I had an accident whilst commuting. Driver denied responsibility and it turned into a drawn out fight. It worked out okay because a driver behind me kindly stopped, waited and insisted on giving his details to the police. I had some pain for months but lost a lot of confidence and bought a garmin virb. I've used it on my head to commute for about 18 months now.
I rarely watch the footage and its even rarer to do anything with it. I've posted 4 clips to youtube in that time and deleted one of them after getting an apologetic email from the company in question. I had emailed them to tell them the clip was there.
I emailed the police about one incident, where the van hadn't paid their VED. Their response was to say their systems can't view youtube, could I come in to make a statement. By this time I had calmed down and decided not to bother.
Where it does help if at all is modifying people's behaviour. People often change their minds about an overtake when they see the camera for instance. I recently had a woman in the passenger seat of a sports car who intended to throw a bottle top at me and stopped when she saw the camera. 10 metres down the road she threw it at a parked car instead.
I get a roughly equal response from a small number of van drivers, where they either peep at me or give me the thumbs up. I'm not clear why, but I take it as disapproval/approval.
Oh and finally, if your adrenaline is up, sometimes because of an earlier incident, it can be easy to overreact. What the camera does is let me see that some overtakes or incidents weren't as bad as I thought at the time.
