[ktRolster]

I'd also assumed that they should be always on. Is there really need for better technology here, as opposed to just a change of political will?

I think you can easily fit a day's worth of video on an 8GB ssd, so I'd think the problem here is not really technological. Although storing that much video is a pain.

[curun1r]

Might battery the more limited resource when it comes to body cameras? After all, given that these are mounted on someone who has a job to do, they have to be pretty small/light and batteries for always-on devices that last that long tend to be pretty big.

[DINKDINK]

>I think you can easily fit a day's worth of video on an 8GB ssd

I'm not a video expert but 8GB seems drastically inadequate for meaningful resolution / frame rate. I estimate roughly 291 Kbps which does allow you much resolution / frame rate.

[chx]

Let's simply take what Netflix recommends: 3 megabit / second for HD video, that means 32GB for 24 hours. Not too bad given you can get a 32GB microSD for below $10.

[mjevans]

Netflix gets to squeeze and optimize in advance, once, for hopefully many hundreds of thousands of streamings.

Police body cameras are going to be a lot more like the dash came I recently installed for a trip. 1080p at 30FPS and slightly blurry gets me about 5 hours to a 32 'billion byte' uSDHC card.

That isn't so bad, you can fit a normal shift in to a 64 GByte space, and if you double that up again you'd get almost a whole day's worth of time.

The battery is an issue for sure, but then again Police already come equipped with a belt that has a lot of other stuff, and are usually deployed with a moving vehicle OR are stationed in an area where they will have a regular chance to return to a break room (which is where a natural battery swap would occur).