>> desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal
>> landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen
>Cams with fisheye lenses that do 180+ are available,
mount two back to back for spherical coverage,
software flattens the fisheye for playback. Or do 4x90's.
Since you're not talking custom #OpenFab #OpenHW here,
all HW so far mentioned is available China OEM sources
design integrator services and assembly in pallet quantities,
if going the route most other black box sellers have gone,
all they typically do is software builds and support.
Originally, I figured I'd have to use bare cameras and do the compression myself.
See the fact that I subsequently discovered the Vuze+ camera system: 4 pairs of 4K cameras, each with fisheye lenses, to see the entire sphere, in stereoscopic view! And 3-axis gyroscopes to stabilize the view.
Way more "oomph!" than I started out wanting to have. The main "drawback" is that it produces 80-120 megabytes/second full-bore. So, it's going to be wonderful quality, but the data-storage and data-transmission systems need to be kept proportionally larger.
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I also found out that recent WiFi's seem to be far more capable than I previously understood. Maybe WiFi 4 would transfer nearly 80 megabytes/second. From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi generations| Generation/IEEE Standard | Maximum Linkrate | Adopted | Frequency |
|---|
| Wi‑Fi 6 (802.11ax) | 600–9608 Mbit/s | 2019 | 2.4/5 GHz 1–6 GHz ISM |
|---|
| Wi‑Fi 5 (802.11ac) | 433–6933 Mbit/s | 2014 | 5 GHz |
|---|
| Wi‑Fi 4 (802.11n) | 72–600 Mbit/s | 2009 | 2.4/5 GHz |
|---|
| Wi‑Fi 3 (802.11g) | 3–54 Mbit/s | 2003 | 2.4 GHz |
|---|
| Wi‑Fi 2 (802.11a) | 1.5 to 54 Mbit/s | 1999 | 5 GHz |
|---|
| Wi‑Fi 1 (802.11b) | 1 to 11 Mbit/s | 1999 | 2.4 GHz |
|---|
| (Wi-Fi 1, Wi-Fi 2, Wi-Fi 3 are unbranded[41] but have unofficial assignments[42 |
So, any smartphone designed since 2014, using WiFi 5, would probably work well
It would be nice to have a pair of 360-degree-cameramen acting as mutual-data-backups: Cameraman A sending 80 megabytes per second to Cameraman B, and vice versa. WiFi 5 and WiFi 6 look like they are quite capable of this, if "full-duplex" operation is allowed.
The Vuze+ camera does its own compression, although it appears to be mild compression. The limited literature I've seen doesn't mention anything about encryption, above and beyond the WiFi's password system. How much overhead would a single-key encryption algorithm take?
"Catching" this WiFi-transmitted data, 80 megabytes/second, probably only will require a WiFi 5 smartphone and a 256 or 512-gigabyte SD Card, the latter to store about 6000 seconds of video.