At 08:57 PM 04/24/2001 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
>No, I don't have any responsibility to tell you when I'm recording or why.
>The best protection for bad speech is more speech, get your own recorder.
>
>I predict a new industry, mobile surveillance systems for cars. There will
>be a small CCD camera mounted on the passenger side with a wide-angle or
>perhaps split lens system via a itty bitty periscope. There will also be a
>microphone on the driver side window sill, as well as the middle bumper
>area. It will drive a small 12VDC recorder (initially tape, moving to
>solid state).
Tape? How antique! Disk drives are much more reliable,
big enough, and dirt cheap for the resolutions you'd need,
and RAM may be good enough depending on your objectives.
Voice recording takes 1-2 KBytes/sec, and Cu-Seeme quality video
works over 28.8kbps modems, so 4KB/sec, though you'd be happier with 8.
That gets you 20 seconds of voice+video per megabyte,
so $50 of RAM (128MB) will handle 40 minutes,
enough to tape a typical cop interaction or traffic accident.
A $100 disk drive is about 40GB these days;
that's about 5 days of 56kbps video.
One advantage of equipment designed for cars as opposed to pockets
is that you don't have to worry about battery life.
