dvarapala

A cheap Hawkeye knock-off, perhaps? I'm not sure what you mean, can you elaborate? Sorry, my lame attempt at a joke. It originally sounded to me like he was developing a DVR product of his own, but after his second post it sounds like he is just attempting to control an existing DVR using external software. Why this would involve source code to an H.264 CODEC is still a mystery.

A cheap Hawkeye knock-off, perhaps?

Well, actually, you still are: any pixels outside the crop area are being thrown away. It is correct to say that when you crop the larger image from the camera down so that you have a 1:1 pixel ratio on your monitor, you are no longer throwing away any data from the area of interest. But that's a minor nit.

The biggest problem with using a laptop is the typical LCD screen gets washed out in sunlight. There are laptops with transflective screens that are easily viewable in sunlight, but they ain't cheap! Another option is to throw a black blanket over your head and the laptop so you can see the screen.

Lemme guess: he didn't get the french fries with his combo meal?

Hmm... All those visible CCTV cameras don't appear to have been much of a deterrent...

You're at the place I was about a year ago. I started out with ZoneMinder, a SecurityEyes capture card from Bluecherry, and a CNB analog camera. Not satisfied with the analog camera, I started to buy IP cameras - and never looked back. The capture card and the analog camera are now sitting on a shelf in my closet. I'll let them go cheap if you want them. The advantages of IP cams (high resolution, progressive scan, power over ethernet, ease of installation and cable routing, etc.) makes them worth the additional cost IMO.

The obvious solution is to use IP cameras and/or IP encoders. That way a single thin cable can carry the feeds from every camera down to the guard house.

My DVR routes the captured video through the compression stage and then directly to disk; monitoring a camera is done by playing back the recorded image data. With this WYSIWYG approach, there will be no unpleasant surprises such as discovering that the recoded signal doesn't look as good as the "live" signal.

So is 0 degrees C a typical setpoint for the heater, and 40 degrees C for the fan?

So what triggers the heater/blower to come on in a typical outdoor camera housing? Temperature alone? Humidity? Some combination of the two? At what temperature will it kick on?

100% uptime is definitely possible. My VMS runs on Linux and it only goes down when I shut it down (or a power failure outlasts my UPS). Motion detection can be pretty tricky sometimes. I do some motion detection in my VMS for some cameras and in the camera itself for others. Both work well most of the time, but under certain conditions both can miss events. That's why I also have a Redwall PIR which I plan to use to trigger recordings.

So. You can capture clear images of license plates using a "regular" camera, but it needs to be a pretty good regular camera. The following features are essential: * Fast shutter speed. 1/1000th of a second works well. * The camera must allow you to set this shutter speed as the slowest under any lighting conditions. * Progressive scan helps a lot, especially at larger capture angles. * For night-time capture, a good source of light is absolutely critical. * You also need a way to filter out the glare from car headlights. Commercial cameras typically use an IR-pass filter and an IR illuminator to solve the latter two problems. As you have probably realized by now, there's no way in hell you're going to get all that for $150.

OK, thanks for being honest. I took a look at the Bosch UFLED models, specifically the UFLED20-9BD. It's tough to compare because Raytec doesn't list a distance spec for its 940nm models (the 850nm version is rated for 80m). Bosch also has a "SuperLED" line which costs twice as much and seems to be overkill for my purpose (capturing license plates at night) - if the UFLED20-9BD's rated range of 135m is accurate, that will be more than enough. And the Bosch units seem to be easier to get; unlike the Raytec covert models, a few places claim to actually have the Bosch units in stock. I don't want to wait 4-5 weeks to get my new toy.

How's this for hiding a cam in plain sight?

One tactic you might consider is to just give the cops a list of license plates that you "observed" without going into the details of how you observed them. While it's absolutely legal to record the plates of every vehicle that passes by, you don't necessarily want the fact that you're doing so to become public knowledge; people often have a strong negative reaction to such things.

Not to hijack this thread, but to get license plates, you need at least 2 things: 1) A short exposure time/high shutter speed, on the order of 1/1000th of a second, and 2) Lots of light (follows naturally from 1) - especially at night A progressive-scan image sensor (as opposed to interlaced) helps tremendously. If you want to know more, search this forum for "license plate" and/or start a new discussion thread.

Easier? No. Cheaper? Yes. Dynamic DNS is the way to go. If your equipment/software supports it, you will have a host name in a domain that will resolve to whatever IP address your ISP assigns to you, and will update automatically whenever your IP address changes. Beyond that, if you're running NAT or some other IP-address-sharing scheme (and, judging by your 192.168.x.x address, it seems that you are), you'll need to set up port forwarding as well. The details of all of this are going to vary depending on what hardware and software you're running. At my house I run a Linux box as my Internet gateway, so I can help you with that if you're running a Linux box also.

FWIW, I use an Android app called TinyCam Monitor - it allows viewing cams 1 at a time, 2 at a time, or 4 at a time, with multiple pages. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.alexvas.dvr&hl=en

1 16-ch power supply @ $40 isn't much more than 2 of those $14 transformers. Plus if you ever add more cameras it will really pay off.

OK, so which brand(s) are better? And how much do they cost? Bang for the buck is anything better than Raymax?

The Holy Grail is plate capture at night. Is the RM100 up to the task?

Why is that? Doesn't anybody (besides me) want to buy the covert models?

?? why not just load everything into the DHCP reservation table and skip step 4? Also this is still a huge waste of time. Well, I consider it a huge waste of time to install a software package that I'm only going to use for 5 minutes and then uninstall, never to be used again. I don't mean to belabor this discussion. I simply wanted to say that all of my IP cams can be (and were) configured using the procedure I outlined above; only the Arecont camera required me to install their software in order to configure it. I think we can all agree that it's better to have the choice of whether to use the software or the web browser.

The procedure goes something like this: 1) Look at the label on the camera, obtain camera's MAC address. 2) Add MAC address to the DHCP config file, and assign it a known IP address. 3) Boot the camera. 4) Launch web browser, point it to IP address determined in Step 2. It's really not so hard if you know what you're doing.