Find the ninety seconds that matter.
Your dashcam has been recording faithfully for years. It has also left you thousands of one-minute files with names like 20260901_135000.mp4 and no way into them. DriveReel turns that into drives you can search — and evidence that still counts as evidence.
Nobody opens a dashcam folder for fun.
They open it because something happened, and a specific question needs answering — usually under pressure, often with somebody waiting.
- At the kerb Was I moving when he hit me?
- Next morning Who scratched the door in the car park?
- Adjuster's email What time and where, exactly?
- Disputed fault What colour was the light?
- Hit and run Can you read the plate?
- Two weeks later Is that clip still on the card?
Three afternoons that ruin a week.
Each one is a different question, and each one needs a different thing out of the same pile of files.He says you reversed into him.
You stopped at a light. He went into the back of you. By the time the police arrive he is telling a story where you rolled backwards, and it is your word against his.
The footage exists. It is spread across two files, because the impact happened eleven seconds after a clip boundary, and the minute that proves you were stationary is in the previous file.
Something scraped the door while you were inside.
Nine hours of parking mode. The camera woke on motion four hundred times — every trolley, every passing shopper, every headlight sweep. One of those four hundred is the one.
You have no idea what time it happened. You were in a meeting. Scrubbing nine hours at 8× is most of an evening, and you will probably miss it anyway.
"Please send us the footage."
What they mean is: the date, the time, the location, the speed, a description of what happened — and a file they can open, that nobody has touched.
What most people send is a phone recording of a laptop screen, or a clip trimmed in iMovie. Both are worse than the original, and the second one invites a question you do not want asked.
Card in. Answer out.
Five steps, and only the first one asks anything of you.A folder of strangers
Plug the card in. Thirty files for a half-hour drive, split across cameras, event clips filed somewhere else, every name a timestamp. This is what every dashcam hands you.
Back into drives
Clips that run consecutively are chained into the journey they came from — across cameras, across event files, across the boundary where the interesting thing happened.
What the car already knew
Position, speed and heading are embedded in the video by the camera itself, once a second. DriveReel reads them out of the file and draws the drive: where you slowed, where you turned, where something happened.
Ask it a question
Street names you drove down. A shop you passed. What was said in the car. What the camera saw. Type a word and land on the second it happened.
Something you can send
The original clips, untouched — plus a report with the route, the numbers, what happened and the stills. One attachment instead of an explanation.
What it does, in full.
Five screens, and the reason each one exists.
Trips, not clips
Consecutive clips chain back into the journey they came from — across cameras, across event files, and across the boundary where the interesting thing happened. Grouping compares start to start, never end to start, so a clip truncated by a power cut doesn't split one drive into two.
The band along the top is six months of days. A day with footage is filled; an empty one is still drawn, because a gap in a dashcam archive is information and a day that quietly vanishes is not.
- 126 days on one band
- Drive / parking as a bar, never a truncated count
The telemetry you already had
Cameras write GPS sentences inside the video once a second. DriveReel reads them straight out of the file — no sidecar, no account, no upload — and verifies every checksum, because compressed video contains byte sequences that look like GPS and aren't.
Four lanes on one clock: speed against the posted limit, force as a signed bar off centre, one tick per manoeuvre, and the clip boundaries underneath so you can see where the minutes break.
- 1 Hz position, speed and heading
- 0.30 g the threshold that counts as hard braking
- Blue → amber → red, never green → red
Search what was seen and what was said
Streets you drove down, businesses you passed, text read off signs in the picture, and the words spoken in the car. Type what you'd actually say — white van, roundabout, the school — and land on the second it happened.
Every result says which it was. Seen is the camera. Said is the microphone. The app never blurs the two, because "a white van" in the picture and "a white van" in a sentence are different kinds of claim.
- Every record searched at once, drives and parking
- On your machine — the index never leaves it
A night of parking, in one screen
Parking is the mode that defeats every dashcam app. The engine is off, so the camera stops embedding GPS altogether, and nine hours collapse into four hundred motion fragments with nothing to tell them apart.
DriveReel draws the fragments where they actually fall in the night, so the gaps read as gaps, reads the place off the stamp burnt into the corner of the frame — and labels it as read from the picture, because a position from OCR deserves a different word from a position from a satellite — then describes each fragment in a sentence.
- Nine hours of nothing, and the eleven minutes that aren't
- One line each, so the right one is findable
Evidence that holds up
Two things leave the app. The camera's own file, copied byte for byte with its telemetry intact and a SHA-256 beside it — and a PDF carrying the route, the speed, the deceleration and the stills.
The original is never converted, trimmed, brightened or shrunk to fit an email. Every one of those is a modification, and a modification is the question you do not want an adjuster or a lawyer to ask.
