any hack to record the digital rear camera ?

It's been done in other cars. Mostly a matter of figuring out what signal type they're passing around and then installing an appropriate recorder. I've never seen a problem caused by sharing the signal feed between a recorder and the original displays.

I'm not sure what you can (still) get in the way of recorders for CVBS but there are probably some compact security NVRs that would be about right.

One downside is that most automotive "view" cameras are pretty low resolution while "dash cams" are getting to be very high res.

So if this project ever has to serve its purpose in a courtroom, people might ask why it's so fuzzy compared to everyone else's dashcam. This is a limitation of both the cameras themselves and the signaling type used within the car, so it wouldn't be easy to upgrade.

 

I wonder has anyone upgraded the rear camera with a higher resolution one... if that's possible...

 

The difficulty is that you'd also have to upgrade the head unit in the dash, because it can't work with anything other than the low res factory cameras.

 

One hack I saw, back in the days of the Gen 3, was to tie in the camera with a switch, and which could be fed into the display screen. The problem was that the rear camera was activated by the pulses coming from a reverse motion sensor. The hack involved a pulse generator which fooled the system into thinking the car was backing up, but the whole thing was too complicated and expensive for me, so I never pursued it.

I wish Toyota had a more laid-back attitude about safety. My other car, a VW Golf with a stick-shift, it's easy to activate the rear camera at any speed, by moving the gear shift lever near the reverse gear, without actually putting it reverse. I've seen demos of other models which allowed you to access the rear camera while driving. I wish that were an option on my 2024 Prime.

 

In my Tesla, pressing the Camera "button" brings up the rear facing cameras.


That was pushed as an update in 2020.

 

It sure comes handy when you get hit like that. Luckily, my wife was in the car so he could bail out.

 

Just to write it a different way: The car hasn't got any capture, recording or storage hardware. There's nothing for a hack to unlock. So hardware recorders must be brought in.

Within this problem: multi-camera video recorders for motor vehicles already exist, but as far as I know they've all moved on to a more modern signal standard, so they won't work with the existing Toyota cameras.

Cheap home security recorders that still work with old analog cameras are still on the market, and one could be modified to work on vehicle power. But you'd have to add in the box and run a bunch of wires to it.

 

Part of the fun is just determining what signal standard(s) the car is using.

In my gen 3, the analog camera is going straight to an analog video input at the back of the display head unit. But in a gen 3 with the parking assist feature, the analog camera plugs into the parking ECU instead, which processes the image (adding the guide lines and such) and then sends it digitally to the GVIF input on the back of the head unit instead. There was more in this thread:

Difference between GVIF and AV | PriusChat

I can't even pretend to know what signal standard is used in a gen 5. I had never heard of GVIF until my gen 3; that one seems kind of obscure.