CollinR

If your going to suggest the picture is all "grainy" and "crappy" can you suggest why?

Because my cost on those cams is under $40 and the DVR about $250 so in either case the bang:buck is poor when you pay more for a brand name like that with a reputation like it has.

and no I will not put my company name on selling that for $800 just because I could.

Alright, I am going to test one of the two systems. If you had to pick between Swann and Q-SEE in regards to quality, which would you choose?

 

I will post the results after I have tested.

I think suicide would become an option at that point.

I have installed systems for Costco and they do not use that stuff.

You would want the GVNet or the GVNETIO.

It's a percentage deal and it's easy enough to test just get a BW bullet and an IR camera and position it in parallel (which is basically impossible but bare with me) and then again from say a 30* angle.

Really you can test this with your eye as well just have put a refective surface infront of you car at night, then position it 30* to the side.

Heck really this is exactly why when driving in fog if you turn your high beams on you loose visablity. It's because the high beam is not only brighter it's also closer to parallel and hence more gets reflected directly back.

Everything you said above is 100% accurate having the beam not in parallel simply reduces the % of light reflected smaller for close objects and 30* seperation is hardly noticable for distant objects.

Now since I know you work for someone you obviously (and I mean painfully obvious!) have too much knowledge for an end user. Why don't you go and push for an inexpensive IR illuminator to be produced and sweep the market. They are far far easier to design and really should be dirt cheap, so why are they $2-300? Cause we are too lazy to soulder them up ourselves I guess. No reason you/your organization can't reap those profits.

Really take it to the next level and look at a maglite flashlight, really how hard would it be to replace that bulb with an LED array and maintain the focus adjustments? It's a stupid simple concept just has only been applied in mega $ halogen systems.

I have not discovered if AVerMedia and GeoVision are using different codecs, or what the differences would be between codecs or between the images produced by either card.

 

Any contributions to this discussion would be really helpful, very welcome and certainly invited.

 

1. The resolution that you have set the DVR software to run at.

 

Running at

CIF 352 X 240

CIF2 640 X 480

D1 720 X 480

 

 

The higher the resolution is set for, the greater details and image quality you will achieve. This setting however may effect performance, depending on the CPU speed, memory, and video card of the system in which you have the card installed..

All are supported by both.

Both use custom codecs, this is as much for security and feature support as anything else.

2. Video card and amount of onboard memory (on the card)

especially as opposed to motherboard onboard memory.

 

 

An AGP Express card will render more effectively than an AGP card

An AGP card will render more effectively than a PCI card

An AGP card will give better rendering than onboard video

 

an higher end nVideo card or higher end ATI card will give better rendering than an Intel card.

The amount of memory on the video card is a factor

 

The driver...is it updated....native Windows driver or the chip sets manufacturer latest driver?

 

3. The amount of memory on the Motherboard is a factor not only in systems with onboard memory but also when there are AGP Express, AGP or PCI cards handling the video.

This is highly debatable, and from my home theater experience I can tell you the top end of Nvidia is made for gaming not video playback. Really it makes little difference though as all CCTV systems use codecs not directly supported by basically anyone. So no matter how much you spend you will most likely not see hardware support for decoding the video from these systems.

I have no problems with on board intel video from most modern systems.

All use their own drivers this is for copy protection of the software as much as anything else. Some cards also have generic Windows drivers but they will not function with the original software unless it's a pirated system.

4. Camera resolution 380-420-480-530-550 TVLs as well as the refresh rate of the camera.

Don't forget 480p and the various megapixel formats.

5. brightness, contrast, hue and saturation controls within the DVR program

Both are similar I can't say one stands above another.

6. resolution of the monitor 1024 X 768 or 1280 X 1024...The width of the monitor....19" monitors distort. The brightness, contrast, hue and saturation controls of the monitor.

This is very important with all systems but crucially important in analog cameras where 480i is the maximum capture. IMHO the bigger issue is aspect ratio, analog cameras are all 4:3 aspect ratio and those displays are getting harder and harder to come by. Both companies have created interfaces that support 16:9 aspect ratio displays however when you fullscreen you will surely notice the distortion. With Avermedia you have an uncompressed TV output that can be used with conventional TVs, this is the highest quality live veiwing available. With Geovison you have a loop output which can be combined with a mux for Aver like functionality or a quad processor. Again this will be uncompressed unadulterated video straight from the cam.

7. Type of light

 

indoor incandescent mostly blue spectrum

indoor fluorescent mostly red spectrum

outdoor daylight - full spectrum

Both deal with this similarly.

8 Speed of moving subject - type of camera - refresh rate

This is only an issue with IP cameras and cameras with adjustable shutter speeds. Be leary of the function called "DSS" or Digital Slow Shutter, it's supposed to help with night viewing but only works well for static scenes.

9. Frames per second rate recording or viewing.

This depends on the device chosen from the lineup, Geo has dynamic balancing and Aver does not.

10. Compression

 

Indeo5

MPEG4

JPEG

This is also not really comparable, got Dishnet HD at home? Guess what thats an MPEG4/H.264 stream. How is the quality there?

The problem is how do you like a 1TB HDD only holding a day or twos worth of video per cam?

It's a nice cam and I feel your pain it's kinda in a niche in the IP cam world and further totally sucks in megapixel world.

It's basically the best you are going to find, compare your bang:buck against a regular 484 and a streamer though.

From my experience Aver is better. lol

Okay I can shoot you some points on both sides!

