dvarapala

Really? Like what? The web interface on my Axis P3344 has dozens of pages and seems pretty complete. Yet you claim something is missing - what is it?

Unfortunately, nobody told me that when I used a web browser to set up my Axis P3344. Well that explains it. You set up ONE camera. Do you actually do this for a living? Where did you get that idea? My opinion is every bit as valid as yours. For my situation, having to install software that I'll never use just so I can perform a one-time setup on one camera is annoying. I can see the value of the software for your situation; why can't you see the uselessness of that software for mine?

Especially on those analog cameras you are so fond of.

To each his own. If you don't mind cluttering up your laptop with software from each and every camera manufacturer you deal with, more power to ya.

Unfortunately, nobody told me that when I used a web browser to set up my Axis P3344.

I don't use AV100 - I connect directly to the camera with a web browser. On mine the shutter settings are under the "Image" menu.

Have you tried setting your shutter speed to 1ms? At that shutter speed I get an easy 15fps at full resolution from my Arecont AV1310DN.

I gotta agree with this. I have used several brands of IP cameras and all can be set up without the use of special software (they get an IP address via DHCP, and then you log onto the embedded web server to configure the settings). My Arecont is the only exception to this. I understand that it may help an installer doing 50 cameras at once, but when you're doing a onesey-twosey install it's a PITA. Another problem with some Areconts (including my AV1310DN) is a bug in the MJPEG firmware. They are inserting some extra junk into each frame right before the end-of-image marker. I'm using the standard release of libjpeg to decode these frames, and it spits out an error message for every single frame - you can imagine what that does to a log file. I ended up having to patch the code to ignore this particular error so that my disk would stop being hammered by error messages. Thanks to this thread I see there are some firmware updates for these cameras. Unfortunately they have no release notes, so there's no way for me to know what they changed or fixed with the new FW. Lame, lame, lame!!! To end on a positive note, however, my Arecont has been in service for about a year now with no other issues. It has even survived being dropped - twice - with no apparent ill effects. And it has a feature that is essential to my purpose: a fixed-rate, high-speed shutter option which lets me set a 1/1000 shutter speed to capture blur-free images of license plates on passing vehicles.

Do you have a way to temporarily bypass the Axis box and control the camera with something else? At least then you'd know whether the problem lies in the Axis box or in the camera itself. There's also the slight possibility of some kind of network issue (e.g. lost packets). You could try plugging a laptop directly into the Axis using a short crossover Ethernet cable and seeing if you still have the issue. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

I hate threads like this. MOFO OP gets everybody sucked in with a bizarre yet strangely compelling story, and then never comes back to tell us how the story ends!!

I have a pre-buyout Hitachi 2TB drive, and on a couple of occasions I have experienced symptoms similar to yours. In both cases the problem turned out to be a bad block on the HD. Normally there are enough "spare" blocks on the disk that the firmware in the HD can remap the bad ones automagically. However, once you run out of those built-in spares, you have to map out any additional bad blocks yourself. My system is Linux-based, so all I had to do to fix the problem was force an fsck and reboot. Dunno how you would accomplish that under Windows 7, but I'm sure someone else can advise you on that. HTH.

Something else the OP might want to consider is "Perspex CS Black 962." This is basically black Plexiglas that blocks visible light but allows most of the IR light to pass through. Depending on the cutoff curve, this might also help to filter out the telltale red glow from his 850nm IR LEDs. One could hide both the camera and the illuminators behind a sheet of this stuff and have complete stealth; the downside, of course, is that it's going to cut down on some of the transmitted light, and one would need stronger illuminators to compensate.

Actually, it probably won't. The "discovery" packet that the AV100 software sends out is a UDP datagram sent to the local subnet's broadcast address (i.e. 255.255.255.255) - an address that most routers, by design, will not route off of the originating subnet. Now some routers can be configured to forward broadcast packets from one subnet to another (e.g. so that one DHCP server can serve addresses to multiple subnets), but this is the exception rather than the norm. This "magic packet" is one of the things I really dislike about Arecont Vision cameras, BTW. Most other brands of IP cameras that I have dealt with give you alternative methods of configuring their cameras that don't involve having to install some special software package that you don't ever plan to use.

I have an Arecont Vision AV1310 day/night camera with a Computar megapixel lens sitting in my office window. Capturing legible images of license plates is no problem during the day with this setup. As previously noted, the real challenge will be night time capture. You'll need lots and lots of good lighting to make it work. One way to deal with headlight glare is to use IR lighting and put a filter on your lens that blocks visible wavelengths while allowing IR to pass through; this approach will cut down on much of the glare; it's also more stealthy, which can be important in certain residential situations.

I couldn't agree more. If I lived in an HOA neighborhood, I could never paint my home like this:

My house is stucco-on-chicken-wire, so I didn't even have to content with a layer of plywood. I used regular (not masonry) bits to drill the holes and it was fine.

Anyone know what system this is? http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hs5wTq2vVRGvFUEywfTF1VSibVyA?docId=N0313341301502677332A

Just wait until some poorly-trained "security" guard sees you doing that...

So what's stopping you from running (a) separate network cable(s) just for the surveillance feeds? Since "they don't have any such animal," coming into the New Millennium is looking like your only option.

So you want a box that can take images from a megapixel IP camera, downsample the image to a standard analog video resolution (~720x480), and then output a standard analog signal which you can then feed into your legacy call box equipment? If you can even find such a thing, it's likely to be hideously expensive, especially if you need a lot of them. This might be an opportunity to ditch the legacy equipment altogether and make all of your cameras viewable over the Internet. As daunting as that may sound, it might be easier and cheaper than making your IP cameras viewable on analog equipment.

Yo uare right about the PoE switch, it communicates with device, but some PoE injectors are passive and, they just inject power to the cable so it is possible to fry camera. Any power injector that does that is not following the PoE spec. If you really do have a PoE injector that behaves this way, please tell us the brand name and model number so we never ever buy one.

Nothing will happen. By design you can plug a non-PoE device into a PoE-capable port on a switch with complete safety.

I understand that none exist now, but can you create one? For example, install a fence or place some bollards or even some large rocks along the street, leaving a single gap to serve as the entry/exit point for your parking lot. This would give you the "choke point" you need to allow you to focus your camera(s) more tightly. I think what the other poster is suggesting is that you get some megapixel cameras. Megapixel cameras are almost always IP cameras because analog standards such as NTSC do not support high resolutions. A high res camera will give you more detailed coverage of a wider area than an analog camera can. However, if you install some sort of barrier to limit entry/egress to a single point, maybe you can get away with a (cheaper) analog camera focused on the choke point and maybe a second one focused on your dumpster area. I think you can pretty much count on that happening.

Do you have reason to suspect that's anything other than a standard camera housing mounted on a pan+tilt adapter?

I've been shopping for some direct-burial 18-2 wire to power a heater/blower camera housing, some IR illuminators, and some PIR motion detectors. In my searches I keep running across the multi-conductor direct burial wire used to control irrigation valves. These valves operate at 24 VAC, just like the camera housing, the wire gauge is the same (18AWG), and they are UL rated for direct burial. I know it's probably overkill because of the extra conductors, but is there any reason why I couldn't use this stuff in a pinch?