Lane video database

That's a great idea.

I was starting to collate a few Memory Map tracks for lanes I've driven, but most around here are only about 10 minutes long to drive and probably not worth travelling for. Camera on the front is a great idea though, I'll try a few experiments.

PS, I'll email in a few minutes for a copy ... ;)

Ideally we could collect some videos split up over the country, basically the "database" is deliberately low-tech, I've put a long rambling text file into the admin directory that I'll paste here in case anyone else is bored or wants to suggest something -- as long as any suggestions are low-maintenance otherwise it'll get boring!

-------------------- This is my fledgling lane video database, created mostly for my own records but I'm intending to publish it via bittorrent on a regular-ish basis. Sorry for the waffling nature of this file, I'll refine it in future releases and break it up into more specific files, I'm just getting the ideas down.

USING

The videos are shrunk down to an acceptable quality and low framerate to keep the size down while keeping the quality up as high as I can go. Currently videos are encoded in h264 format which is the best widely playable format for low-bitrate video, much better than xvid or divx. To play them back, use "vlc", which is an easy install on most platforms and doesn't tend to pull in huge dependencies or need loads of codecs installed.

The low framerate allows the videos to be readily played at 8 times normal speed (for rapid lane review) on quite modest hardware of the type that people might have in their trucks.

I put a description file in each lane directory, plus a few other files to help alert me and others to some aspects of a lane, e.g. if a lane has a TRO on it then I'll put a file in there called "TRO in force.txt" or similar with any details I have in that file.

The directory structure is based loosely around the county that has responsibility for the lane (rather than strict geographical location) and also the nearest large town, ignoring villages, so a lane near Mere will be put into Wiltshire/Mere. The placement can be slightly arbitrary when it comes to lanes halfway between two towns, and also on the choice of which towns to choose, but this isn't intended as a precise database. The name of the lane directory itself is taken from any nearby farms, villages etc, whatever seems to make sense, and prefixed with the OS GB co-ordinate of the start, end, or some point on the lane, e.g. "Child Okeford ST829133"

The video files themselves are named with the date in ISO format, i.e. YYYYMMDD, e.g. 20080323 for 23rd March 2008 so they appear in chronological order when files are sorted by name, and are postfixed with the end of the lane the video was started from, e.g. "20080323 north end.mp4". There's a few in there that don't have the "north end" bit on, I'll sort them out sometime.

The camera is aimed deliberately downwards with the horizon on level ground filling just the top quarter of the screen, this is to help the camera expose the scene correctly and to capture as much of the ground as possible as that's of primary interest. It does mean that some of the scenery is missed out but if scenery is particularly nice it's easy to pop the camera off the quick-release mount and pan it around.

Note that the camera is at its widest angle setting, which exaggerates the speed of travel, so I'm not really hurtling along at 100MPH, it just looks like it! Something 20 feet away looks a long way off on wide-angle so it all tends to rush at the camera much quicker than you're normally used to.

Any questions, contact me on xxxx

CONTRIBUTING

If you would like to contribute videos to the database then please contact me on xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx for advice on the conversion and anything else you can think of, I might be able to help. It's best to pass videos to me somehow so I can integrate them into future releases.

I'd suggest the following conventions regarding talking during the video;

• give an OS GB co-ordinate at some point in the video so it can be pinpointed,

• comment a little on the surface and the vegetation,

• comment on whether people on road tyres are likely to make it down the lane,

• comment on whether the ruts are particularly deep,

• feature another truck in front so depth of water etc can be judged,

• if you stop then try to cut that out of the video so the length of the video reflects the time it takes to drive the lane,

• capture some lead-up to the lane (20-30 seconds or so) to help others find the lane entrance.

The above aren't strict though, my own videos don't always follow them. Basically just talk about anything that you think others ought to know regarding the lane but don't feel the need to give a running commentary, or even talk at all. Bear in mind that others will hear what you say though so don't say anything too embarassing!

I've standardised on 300Kbits/second video which works out at about 3 megabytes per minute, so the database is small enough to be kept on a laptop hard disc for use out in the field. The videos are created using AVIDemux, and the ".js" file in the AVIDemux directory contains the settings file I use to create the videos, so you can create your own by using that settings file as a template (choose "Load/Run project"). The only thing you might need to change is the scaling filter as it depends on the resolution of the original video files. Contact me for help if needed.

