Reading Dashcam Video Without Watching It
A 2 TB drive of five-camera Rivian R1T footage, sorted, searched and cut by reading what the files already say: GPS, keyframes, motion and color.
Each part stands alone, as every article here does. The first is the whole job done with Claude Code, with the prompts to repeat it; the rest are the techniques behind each step, from reading the GPS tag to finding a landmark by the color of tunnel lights.
6 parts · 6 published
- Part 1
How to Sort Months of Dashcam Footage with Claude Code
Five copy-paste Claude Code prompts sort months of Rivian R1T dashcam footage by GPS and keyframes, each with the check that caught a real failure.
- Part 2
Read the GPS Location from Rivian Dashcam Video with ffprobe
A Rivian R1T dashcam clip carries one GPS fix, taken where its segment began, in the MP4 location tag, and ffprobe reads it in one command.
- Part 3
Rivian Dashcam Camera Missing from a Drive: It Restarted in Another Folder
A Rivian R1T camera that stops partway through a drive often restarted into a sibling folder; motion correlation, not folder names, gives its offset.
- Part 4
Cut Multi-Camera Dashcam Clips with ffmpeg Without Re-Encoding, and Keep Them in Sync
Stream-copy each dashcam camera and line the files up to the frame, even though each camera's keyframes fall at their own drifting fraction of a second.
- Part 5
Make a Hyperlapse from Keyframes with ffmpeg Without Decoding Every Frame
With one keyframe per second, -skip_frame nokey decodes 1 frame in 30 and setpts makes each one a frame at 30 fps: a 36-minute drive becomes 72 seconds.
- Part 6
Finding a Bridge in 2 TB of Dashcam Video by the Color of Tunnel Lights
A red/blue ratio found the sodium-lit tunnel on 71 of 79 bridge drives after auto-exposure hid it from every brightness check.