As you may have noticed, while watching your video of the Bulletproof Race Day Event, that the in-car video section is a little choppy. You may be wondering why.

Well, first of all, we had some design constraints:

• Portability - Our preference was to NOT have to take a rack full of storage and controller gear on the road for the event.
• Power - Not much power to be had in a race car.
• Focus on the in person experience – It had to look great for people watching in person.
• Race car – Not the most hospitable environment for gear!

Taking a Cisco Wireless Video Surveillance camera, putting it into a race car, displaying it during the event and capturing the video feed was a new and interesting challenge for the Bulletproof team. While we didn’t build them, I can bet that the cameras and software were not designed with these goals in mind. Never the less, we figured out a pretty cool solution.

Our solution ended up including a combination of Cisco, open source and other vendor software. As it turns out, it was the “other vendor” software that has caused us some issues. Unfortunately the “other vendor” software does a fabulous job of storing a good quality version of the footage but not such a great job of getting the footage back out. Trans-coding seems to be the issue. The software stores the video in one native format (SEF) and doesn’t do well at converting it out to a more usable format (MPEG).

I personally quite proud of what we ended up with and I can’t wait until the next event so that we can try this again… minus the “other vendor” software.