Using a PVR as a helmet camera recorder: The experiment

[Red Baron]

I mentioned this months ago and recieved a few PM's about it recently, so here's the deal.

I bought a used helmet camera a while back and shot some stuff last season with it, attached to a MiniDV camera. It was bulky, there were too many cables and it was a real pain in the ass to set up, and get good results.

I saw a little "Personal Video Recorder" on sale at Amazon for around $70, the PVR1000 by Audiovox. It has RCA video and audio in, and records on SD cards. Well, I already have a few 1gb SD cards from my digital camera, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I decided to simplify things a bit by hard wiring the batteries to the camera, and the video and audio connectors to the cable that goes to the PVR. Here's how the setup looks.

This is the PVR


I used a small pelican case to hold the batteries and the connectors


And this is the camera & mic; from what I remember, it's only 380 lines.


And the results: Compressed as a WMV file, 640x480, 30fps; ~7 meg file
Video is here:

A 2.5 minute clip on the camera took up 71 megs, so I can't post that directly. I cut it down to 1:20 and used compression to make the movie above.

Quick thoughts: This will work OK for people who just want POV video for fun, but it doesn't look very good full screen on my 19" monitor. Snow may look better since there are fewer colors, once the season starts up I'll post some stuff from the mountains.

Also, the PVR1000 is, engineering wise, an absolute joke. Everything works on it, but there's a reason it's $70. Clunky menus, crappy speaker, joke of an MP3 player (no ID tags, no way to shuffle), oh, and don't even think about putting video from your computer on here to watch, you have to use a special compression program that is a total waste of time...

[meatdrink9]

Thanks for the update. I was definitely interested to see how that worked. It'll be cool to see your winter test as well.

I think that would work fine for a skiing helmet cam. The quality of almost any helmet cam footy you see is always a little munched anyway. Nice getting everything into a such a small size. hmmmm... maybe some new toys for xmas.

[Art Vandelay]

That's a cool idea. I might have to consider doing something similar. Thanks for sharing.