Try to aim the camera downwards to capture as much of the ground as possible, aim for the sky to fill only the top quarter of the screen, but if you have a vehicle with a bonnet, e.g. Defender, Suzuki, then try to avoid filling the picture with it! Mounting the camera high should help. Set the camera to wide-angle and also if you have a 16:9 mode on your camera then please use it as it gets more width for less height and the width is more useful than height in this case.

If a *voluntary* TRO is in force on a lane but the lane is not in the database then I feel it's justifiable to drive the lane to capture the video, but try not to do it in a large group. Don't drive a lane with a TRO and submit it to the database as that's like videoing yourself speeding, not wise!

Text files should be created in notepad and not Word or Wordpad to keep things simple and to help make sure that linux or mac users (I use linux at home and Windows on my truck laptop) don't have to mess about with alien file formats just to read text. Let the text editor wrap the lines at the edge of the window, don't put in hard returns at the ends of lines, so people can choose the width of the text viewer window and let it wrap paragraphs to suit.

Any pictures should be jpeg for photos, PNG or GIF for map extracts or line diagrams (jpeg blurs maps and diagrams, use it only for photos, unless you received the map/diagram as a jpeg yourself).

Try to stick to the naming conventions already detailed, although I'll shuffle the directories around when putting files into the database.

Any questions, email me on xxxx

Ian Rawlings (Pinzgauer 712M)

--------------------

Only looked at a couple so far, other things to do, but that is a great way of documenting lanes. Be nice if you can get to the situation where one could request lanes in a specific area and someone would have one or two available.

Just getting the look of what a particular lane is like says far more than any written word and map can do and can give an indication of what it might be like in different weather conditions.

Simple idea, pretty simple to execute but absolutely feckin' brilliant all-round, Ian, very very nice one. Keep it quiet, expand it a little to other areas and you could have a great little business there.

Gonna have to rig up a camera and try it out round here. I suspect this could catch on ... ;)

It would be nice if that happened, I'll be going to Wales in a few months and will be giving the lanes we run the treatment, it'd be very useful if someone else local had already done it though.

Yep, I try and comment on whether a lane looks like it would be bad to drive in the wet, or even if the locals are unfriendly and therefore to keep traffic low. There's always the possibility of the mud-pluggers using such stuff to hunt down the muddy lanes but there's plenty of websites where they get together to do that anyway so I don't think my paltry little effort will do any harm.

Nah, it'd get boring if I did that ;-)

Cheers for the compliments though, it's a shame none of the Dorset crowd I emailed, who the database would be most useful for, have even bothered to reply let alone download it :-/

Have a go and either send me the vids and I'll stick them in my database, or just publish your own in a similar manner. Anyone who uses bittorrent to download stuff can very easily use it to publish things too, the only real difference being they need to create a torrent file (trivial) and send it to a tracker, no need to f*ck about with web servers, security or other dull stuff.

Perhaps if more people do it for their areas then we could start a website and tracker to act as a point of reference for individual's databases, ideally there'd be one co-ordinator for each county.

Give me a shout if you get any of your own made! I'll email you a new torrent when I next add a few lanes.

Well, once you've got the files it's just a case of clicking on them and they play, just like loading a word document or picture. The only real barrier at the moment is the bittorrent download, which is normally pretty easy but if it doesn't work then it can be hard to diagnose the problem. The idea at the moment though is that it can be downloaded nice and easily by many people, and those who can't handle bittorrent can copy off other off-roaders they know personally. Given that only two people in the world currently have the files it's not at that point yet ;-)

Try downloading and installing "utorrent" and if you can get it installed, email me for the torrent file and have a crack.

I've never used it myself (I don't use windows) but it's a popular client.

It's what I use.

If you (Julian) have any problems setting it up, just post to newsgroup and I'll try and help. Basically, just install it, use the default setings and you can't go far wrong. When you get the torrent file from Ian just open it and utorrent will download the videos/database for you.

