Soundy

I don't have a GV box in front of me to confirm, and I'm not familiar enough with them to walk you through it from memory, but yes, it can be done - there should be a database utility (or something of the sort) in the GV folder on the Start Menu - you can use that to rebuild the search database with the existing video files.

You mean this? "HDcctv is the world's only electrical interface standard for HD surveillance video, providing 100% digital transmission of uncompressed HDTV signals over existing coax." I'd say that's about the extent of it. Most of the rest is either marketing hyperbole, outright falsehoods, or just plain FUD. Some of the stuff on their little comparison chart boils to the equivalent of listing "front driver's seat" as a feature on a new car. thewireguys is right, you should look into some of the LinkedIn discussions, where some of the actual manufacturers are now chiming in... get a much clearer picture than the Alliance is presenting.

Even in night mode, the 484 and 24VF aren't cutting it... and of course, the "higher-ups" complain endlessly about them not being in color then. But just try to tell them they need more light... nooooo, they want it dim, don't want to ruin the "atmosphere"!

Yeah, did find their Canadian listing... got no response to any emails to them tho. I think I tried calling them once and got lost in voicemail-menu hell.

Anyone here have any experience with HISCO PC-based DVRs? I've inherited a couple of their machines now... looks very similar to a Capture IDR system. No specific questions yet, just curious if anyone else here has used them...

Oh yeah, and along with acts-of-God at 1, I'd put acts-of-human-stupidity at 1a. Not intentional tampering, mind you, but just idiotic things, like... spilling drinks into equipment... piling stuff up against air vents leading to failure from overheating... kicking power cords loose... all things you can try to guard against, all things that people still find a way to f*** up. Remember: make something idiot-proof, and the universe will just devise a better idiot.

I would agree about 90% with Carl's list... 100% on the items, maybe a little different in the order... but not much different! And BTW, that's based not just on 8 years working professionally in CCTV, but over 15 years actually working in IT, over 20 working (intermittently) in live and studio audio engineering, and many more dabbling in various other aspects of similar technology (including some time in car audio and alarms, too). The exact equipment may differ, but the same principles apply, and the points of failure tend to break down about the same in all of them.

Bump for this...

Welcome aboard!

If it says it's IP65 or IP66, you should be fine for outdoor use. Heater/blower really shouldn't be a big issue in most cases.

Are you set on an Arecont bubble? I've got a 511 running inside a Specta III enclosure on one site, fits in there with LOTS of room to spare.

Ive done alot of PC repair work for homes over the years and Ive had to replace many routers. I myself have gone through 3 routers in the past 3 years or so alone. Most dont have switches though. Then again Ive had some routers last 10 years without a major glitch. But it IS an additional point of failure. In the common IP network, the *router* is rarely in the packet path between the cameras and the NVR. Of course, if you're trying to build a quality surveillance system, you might not want to use some little $40 plastic-encased thing from Wal Mart (which is probably a $90 plastic thing in the Islands ) You don't need super high-end gear, but spend an extra $100 for a decent switch and it'll last as long as the cameras in most cases. Agreed with this. I've had all of three switches fail in IP installations... only two failed spontaneously, and those were $40 10/100 units running two or three cameras. A third was killed by a lightning strike that also did substantial damage to other equipment on the site (that wasn't my install, BTW, I just got the call to service it). I reality, "total network failure" SHOULD NOT be a concern - as others have noted, there are far more other things that can go wrong that should be a higher priority concern; the recorder failure issue is something that affects IP, SDI, *and analog* systems equally. Thanks for the input ---? Is it fair to say then that interrupted recording on all cameras from a LAN failure on an IP system is far more likely than interrupted recording on all cameras on an HDcctv system? I wouldn't call this a fair statement either. Did you not read survtech's words? HDcctv is far more sensitive to issues with quality of cabling and termination than IP. Meaning you'd best make damn sure your terminations are clean and solid. The only way a cable failure will give you a total loss of recording with an IP system is if you lose the link between the NVR and the switch, and that's easy to compensate for by adding a redundant link, by way of a second NIC or a dual-NIC motherboard. BTW, IP gives you another benefit: it's really easy to set up a second NVR as a backup recorder - just plug it into the network and configure the cameras, and if your main NVR goes offline, you're covered. Doing that with analog can get pricey (active video splitters) and messy (coax bundles everywhere)... I don't even know if it's possible with SDI (if there are SDI signal splitters, guarantee you they'll cost a bundle).

