I'm well aware tampering is illegal. It also doesn't mean it never happens. Time and date are useful but they're not concrete evidence of time and date, and you're unlikely to have an issue without if your evidence captures the accident. I had someone run into the back of me and because I didn't write the date down, I got it the date 3 weeks out (!) several months later. I was also using a GoPro with no time stamp on. It's largely irrelevent - it's pretty hard to deny an accident if footage shows you and your car involved in one, irrespective of the time and date. Unless someone is claiming you outside of the Statutory Limitation Period which is several years in most jurisdicitions, and you have no means of backing that up, then it's unlikely to matter if the accident occured on a Monday or a Tuesday. Being unable to prove an exact date or time is not the death knell. What's important is the footage captured. For someone who removes and powers down the camera all the time in the absence of back up power, the date / time will always be wrong. It's not the absolute death of your evidence.
As for original footage, most people are not going to have the original footage as they're going to burn the accident footage off the camera to their pc, and then continue to use the card. There's a difference here between criminal and civil liabilties. Criminal Offences have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Civil only on the balance of probabilities ie is it more likely you did it than you didn't. (English law jurisdictions, can't comment about other jurisdictions).
For a side impact I don't think anyone isn't going to turn a forward facing camera around to capture the aftermath or take photos on their cell phone. Cell phone photos contain EXIF data. If the cameras forward and records nothing but a bang then having time and date (which isn't necessarily correct anyway) doesn't prove anything other than a noise was recorded at that cameras set time and date. It's of very little value if not turned around to show the accident aftermath.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying time and date isn't useful, but it isn't the be all and end all and it's only indicative not concrete evidence.
You seem to have me wrong throughout this thread. I'm not trying to justify Viofo's failings with failing to have the WR1 controllable entirely from the PC. I agree it's useful and desirable to be able to access everything and I fully support calls for a PC App Mobius style that allows that. Won't I don't agree is that the camera is "useless" without a Smart Phone. It's limited to being a pure camera, but it works and captures decent quality usable footage both day and night out of the box. The other things want fixing but they don't stop it being used in it's most basic form in the meantime.
It truly boggles the minds at this point that yet once again you feel the compulsion to engage in this level of prolixity over something as absurd as the basic need to set the time and date on a dash cam. These repeated circular, rabbit hole arguments become increasingly weird and tedious the more you engage in them. Against my better judgement, I will follow you down the hole just this one more time.
I'm quite sure that every other person in your situation would merely remark that the camera is working for them at the default settings and move on. You on the other hand keep hammering away with tautological arguments about why something as basic and fundamental as setting the date and time is, according to you is essentially "unnecessary" along with all the other standard settings all other experienced dash cam users other than you rely upon for optimal functionality on a daily basis. So sure, the camera will provide basic usability straight out of the box, so no, it's technically not "useless". It is however, highly compromised and to such a degree that only someone like you would argue otherwise. Based on your logic I'll bet if you bought a brand new HDTV that somehow came without a remote control or the ability to adjust the settings or change channels you would argue that watching only one channel at the default settings is all anyone ever needs.
So, lets' see; first you claim you don't need the date and time at all because you'll have the license plate number of the car that hit you. Then, after it was pointed out that you might not capture the plate number or a vehicle may come at you from an oblique angle or the situation might not even involve a collision, you suggest that the date and time could be "faked". (more on that later) After that argument was disposed of you moved the goal post once again by claiming that date and time stamps are now somehow "irrelevant" and then move on to theorizing about statutes of limitations and claiming that it doesn't really matter when an incident occurs as long as you capture it. And finally, you suggest a properly configured date and time stamp is only "indicative"as if your wristwatch or the clock in your car might also only be "indicative". Oh, and then you go off on some tangent about cell phone photo EXIF data.
As for whether a given situation is a criminal violation or a civil liability, how could you ever determine that
before a situation even happens to you in regard to what legal ramifications might unfold? How can you assume that your actions behind the wheel of an automobile may or may not result in your being charged with criminal negligence as an unintended result of causing a fatality? Some years ago a friend of mine accidentally ran over a small child on a bicycle who darted out from between two parked cars right in front of his car and then had to spend years years in court defending himself for something that wasn't in any way his fault. If you don't think something like that couldn't happen to any one of us, I have some bad news for you. That's why we have dash cams. They are there to protect us or document whatever unexpected and unanticipated event may happen. It is foolish and naive to imagine or project that one type of incident might happen to you and another might not. Hey, maybe a huge meteor might fall from the sky that gets captured on your dash cam and you'll want to record the time and date that it happened on your footage? You never know, stranger things have happened.
All these arguments and rationalizations are complete and utter nonsense and merely confirm my assertion that you have never been in an actual real world situation here you have needed dash cam footage (or CCTV footage for that matter) as actionable evidence in a serious legal or insurance matter.
On these pages I've repeatedly spoken of how I first became interested in dash cams due to ongoing harassment and threatening behavior from someone I once did business with who broke a contract and then became irrationally angry after I hired an attorney to deal with the matter. The guy turned out to be a rather disturbed fellow and he started doing things like swerving his vehicle at me whenever he would see me out on the roads. At one point during a criminal investigation I was required to submit an affidavit and chronology of events to law enforcement. That led to the guy to come up with a long list of alleged alibis claiming that he was actually somewhere else during many of the incidents I listed, except that, guess what? I had numerous examples of dash cam footage and CCTV footage as well with the
time and date stamps proving that he was lying about his true whereabouts on those days and times and so were the friends of his who were providing those alibis. It wasn't enough to have just the footage. The date and time stamps were vital!
As for the concept of faking the date and time on dash cam video, how exactly do you propose to do that? You might not know this but dash cam time stamps click off the seconds as you drive along. That means you would need to overlay a perfect animation on top of your footage that would look plausible and realistic while at the same time erasing the incorrect default time stamps . Not only that, but your video could have to hold up in court to forensic examination from an investigator from the defense or the prosecution or an insurance examiner's office. And what if a prosecutor suddenly demanded to see the clips before and after the one you submitted? Or maybe even some random footage from your camera to establish the veracity of your fake one? What sort of software and skills would you need to pull off a fake time and date stamp like this? How often does this really happen, if at all? Do you have an example you could present? Maybe you should think this through a bit further before suggesting that date and time stamps can easily be "faked" and therefore nobody should rely on the time and date stamps as evidence in their dash cam footage?