Neighbor keeps keying car, often at night—best dash cam?

Arbois

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Title kinda says it all—looking for the best dual channel dash cam to catch a neighbor keying my car, so that I can get a restraining order. Considering the VIOFO A129 Pro Duo 4K or the Thinkware U1000, but open to ideas. Want something that is good on power consumption, I sometimes don't drive my car for days. Open to something that includes external capacitors/batteries if need be. Would be nice if it had wifi, and auto-backed up to a computer/server when parked in front of my house. Needs to be discreet, as I live in a rough neighborhood, and I don't want it to get stolen. Price is not necessarily an object, but I also don't want to spend a cool grand.

Thanks in advance for your help!
 
Is the car parked in front of your house on a driveway? Just thinking outside the box, then it might be better to use CCTV!
 
As above you'd probably be better served by something outside the car. Even a dual cam system will only cover 2 of the 4 sides so you'd need 2 systems to give you full coverage and then your power requirement doubles making a selection and subsequent operation that much more difficult. If you have view of the car from your residence look into a PTZ camera/recording system that can watch over the vehicle and be powered 24/7 without concern about battery life.
 
Title kinda says it all—looking for the best dual channel dash cam to catch a neighbor keying my car, so that I can get a restraining order. Considering the VIOFO A129 Pro Duo 4K or the Thinkware U1000, but open to ideas. Want something that is good on power consumption, I sometimes don't drive my car for days. Open to something that includes external capacitors/batteries if need be. Would be nice if it had wifi, and auto-backed up to a computer/server when parked in front of my house. Needs to be discreet, as I live in a rough neighborhood, and I don't want it to get stolen. Price is not necessarily an object, but I also don't want to spend a cool grand.

Thanks in advance for your help!
You will have far better chances of catching the event with an external camera. Even if you dashcam records something, it would be very hard to prove what he did to thecar because he is not in direct view.
As Peter_R had suggested. If you can install a cctv camera outside your house aimed towards your vehicle would be a better way to go.
There are very inexpensive wifi cameras with local recording such as the wyze cam or similar you could use.
 
Street parked in front of my house, there's some streetlights.

I do eventually plan to get a full surveillance system, but my SO won't authorize spending $2500(basically what I'd need to spend for a solid system) until I give this a try.

Tried a Wyze, it was a waste.
 
Tried a Wyze, it was a waste
I agree. The way to go by all means but at a cost as you already know.
Wyze cams are ok for things that are very close but for a wider view thwy are worthless. Person detection on them are a joke
 
Might take a look at Arlo cams. I saw they were highly rated somewhere I didn't bookmark when I last looked into the subject. They have a range of cams and offer a subscription cloud storage service- seems to be what Wyze and Ring should have been.

Were it not for the longer duration parking there would be some dashcam solutions, but when you're looking past 24 hours things are going to get expensive fast with powering them. And sad to say, a restraining order won't do diddly for you- they'll just pay a neighborhood druggie to do it for them, only worse o_O Of course you could use that technique too- just saying, not recommending :whistle:

Phil
 
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Back to my original statement of using CCTV. I know this is in the UK, but I have had a 4 camera CCTV system installed on/in my property for years and the police called several years ago and used the footage because it also overlooked the road and it showed a van repeatedly driving past my property. A neighbour's house was broken into one evening and the van was identified and the footage allowed the police to narrow down the suspects and eventually secure a conviction.
@Arbois
You do not have to spend a fortune these days, not in the UK anyway. Your area and country of residence may vary of course. I recently upgraded and spent £1100 ($1500) and purchased a complete kit using HIKvision NVR and 4 cameras from a recognized installer who set up everything. You can now choose color cameras that give a brilliant color picture even without using the integrated LEDs if there is street lighting or even when the moon or just the stars illuminate the area giving a small amount of light.
Also, be aware, the installation of a camera system will also act as a deterrent to would-be problem people.
 
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Parking guard, not least at night are not something i would put any larger sum on at the betting office.
Some street light make me even more doubtful, and also this time of the year a lot of things can be on the windscreen and largely obstruct the camera view though with my Danish knowledge of the bay area weather should not be a absolute killer.
So at least the power requirement are a issue, using parking guard all evening & night, you have to drive a bit every day to replenish that, even if a car battery get charged pretty hard at first, but like phones when almost full the charge rate drop significant.

