DVRs for Cop Cars

Posted by michael on Thursday May 15, 2003 @06:47AM from the season-pass dept.

AEton writes "News.com is reporting that IBM is developing digital video recorders for cop cars. The systems involve a digital video camera and reusable hard drives which police officers will take with them on their shifts; centralized servers with up to 3.5 TB of storage will hold recordings. The cameras continuously record and cache old video in a "Tivo-like" fashion; tapes will start from three to five minutes before the cop turned on the recorder. Unbiased, high-quality recording could have a compelling social effect; and at the very least, we're headed for HDTV Cops."

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Re:Einstein would be impressed. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-05-15 06:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

It means that video is continuously recorded, with the oldest video overwritten, and that when you press "record", you don't really start recording. Instead, you just mark a spot in the video stream, and the software takes the time three (or five) minutes previously as the "start" time. Those video bits wouldn't then get recycled.

Makes sense. You're only going to hit "record" after figuring out something interesting is going on, and you can't hit the button immediately.