Kumba

Yeah... When e-bay was populated by technician's and geeks and the technologically savy. When Paypal didn't charge fee's, and e-bay was reasonable. Costs about 11% to do business on e-bay (Auction + PayPal) on my average auction price of $500. Kind of puts a dent in my margin's, and the buyers I get on here now tend to be the most uninclined group of individual's ever. Not to mention it's a marketting fiasco now with all the "Picture is for illustration purposes only" and "Not picture of Actual Item" buried in the 5000-word description. Price's are crazy too. Can buy stuff down the road for like $20-more and not have to ship/wait. It's a great place to find cheap knock-off's and black-market goods. If you're into that sort of thing. It was fun while it lasted

I wouldn't want to sell a configuration like that. Unless someone wanted a $200 single-channel DVR, and wasn't a stickler on little things like QoS, uptime, data-redundancy, or quality hardware If you know of such a market, let's talk. There is some fleecing to be had. This weekend i'll put the camera outside and post the link here so you can all watch the alleycats. Maybe I can find out which one is always meowing at 5am in the morning.

If anyone's really interested I can set-up a zone-minder box to record the cats in the alley-way and let you all log into it and watch recorded videos and play with settings and alarms and what-not. Keep in mind it would comprise of a $20 IR Night-Vision e-bay camera, $10 capture card, and $100 computer. Not much of a demo system If there is enough interest I will spend a few bucks and put a good setup on it.

I dont know what your selling but i'll buy one. As far as some level of automation, it will depend on the DVR/etc. ZoneMinder has X10 automation built into it. It will need a Perl programmer in order to make it interact in realtime. Otherwise there can potentially be a 5-minute lag from when it detects someone to when it activates the X10/etc. Lots of other possibilities but you'd need to map them all out to make sure it'll all work. I've done something similar where the box would turn on shop lights and play barking dogs and police sirens if it detected motion. That used a Nema contactor and a sound-card. No X10 involved.

Going to hook a bunch of camera's to a ZoneMinder CCTV Box and use it to record 8 different camera's at a live presentation since I dont have 8 camera men. Using a seperate system to record all the PA Inputs. I'll be roaming around with a DV camera. Anyone ever done something similar? How well has it worked for you? SHould be easy enough I think. Guess i'll find out in edit Hopefully 8 cams + 1 mobile ought to give me some good looks. Either way, they want cheap on the cheap. What I get for donating time to churches.

wouldn't this challenge only apply to DVR systems in which the camera's were an integrated part? IE Came as a package deal from the manufacturer. Otherwise wouldn't it be better to have this challenge use 3-4 "standardized" camera's and then view the results on the DVR to see how it copes with different qualities and levels of camera's? Then you could rate results based on camera used for a better realistic score. It seems like without a few simple guidelines it could quickly turn into a contest of budgets I guess I could hang that $20 e-bay "Night Vision" camera outside my apartment and let you all log into it and watch the cats fight. Be good for a laugh anyways

So, Hi. I specialize in service for small to medium sized business (typically tops out at around 50-employee's). I do infrastructure, IT, Telecom, CCTV and a myriad of whatever little technical things they ask of me. Somewhat of a jack of all trades, master of very few. I have experience with Windows, Linux, and OpenBSD. Do installs ranging from simple changes/additions to complete turn-key solutions. CCTV is something fairly new to me as I've only been messing with it the past year or so. Have done 7 installs using ZoneMinder as the CCTV app. Have also done integrations of ZoneMinder and Asterisk (PBX-software) where the alarms/cameras/automation could be controlled remotely. This includes callbacks on motion, playing back alarm noises over the PA system, having a keyed entry system, causing an ADT system to alarm, etc. I have only done one automation and that was where there was a door-entry phone where you could dial a code to turn the shop-lights on and off. I stay away from burglar security systems as I dont want to deal with the liability. I leave that to ADT. So that's pretty much it. I'm a fairly outgoing and helpful guy and have no problems answering whatever questions you might have. Feel free to drop me a line, Thanks.

Your request is somewhat vague as you just want to capture 32ch@960fps or basically realtime. Some of the other factors are color/bw, and resolution. Something with 32-channels at full-color D1 NTSC will need a hardware-based compression card w/ compatible software or split-servers. Depending on the software, you may be able to use clustered-servers. I use ZoneMinder in my installs and am a fan of bt878 chips. I find them to be very robust and reliable with a very mature driver-code on Win and xNIX platforms. Each bt878 chip at full-color D1 NTSC will push approximately 13MB/sec onto the PCI Bus. So for me to do a 32-ch system means I would need a subsystem that could process 32*13MB/sec or 416MB/sec. This means that it is basically not obtainable for me using commodity-based computer hardware. I would need blade-servers or a rather large Sun to accomplish this. If I were approaching this problem, I would user a clustered server setup. Basically there would be a back-end server with a massive raid/NIC configuration and a couple head-end servers that capture, analyze, and compress the stream. Each head-end server would have a p2p gigabit link with the back-end server. The SQL database and Filesystem would be located on the back-end server and the head-end's would all record into it. Only other thing to consider might be an application-server in order to serve streams to the users. Still not a cheap set-up but definately cheaper the the closest mega-puter install.

ZoneMinder will only run on Linux as it uses the Video 4 Linux driver-model. The popular thing to do is use BT878 cards since this is a very mature and stable chipset. But you can use any capture card that supports a V4L Driver. ZoneMinder also stores it's recording as MJPEG. You can configure ffmpeg to stream the MJPEG files (basically each frame = jpeg) as SWF or AVI or H.264 or whatever you feel like compiling. Also keep in mind the amount of CPU power needed to stream H.264 in realtime. You do need to have a solid grasp on linux to install a reliable system. The generic RedHat or Fedora Core install will not lead to a stable linux system. It typically never has. Also the Microsoft update mentality is your enemy. Just because an update exists, doesn't mean you need it. Newer is not always better. The bad news is there is no "Client Application" which means you are locked into whatever browser they use and the BS antispyware/antivirus/anti-anti-anti-friendly browser programs they use. I dont know how many services calls i've had because the computer they were using had "Norton Internet Security" on it and norton figured that all java was bad. There is also no voice-recording (yet). It's in the words with the next major release.

I do CCTV/PBX integrations using ZoneMinder and Asterisk and a few other things. My latest customer has an EyeMax DV-9120 with 16-channels that locks up and acts buggy. He wants me to take it and integrate it with the PBX/Asterisk machine. I am not familiar with the EyeMax hardware therefore I need to figure out if it has a V4L Driver or what chipset it uses. So if anyone has played with this hardware under linux or knows that driver-model/chipset it uses let me know. Thanks.