G Thanks Ian and Paul

Have downloaded u-torrent and file would be appreciated

snipped-for-privacy@bt>

OK, it's in the mail. Let me know how it goes.

Hello Paul (or anyone else familiar with utorrent), Julian has started the download but his download is capped at 20K/s whereas everyone else was getting between 80-100K/s, can utorrent handle encrypted connections to bypass ISP caps and if so, can you tell him how to enable it and whether he'll have to restart the torrent or not? My main seed will do encryption.

Cheers!

I've taken to carrying a garmin 76csx on my walks, so I make sure my camera is synchronised to GMT, then I can see when a photo was taken and view my position at the time. Also it's very easy to show the track as a file opened in google earth.

AJH

I used to do that with voicenotes, I'd take my PDA and make notes about lanes as I drove them, then when I got back home, the PDA had all the notes saved with the date and time in the filename making it easy to associate the voicenote with a point in the lane using the track log.

Ideally I'd like to have the OSGB co-ordinates put into the video files as soft subtitles and maybe some descriptive text, if I can figure out a way to do that with little to no effort I'll do it. I intend to move to using a PVR-style device attached to the laptop to record future videos, it may be quite easy to do it with that, or at least to put date and time on the video.

No rush though, the idea is to re-film lanes on an occasional basis and expire old videos out of the database as I go, keeping ones of interest and replacing redundant ones so any upgrades like that can go in as I get the chance to fiddle about more.

BTW for about £350 you can buy a bullet-camera, leads and a solid-state mpeg4 recorder as a ready-made package for filming all sorts of activities like this, I've not tried this company but might have a peek at the cameras they sell but probably not the mpeg4 recorders as I'll use my laptop;

Plenty of other places selling bullet cameras. I'll probably rig up two at some point, one for filming lanes and other activities, and another as a rear-view camera.

On or around Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:16:18 +0000, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

nifty stuff.

'ere, just been watching the Blandford ones, what are you following? Mog?

No, that's a Volvo C303, the ugliest truck in the world, here's a picture of the same truck from a different angle;

That's what some landy owners nick the axles from to add portals to the defender. They're good off-road, portal axles and diff locks as standard, leaf springs though but more travel than the pinz, and the whole truck only costs about 3K. There's a box-bodied version which isn't quite so aesthetically challenged and even a 6x6 (I suspect you know all this though).

It's driven by a friend of mine and appears in most of the early videos as they were the first videos I shot on a laning trip with him and a few others. The idea of the lane database grew from what was just an initial attempt to capture what we did on the day.

There's some video of the C303 on my youtube page down there | V

On or around Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:15:44 +0000, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

did wonder about whether it was one of them.

Its a pity none of the older Pinzies are RHD. I've an idea that there's a prohibition on LHD for private hire cars in this county, even if I could get them to accept the vehicle in general. And there's no way I can afford a recent one.

Hmmm. wonder how hard it'd be to convert it to RHD... :-)

I'd reckon relatively easy, the instrument panel should be easily swappable, throttle is pushrod actuated, gearchange similar, brake servo is under instrument panel and would swap too, ditto clutch master, steering column is a single self-contained unit that bolts to the floor and sticks out through a hole in the floor, it's connected to the wheels by a central swivelling relay bar with four ball joints on it, one for the steering box connection, two for the wheels and one for the damper, just swap the damper and steering connection over and no need to modify the rest or the chassis, there's nothing in the way. Diff-lock and axle drive controls are central so no need to change, you could swap their order without problems, heater controls are on the central console on the left, easy to swap.

So, you'll be starting next week then ;-)

On or around Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:34:11 +0000, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

heh. It's just a thought experiment at the moment. I doubt it'd be at all easy to get it insured [carriage of passengers for hire and reward] or licensed.

TBH I don't know. All I did with utorrent was install it, run it's wizard and let it do it's thing. Only things I've had to change are the download directory and open it up to unlimited up and downloads. Sorry.

That's OK, he figured it out, once encryption was enabled his download went from 20K/s to about 90K/s as his ISP could no longer see it was P2P traffic. That's BT for you, not only do they snoop on your traffic to reduce your bandwith, they snoop on your traffic to sell you more targetted adverts too.