In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.
Yesterday I installed "Dashcam 2.0" in the car, upgrading the old one that I've been running since July of last year. The new camera is an SD-card based 720P unit that shoots full 1280x720 HD video, encoding the footage in H.264 to the memory card. I bought a 4GB card that will hold two hours of video. When the card gets full, I just delete it and start over - much simpler than rewinding a tape! The whole unit is easily detached from the mount that I made, allowing me to carry it around as a leisure use / backup camera. Credit goes to my brother Matt for this find.
The new camera has a few issues (as expected for a low-end consumer model) such as terrible audio quality, no optical zoom, no focus, no image stabilization, CMOS rolling shutter and low codec bitrate to name a few. I won't be using this to shoot storm video! But for a dashcam, this thing is perfect for the job and is a 1000 percent leap in quality over the old RCA to VHS system. Here is a test-run of the new dashcam from this morning on I-64 in Charleston. To save space, I turned the audio bitrate WAY down on this WMV - so the sound in this clip is a lot worse than the actual source (though it is bad to begin with).
As for the old camera system, I fulfilled my original plans to have two camera views by moving the cam to the back window - giving me full-time front and rear cameras while I'm driving.
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From Dan: Please Read
Please do not copy/upload this site's content to social media or other web sites. Those copies have been a critical problem for me, seriously harming this site and my photography/storm chasing operation by diverting traffic, viewers, engagement and income. "Credit" and "exposure" does not benefit this site or my operation, rather they threaten my ability to cover my operating expenses. Please read my full explanation for this notice here.
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To my regular readers, I offer my apologies for this heavy-handed notice, but unfortunately it has become necessary.
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