In-car videos with overlayed data

This is done using PC software called Trackvision. It doesn't produce results in real time. Instead, you have to take files from your video camera (here's mine) and data logger (here's mine), do a little massaging, and then feed them to Trackvision. The software then produces a video clip in your favorite format. I usually use MPEG-4, but you can see a comparison of various formats here.

Most interesting thing to do with a video? Share it. There are lots of sites to do this (YouTube being the obvious one) and they accept videos uploaded in many different formats. Unfortunately, the loss of resolution is dramatic.

For example, here's a clip embedded from YouTube (very lossy compression and low frame rate):


Same clip embedded from blip.tv (about the same):


Same clip embedded from Vimeo (best quality and frame rate of any video sharing site I know of currently):


Vimeo also supports HD videos if you have those.

Even with videos that are less than HD, it takes forever to upload the original files in their native resolution because they're dozens or hundreds of megabytes in size. This also means they're generally too large to email as attachments. One workaround for this: if you post to blip.tv or vimeo.com, they offer the original file for easy download in addition to the Flash version embedded in the web page. At this time, Vimeo requires you to create an account (trivial) in order to download the originals. Here are the direct download links for comparison: on blip.tv and on Vimeo.

I've learned that it takes some time to create these merged data/videos and the result doesn't return a lot of value other than the "wow factor" when showing it to friends. To make large improvements to your driving, get a coach. To make optimizations, get a data logger and analysis package. It's nice to have a camera onboard (you can catch incriminating things like this), and the videos are fun to watch, but combining the data and video together doesn't help that much.