Geovision Pros:

** Has active CCTVForum presence! < This is a biggie for me, they aren't shy or scared.

*Software Configurablity, its got tons of configuration options.

*Video quality, this is more related to configuration then anything else.

*Features, Geo has more features that in reality few actually use.

*Digital IO controls, Geo has more for less when it comes to digital IO.

**Dynamic load balancing on framerate.

**Multistreaming based on function in use.

*Looping output is an option and not too expensive either.

Avermedia Pros:

** Has mild CCTVForum presence, they are here.

*Hardware Configurability, most of the time you can upgrade without a total redo.

*Ease of use, I do not have to train my customers to use Aver.

*IP and Megapixel support, Aver has an open IP scheme.

*Integration, Geo preaches it Aver delivers it.

*Cost, Aver is usually cheaper, especially if you factor in #2.

*Ease of modification, Aver is easier to tweak much of it is flat file configuration.

*IP stream transcoding. (Dunno Geo may have this too, I'm not paying the license fee to find out.)

*All Aver cards have at least a mux TV output.

*More cameras per box if you desire, 32 compared to Geo 16.

*Quickly catching Geo on features.

*Quickly catching Geo on IO controls.

*OEM software available, SDK not readily available but moreso then Geo.

*Aver seems more hardware tolerant, dunno if this is factual though.

Geo Cons:

*No upgrade path.

*IP license cost is crazy!!!

*More Geo pirated on eBay, makes it tough for legit dealers to compete.

*No OEM software available, SDK difficult/impossible to aquire.

*No easy means of integrating with higher control systems.

*TV out means you spend a grand.

*Cost

Aver Cons:

*Little to no compression controls, pick your codec and a slider.

*Basically no streaming controls at all.

*No dynamic load balancing, set it and forget it framerate.

*Depending on hardware framerate can be reduced by ports not in use.

Don't ever use a camera with IR actually on it, bottom line. If you want/need IR add an illuminator and install it at least a couple of degrees off. What you are seeing is the IR bouncing straight back into the camera. All the other stuff discusses is fine and dandy and makes a valid point and difference however as long as the incedent IR beam and the cameras FOV are in parallel you will be capturing ghosts.

The other point that has been mentioned is cost, this has little to nothing to do with it. You can get sub $100 cameras that do not have this problem however they are all BW and do not have IR on them. So go get a quality BW bullet and IR corrected lens and use that Q-See as an IR illuminator.

1/4" CCD and Color scream piss poor low light performance regaurdless of what the marketing on the box says.

It's for color reproduction, if outdoors colors look correct you have an IR filter. If they look all strange and crappy then you might not, IR filters exist that are kinda half and half this is what all those IR bullet cameras have basically they have a notch wavelength that they will partially pass the the DSP in the camera will attempt to account for this during the daytime. The notch matches the output of the LEDs and was probably chosen to be not as naturally occuring.

The filter is about 1 F stop so it damn sure does effect exposure and depending on the ciruitry limitations you c an wind up with an overexposure situation in high lighting.

No it means you either have a black and white camera or digital day/night.

The fastest way i can think of is 2 usernames and a scheduled access on the second.

Also in the playback configuration you can diable directdraw overlay IIRC.

This is independent of DD overlay used in preview mode.

What do you guys have the AES set to? I ask as I have had on up for a while and have not noticed this. Mine is the older style big box with no AI options. I run it BW with the filter removed, no problems day or night.

This was probably an inside job, only someone who knew about this system and how it works would have manually deleted the video from it rather then simply stealing or destroying it.

Have you tried any forsensic tools to recover the data? If you have left the disk alone the data is still on it.

No not really, there are bullets with digital zoom but I wouldn't pay extra for it.

Look at Arecont Vision, if you want an out of the box solution many are now true day/night.

Me personally I have a 3130 (2 imagers both 1/2") and a 3100 that I removed the IR filter from and installed a 1" format machine vision lens. It can see pretty well in .2lux ambient with a 75' rated IR cannon out to about 700'.

And how would you address low light situations in which megapixel cameras fail miserably?

These exist now, just not cheap.

All DVRs that are worth anything allow for this, ones that have networking yet do not support this would be a much shorter list.

IIRC you need to enable it in 2 places, the system config and the specific camera you want the audio linked to.

Look at the video and take a snapshot, then compare to the last maintence. Well unless it looks bad then just report that.

It's just like regular RG59u but the core is stranded so it can bend repeatedly without breaking. Finding a small length of it will be the problem, possibly use a patch cable until you are in the wall and then use normal RG59u.

You could also use stranded Cat5.

It's a crapshoot, some marked megapixel has in my experience been no better then a quality standard lens. Unfortunately you'll need to just buy and try for now.

I have had good luck with 1" format machine vision lenses though.

If the ftp server thinks C:\DVR is root and you wish to use a subfolder you will need to create it beforehand or use mkdir to create it. The DVR probably doesn't support mkdir so you will need to create it with another FTP client on on the FTP server.

In other words "C:\DVR" = "/" in the ftp clients eyes.

Same as "C:\DVR\DVR" = "/DVR" to the client.

If you want to use a folder called DVR under that you will need to create C:\DVR\DVR. Then you can use a path like /DVR, the error is telling you that directory doesn't exist.

You can probably just use / and see where it goes but your FTP server configuration should dictate where the files are located.

Also you probably need DDNS configured to pass ftp.yourdomain.com otherwise you must have and use a static IP.

EDIT: Are these two on the same LAN?