I'm always a little surprised that anyone falls for any part of the hdcctv gambit, but this is one that is especially puzzling. Look at your "average" cctv deployment, and what the typical customer is really willing to spend money on. Almost none of these will budget enough pixels-per-foot to capture all the details they want in all the camera views. So, you can take a 720p or 1080p camera and cover a 100ft wide area. You'll get a much better picture than would have with an SD camera, but in most of that view you're not going to have enough pixels per foot to get *really* good detail. Carrying the image over IP or SDI or via Carrier Pigeon doesn't materially affect the outcome of a system that has placed 400 pixels *total* on a license plate at the far end of the FOV. HDcctv does (or should) produce very pretty, sharp, clean, impressive live pictures, since it's transmitting uncompressed HD video at up to 3Gb/s. However, STORING video at 3Gb/s is far beyond impractical and verges on impossible. This means that the video still needs to be compressed - so you're back to compressing it in the DVR. And you're using the same codecs as IP cameras would use - MJPEG, MPEG-4, H.264 - you're just changing where it's done. In the end, there's no inherent reason PLAYBACK of HDcctv will be any different than playback of IP megapixel - you still have to make the same tradeoffs of framerate, frame size, and compression level vs. storage requirements and storage costs. All settings being equal, one minute of H.264-compressed 1920x1080 (2MP) video is going to take the same space and playback with the same quality whether you process it in-camera, or in the DVR. BTW, don't forget that 2MP is the *maximum* you'll get with current HDcctv spec (has anyone actually brought out a 1080p camera yet, or are they all still 720p?). 2MP cameras were high-end in IP three years ago... today 3MP and 5MP cameras are common, 10MP are readily available, and if you're really ballin', there are 16MP models out there. If you're all about the resolution, there's no contest. This. And given the cost, I don't see it being all that attractive to most DIYers, either.

It says it's designed to fit all of Arecont's box cams... the ones I've used (the "compact" models - http://www.arecontvision.com/index.php?section=product&category_id=22) are pretty similar in size to the 511, so it SHOULD work. IQ lists the 511 as 2.91" x 3.46"; the Arecont models all list a hair smaller at 2.5" x 3", with the larger models being 2.25" deep and the "compact" units being 1.25" deep.

Glad I could help My next piece of advice would be to start looking for a new employer!

Sounds like a service nightmare. How can you be great at anything if you do everything? Speak for yourself I can be great at everything because I'm amazing... dunno about you ;P What a coincidence - me too!

^Agreed - Cat5e is rated for gigabit as it is. Unless you're planning 10GbE or higher expansion in the near future, there's little call for the extra cost.

You need to give the computer IPs on both networks. In Windows, when you're in the TCP/IP settings, you want to set it for "Use the following IP address", then hit the Advanced button. Under IP Addresses, hit Add, then put in your IP for your main LAN (192.168.1.whatever), and the proper netmask, then hit OK. That allows the machine to communicate with other machines on the 192 network. Then hit Add again, and give it an address on your camera network (172.17.1.whatever), with the proper netmask as well. That will allow it to communicate with anything on the 172 network. Then under Default Gateways, hit Add, and put in your router's IP (192.168.1.1). That tells it that for all other IPs, to send the connection via that address. Finally, on the DNS tab, add your router's IP (192.168.1.1), otherwise you'll be able to connect to the world, but you won't be able to look up domain names.

