Raspberry Pi Zero hardware based video encoding

Question

I'm trying to build a dashcam with a Raspberry Pi Zero with an official Raspberry Pi Camera (version 2) in an official Raspberry Pi Zero case mounted with a old GPS device cradle. I installed motion with a motion eye Web UI to control it and set it up to record constantly to a SanDisk Industrial SD Card.

The frame rate is abysmally slow to the point that it'll never be effective as a dashcam. It's sometimes only 2.0 FPS at higher resolutions and setting it to 640x320 can get me up to about 15.0 FPS but that's still not good enough for what I want to use it for.

I understand FFMpeg is used by motion and that it's not optimised for ARMv6. Now I'm wondering about what other options I have to do hardware based video encoding on the Zero because software based encoding seems unworkably slow.

Is the Zero powerful enough to at the very least save 1080p at 30 FPS to it's SD Card? Are there other options for encoding video I haven't explored?

Answer 1

I had exactly the same idea to you. And I have the same problem with motioneyeos. After I try this, it works very well. But I need to add a RTC module to it to keep it works with correct time. I didn't use the HAT because at the moment it is not available. Try this: https://dride.io/documentation/getting_started.