- Passthrough only — no re-encode on any export path
- SHA-256 printed with the file it belongs to
And the specifics underneath
Vehicles, people, plates
On-device vision marks what was in frame and when, at full resolution so a registration is legible rather than a smear.
What was said
Speech in the car is transcribed locally and indexed alongside everything else. Captions are off until you ask for them.
Every camera, on one clock
Front, rear and interior play against the same composition time, so switching angle never loses your place.
Unreadable is a state
A clip the app cannot parse is kept and reported by name. Nothing is dropped quietly to make a number look tidier.
It never deletes
Import copies off the card and leaves the card alone. Deciding what to erase stays a decision you make yourself.
Works with what you own
Any camera that writes standard files with embedded GPS. Where a manufacturer encrypts its own format, the app says so instead of guessing.
Why the original matters more than the clip.
“any modification, however benign, creates a chain of custody question” Nexar, on why dash cam footage gets rejected
This is the part most people get wrong, and it is the reason DriveReel is built the way it is. Trimming a clip to the exciting bit, brightening it, or re-encoding it to make it small enough to email are all reasonable instincts — and all of them hand the other side something to argue about.
DriveReel's answer to all four: import off the card before the loop eats it, keep the embedded telemetry attached to the record, export the whole drive rather than a fragment, and never re-encode anything on the way out.
The desk does the work. The pocket does the moment.
Two apps, one library. The Mac holds the footage; the iPhone streams from it.The lanes did not shrink; they moved. A 44-point list row is a good touch target and a 22-point lane tick is not, so on the phone the event list becomes the primary way of moving and the strip becomes a single shape you drag a thumb across — ticking the Taptic Engine at every event, which means you can find the four things that happened in a thirty-minute drive without looking at the screen.
| Mac | iPhone | |
|---|---|---|
| Import from the card | Yes | No — a phone has no card slot |
| Holds the library | Yes | Streams from the Mac |
| Browse every drive offline | Yes | Yes — the list is tiny |
| Describe footage | Yes, at full resolution | Fills the gaps the Mac hasn't reached |
| Pinch to read a plate | No | Yes |
| Build the PDF report | Yes | Asks the Mac to |
| Share the original file | Yes | Yes — fetched from the Mac |
| Delete footage | Yes | Deliberately not |
The phone cannot delete footage on purpose. The Mac is the library of record, and a pocket device that can empty a bin it cannot see the contents of is a device that will eventually lose somebody's evidence.
Pricing.
Buy the Mac app once. The subscription only exists because the phone app has a Mac to keep talking to.Free
- Import from any card or folder
- Clips chained back into drives
- Play, scrub, switch cameras
- Route and speed from the embedded GPS
- Unlimited footage — it's your disk
Base
- Everything in Free
- Events — braking, acceleration, turns
- Search speech, road signs and places
- On-device vision: vehicles, people, plates
- PDF incident reports
- Export originals, never re-encoded
Pro
- Everything in Base
- The iPhone app, streaming from your Mac
- Evidence packages with file hashes
- Batch export across a whole day
- Parking review — a night in one screen
- New apps from Minddrift included
DriveReel is in development and not yet on sale. These are the planned tiers — the buttons currently join the early-access list, and switch to real checkout at launch.
| Free | Base | Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $39 once | $6 / month |
| Import from any card or folder | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Clips chained back into drives | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Route and speed from embedded GPS | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Play, scrub, switch cameras | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Export originals, never re-encoded | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Events — braking, acceleration, turns | — | Yes | Yes |
| Search speech, road signs and places | — | Yes | Yes |
| On-device vision — vehicles, people, plates | — | Yes | Yes |
| PDF incident reports | — | Yes | Yes |
| Parking review — a night in one screen | — | — | Yes |
| The iPhone app, streaming from your Mac | — | — | Yes |
| Evidence packages with file hashes | — | — | Yes |
| Batch export across a whole day | — | — | Yes |
| New apps from Minddrift included | — | — | Yes |
| Keeps working if we stop | Yes | Yes | Reverts to Base |
Getting it.
DriveReel Base — Mac
Payment is handled by the processor on their own page. Card details are never typed into minddrift.ai and never touch our servers.
The iPhone app ships through the App Store. The Mac app is sold direct, so a licence is a file you own rather than an account you keep.
macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon or Intel. The free version is the whole viewer — no trial clock, no watermark.
Reasonable questions.
Does my footage go to a server?
Which cameras work?
Will it re-encode my video?
What if the camera encrypts its files?
Is a one-time purchase really one-time?
Be there when it ships.
We'll write once when the Mac app is ready, and once when the iPhone app follows. Nothing else.