SectorSecurity

The best advise I can give you with regards to motion sensor image captures is to always test it out before hand, dial in the settings and have someone walk by the camera, this will let you know if the motion recording is working to your standards or if you need to make adjustments.

Sounds about as good as your grammer, I don't like anything that claims D1 on limited channels. The rest of the features are standard on just about every DVR on the market, not exclusive to Night-Owl.

I used to buy galaxy stuff, actually comes from these guys: http://www.smartvisiondirect.com/ But now I shop at ADI, very easy to get an account if you are running a business, and they have thousands of products and very helpful staff. www.adiglobal.ca I believe is their website.

Hey gus, so I bought a 16CH DVR for a client, went with the enterprise level DVR and spent over 5 grand just on the DVR, plugged it in connected everything and time to power up, or so I thought. The unit wouldn't power up, so I tried a new plug, still nothing, tried a new power cord, still nothing, time to open up the unit. I opened the unit to find the hard drives thrown inside 2x 2TB drives, just thrown in the case, only 1 is half connected to the power side, no data, the other ins't connected at all, only the data was connected to the DVD drive, no power. Many capacitors had been damaged, some taken clean off the board, most of the sata connectors were in pieces. I was in shock to find the drives just thrown in the case on such an expensive unit. I will post pictures of my findings shortly.

Sounds like an IE security setting is blocking either a java applet or an ActiveX control, do you get a popup bar asking you to run any of these? You can try adjusting your security settings or try a different browser like Chrome, or Firefox.

I have always found those 60FT cables to be to short for anything, I usually end up giving them away once I have amassed a bunch of them from customers who buy these systems then realize 60FT doesn't go as far as they thought it would.

Most customers have a hard enough time getting a decent signal to browse the internet in most parts of their house, yes alone stream video wirelessly. This is usually do in part to the fact most people place their cable modems and routers in the basement, at least here in Ontario. Unless you want to expand your wireless network, wireless cameras usually aren't the best option. If you want to see how well your wireless coverage is, grab a laptop and the software called netstumbler (its free) and then walk around to the areas in your house where you plan to put your wireless cameras and observe the signal strength from your network; this will give you a pretty good indication on whether or not you can go with wireless cameras.

Most systems can do a motion based capture which can be dialed in to a set time, say 1-2 seconds of record when motion is captures, I don't know about saving the image to screen, not exactly how a CCTV system works.

Don't know if they support CMS software, usually when I do this I use CMS software and just let the client view serveral DVR's from a computer. You could use a 16CH multiplexer and just add BNC T adapters to the cameras and feed the second input into the multiplexer then split the output from the multiplexer to how ever many TV's you want to feed.

I would say just get several SATA drives, and put them in a RAID 5 config, split the read write from the cameras across serveral drives, improved performance with the ability to lose 1 hard drive and recover. The thing to remember is SSD's have a time based shelf life, after they run for an amount of time they begin to fail, its something like several years though. I would say make sure you have gigabit network card(s).

There are services which will do this for a price, or he can simply FTP the data to a remote location for free.

Can you clear some stuff up, first subnets can be on the same network, I can subnet a single network into many smaller virtual segments and still view it all from 1 external source if I enter the routing information correctly. Are you talking about several physical locations; such as warehouse 1, warehouse 2, warehouse 3 ect. ? If this is the case you would need something like a CMS software to aggregate the information into 1 location.

This is not true, the DVR manufacture will give you the MAC address not the IP address, the MAC address is the hardware address assigned to an ethernet card. How can the DVR manufacture set the IP address, they have no idea what private address space I use on my network. Now for setting a static IP address, yes you can do this on the DVR but this would be an internal address, you can not set your external address as static this has to be done by your ISP.

What you need is a dynamic DNS service to keep track of your changing dynamic IP address and they will map a hostname such as mydvr.com to your IP address so you can access it externally, you will still need to do your own port forwarding on your router.

I have never had a problem with the ones from home depot, they aren't meant to give you extreme bend they are meant to go through a wall plate hole and up the wall to go through fire stops or beams. If you want more flex get a longer flex bit, I think I also have a 72" flex bit which will bend more then the 54" one.

Are you sure it is not an electrical surge which is taking out the camera? Have you tried plugging the camera into a surge protector on the power side as well as the video side?

Get yourself some 54" flex bits that can be worked through the wall to drill through fire stops and between floors, you can get them in behind the insulation to. I would also recommend an inspection camera so you can see what's in the wall, usually doesn't work on exterior walls do to insulation. Beyond that a good stud sensor, one that can alert on electrical really helps, good fish tape, push rods (also known as glow rods) and a good ball and chain can be helpful. This is something you will get good with with practice, having the right tools really helps to, and sometimes you have no option but to cut more holes then you would like, just explain this to the customer first.

I use what we call security wire, or alarm wire, its a 22AWG with 4 wires in it, has always worked great for me, and I find it to be about 25$ cheaper per 1000FT then CAT5, of course CAT5 always gives you the option to go IP cams later. http://www.security.honeywell.com/documents/Cabling.pdf Look under the security wire section.

Hey Guys, I am looking for insurance for CCTV installation as well as alarm installation, all our monitoring will be contracted out. Having trouble finding a company to go with, can anyone make any recommendations? Would really love to find a company that does 12 equal payments (hate parting with money ahead of time).

The port forwarding will happen on your router that your DVR is plugged into. If you have 2 routers you need to setup routes to direct the traffic. Are you sure you have 2 routers and not a router and a switch?

My Suggestion would be to put them on a seperate switch and have 2 VLANS, 1 for cameras and 1 for management. This would allow you to access your cameras while keeping them seperate. This will also save your network from saturation as 30 cams will produce a lot of packets. If you do use the existing gear a VLAN is the way to go, depending on how you set it up you may be able to reduce the impact to the rest of the network, just remember any and all problems are always blamed on the last guy to touch anything.

I install analog when thats all that will fit in the clients budget, if they don't want to spend the money to go IP I can't force them, that would be the main reason we still install analog.

Are they offering a D1 view or D1 record? there is a difference. Some will let you view at a D1 resolution but only record at CIF. Are they sure there is only 100FPS sounds like a really odd number for the total FPS for the system.

Buy 4 cameras that meet your specs, get yourself a quad processor, and get a monitor, this will fulfil your requirements. If you want IP cameras, then get 4 dome IP cameras, and 8 port switch a router and a spare PC, cable the cameras and the computer to the switch the switch to the router and then get something like blue iris or if you use Axis IP cams use the axis camera companion and you are setup.

Have you port forwarded the correct ports so when you use the external it knows where internally to point the traffic?