Thank you Don for providing these videos, and also for showing up somewhere we can discuss them with you without the need to sign up to an American nazi's personal spyware and indoctrination platform.
Thank you in particular for the Hindlow to Crewe one, because I have been looking for one of the Midland Peak Forest route for ages.
That one also illustrates a technical point I wanted to make: that 25fps is a better choice of frame rate than either 30fps or 60fps, which seem to be default choices of some kind with a lot of kit, judging by lots of people's cab ride videos as well as yours, but are not good choices.
It seems that an awful lot of cameras, even ones manufactured recently enough to know better, claim to record at 30fps but actually do not; instead they record at 25 or 24 fps and then insert duplicate frames to bring the total frame
count up to 30 per second, as a means of "faking" a frame
rate of 30 per second. The result is that the video plays in a series of 0.2 second jerks, which is particularly noticeable on cab rides where the motion of the actual scene is so continuous and steady. Some of your earlier videos do this, and it is almost certainly the camera's fault because if you step through one of the sections with a scrolling caption one frame at a time, the motion halts every five frames but the caption continues to scroll; your editing software is generating the caption at a genuine 30fps but the source material it's adding it to is a hooky 30fps faked by duplicating frames.
Cameras that record at 60fps do seem to avoid duplicating frames even though the rate is faster, but the faster rate causes a different problem. If the total
bitrate of the recording remains the same, then because it needs to represent double the temporal resolution, the spatial resolution can only be half as much. Then on top of that the spatial compression algorithm makes it worse, by allocating most of its bits to the areas of the image that change a lot and skimping on the areas that stay much the same from frame to frame... which on a cab ride video means that most of the bandwidth goes on encoding the ballast and shrubbery flying past at the edges of the picture, while the actual focus of attention - around the vanishing point - is allowed to blur and degrade.
Recording at 25fps, as in the Hindlow to Crewe video, avoids the first problem entirely, and provides the best available conditions for minimising the prominence of the second one. And it is
perfectly adequate for sneaking the illusion of motion past the persistence of vision; super high frame rates are a silly fashion thing about having the biggest number and do not do anything useful towards improving the quality, although they may enable some people to fool themselves into thinking otherwise.
So please make 25fps your standard for future videos too!
I must say I did not realise those Gopro cameras were so amazingly rubbish. I thought conking out after 30 minutes was something only the £10 cheapo versions did. I thought Gopro ones were supposed to be expensive high quality things that wouldn't do things like that. You may find it worthwhile to take the works out of the case and remount them in a diecast alumimium box, with air holes in it and the parts laid out in a less squashed-together fashion than the original so the air can get at them. I did that with a cheapo one, along with replacing its battery with an 18650 cell for increased capacity, and it will record for two and a half hours continuously without a hitch.
Replacement lenses in a variety of focal lengths for standard size miniature camera threads are available on ebay and they only cost a few quid, though they do seem to take a bit of searching for. So it is both cheap and easy to replace the usual silly wide angle things with a "standard" lens (ie. one that is neither wide-angle nor telephoto, but approximates the usual viewing angle of the human eye).
I'm thinking in particular about Hull to Scarborough, Middlesbrough to Saltburn, Horbury Junction to Sheffield via Barnsley and between Moorthorpe and Pontefract. I doubt I'm alone in wanting these.
There is a Hull to Scarborough video around already, youtube id xHriU-kLqTg. Horbury Junction to Sheffield via Barnsley, though, is indeed one I have been looking for also, as is Chesterfield to Rotherham via the Old Road.