Network latency is almost zero in IP cameras compared to processing latency. 95% of the lag you're seeing is because of the time the camera takes compressing the video, and the time the VMS takes decompressing it for viewing. The two "latencies" are NOT related, despite the same term being used for both. Actually, using "latency" for this issue is probably a misuse of the term anyway, and obviously leads to some confusion - "lag" is much more suitable.

Can you expand on how IP has better system scalability than HDcctv? is that assuming that a LAN already exists? is that assuming that the existing lan has sufficient capacity? Likewise --- with design flexibility? I believe I already spoke to those several posts back (or might have been in another thread, I dunno). Given the aforementioned HDcctv manufacturer claims HDcctv DVRs can currently do little beyond record and playback (including, no advanced search functionality)... I'd say the list is too long get into. I think you're still living in 1992... network systems have improved a bit in the last 20 years...

Yeah, the thing is, that same thinking works for IP systems as well... The following is a quote from a discussion on another forum, *BY A MANUFACTURER OF BOTH IP AND SDI SYSTEMS*: And remember, this is coming from someone who builds *both types of systems*, which makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the subject. His admission that SDI costs the same as IP flies directly in the face of the Alliance spokesman's claims that it will be cheaper than IP... and his admitting to the problems that SDI systems have (there are many other posts speaking about the limitations of the technology) is ever bolder given the fact that he's potentially hurting his own sales (he's stated in other posts that they've not yet sold a single HDcctv DVR, mainly due to the high cost).

Okay, I think I see where the confusion is here: I think you're confusing two different uses of the term. When HDcctv boosters go on about "zero latency", they're not talking about network latency (mainly because there's no network involved anyway). When we talk about latency in CCTV systems (and IP cameras in particular), we're referring to the delay between when something happens and when you see it happen, which is introduced *BY THE IN-CAMERA PROCESSING OF THE VIDEO*. It has nothing to do with network or data latency.

Yes, but it's an often-overstated one. No... just over-used and over-emphasized. What impact would it have on the performance of the system? The NVR doesn't care if the event happened .4s or 1s earlier; all it has to do is accept the data and write it to disk. It makes no difference to the *processing* of analytics, either. It might matter to the response time, say, if you're using an autotracking PTZ, but how many other situations is a .6s difference actually going to affect the outcome of something? Depends on the data, doesn't it? As with everything else, "it depends". Are you suggesting that it's ALWAYS important? My assertion is that WHETHER IT'S IMPORTANT FOR A SPECIFIC INSTALLATION NEEDS TO BE CONSIDERED. All too often, pie-in-the-sky specs are just thrown in as "requirements" whether or not they're actually relevant to that specific design. I'm not saying it's ALWAYS insignificant. I'm saying in the vast majority of cases, it PROBABLY is. If you're a conscientious integrator, it's your duty to determine what requirements are actually important for a specific install, so you're not wasting your client's money on features that won't actually make a difference to the job. If they want to spend extra for it anyway, then fine, it's their money, but if you're not giving them alternatives, and explaining WHY you're suggesting those alternatives, then you're not serving them very well. As far as HDcctv goes, yes, I think we should. That may be fine in an IP-vs-analog discussion... I'm not aware of any HDcctv PTZs being available yet, so again, latency isn't really relevant in that part of the discussion.

Yes, but the question is, is it a *realistic* requirement, or just something they *think* they need? In the overall scheme of the entire chain of events, from a event happening to a response being launched, will an extra few hundred milliseconds actually make a difference? Or is it just something that some engineer somewhere decided needed to be thrown in for no particular reason? The point is, when you introduce the human element to the chain of events, you introduce substantial extra latency right there. It could be 5ms between something happening, and the time it shows up on the screen... it still takes the person watching time to realize what he's seeing, make the decision to act, make the decision HOW to act, and then actually perform those actions... all of which will probably take 5-15s before a response is even initiated. I'm just saying, a lot of times "perception" is skewed, and the importance of some factors are over-emphasized, often because people don't take into account just how much (or how little) those factors actually contribute.

Short of a digital storage 'scope, can anyone suggest a (reasonably price-conscious) multimeter with the ability to log/record values over time (voltages, in particular)?