That wyze cam why did it not work ?
If it is its larger fov meaning things look far away,,, and so yes do render identification impossible, maybe you could move it up close concealed inside some X-mas decoration with a power bank ??
Alternative you can also put another lens on the wyze camera so it is like a zoom camera, quite a few of us have done that with a secondary dashcam on out windscreen as you dont have to get many car lengths out front and your regular dashcam are only able to provide the big picture.
You can gauge in this video how much difference there is between a regular dash / cctv camera with a wide angle lens, and a 12 mm lens, the footage are only trimmed in height to have room for 2 feeds in the video, with are indicative of the actual field of view with the lenses in use.


A 12 - 16 mm lens ( or so depending on your needs ) are only a few USD, though of course some wait are required depending on where you order one.

Too bad you are not up the street, i would gladly spend a night or more on your back seat as a ferrous great Dane guard dog :)
 
I use to have a cctv camera on where my car are parked in the back yard, it was a PTZ network camera mounted on my 2 floor balcony door.
You can also get bullet shaped CCTV cameras that have a build in memory card slot and optical zoom, and are wifi so you can access it remote with a phone or tablet, and as i understand can operate alone so you dont need to buy a NVR for the storage of several cameras like i have a 4 channel Dahua NVR.


PTZ = Pan Tilt Zoom
NVR = Network Video Recorder.

Though for a NVR like mine + a camera + a 1 TB HDD you dont have to spend a whopping 2500 USD, you can probably do that for 500 USD if you do not go for the APPLE of CCTV equipment.
You can also get a wired camera for that matter and use your computer /laptop as the NVR, there are a few free CCTV software's for this approach, in that case you could get a 100 - 200 USD PTZ camera, this also allow you to pan tilt and zoom on the person if you are awake or maybe have been notified in some way.
Om my setup i used motion detect and had a zone about 4 feet around my car, and anything human sized within that triggered a alarm on my tablet on my bedside table,,,,,, but not sure if stuff like that also worth with the free cctv software's out there, as said i used a NVR box myself though it was also remote accessible from my PC or from my smartphone out on town.

There are a few good CCTV forums out there, i am sure those guys can advise even better, in here it is just a few of us that are dabbling in CCTV

If you park in the same spot you of course do not need a PTZ camera, in that case you can make do with a all manual camera where you just set the zoom level on a knob on the camera itself.
PTZ are nice to adjust, or if you are nosy you can turn it and look up and down the street, i once saw the police raid a house out back of my apartment,,,,, though a raid in Denmark are far from the same as in the US for good reasons :)

 
I picked up a Reolink NVR CCTV system with 4 x 4k cameras for £379 in the UK on Black Friday, I'm not sure what is available in the US but I am sure you can get decent systems for a reasonable price.
 
Parking guard, not least at night are not something i would put any larger sum on at the betting office.
Some street light make me even more doubtful, and also this time of the year a lot of things can be on the windscreen and largely obstruct the camera view though with my Danish knowledge of the bay area weather should not be a absolute killer.
So at least the power requirement are a issue, using parking guard all evening & night, you have to drive a bit every day to replenish that, even if a car battery get charged pretty hard at first, but like phones when almost full the charge rate drop significant.

The weather is definetly an issue in the UK for parking mode, rain or frost on the screen reduces visibility although sometimes the heat from the camera helps a bit
 
Just an IP camera is enough and can cost about $70. Many of them have cards so you can store there the videos. The only thing you need is a power source and a Wi-Fi network even it is not yours.

enjoy,
Mtz
 
You don’t have to splurge the full amount right now for a cctv system. Just by the NVR or other suitable recorder, just make sure it has the expansion you will need in the future, add a hard disk, again get one to accommodate the future and a camera or a couple for right now.

I did this 18 months ago, had all the cables run and added a few cameras with the ideas being that the cable runs are done when I can get round to adding extra cams.

For the NVR I went down the route of getting an ex office PC off eBay and the running Blue Iris as the NVR software.
 
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