Soundy

Thanks, looks great... anything available in a fixed dome as well? The PTZ seems a little excessive for this purpose.

Welcome!

Most any D/N camera should do fine for that (or the HIKvisions I mentioned, if you want to stay in color the whole time). Okay, unless I'm blind, I don't see any mention previously in the thread that specifies a 90-degree FOV. That changes things a bit, because you ideally need a lens around 3.2mm to get a 90-degree horizontal FOV on a 1/2" sensor. Finding a 1/2", megapixel, day/night (IR-corrected) lens *under 4mm* is tricky... and expensive. A basic 4-10mm, 1/2" megapixel D/N lens, like that included on the AV3155DN, will give you about 77 degrees horizontal FOV. IQEye sells a 2.5-7mm megapixel lens, but it's not designed for day/night and only works properly with a 1/3" or smaller sensor (I've tried one on the Arecont, the tunnel effect is amazing). There's no previous mention of IP67 as a requirement either - that changes things as well, because most outdoor vandal domes only do IP65 or IP66. IP66 means the camera must withstand "water projected in powerful jets (12.5mm nozzle) against the enclosure from any direction"... IP67 requires it to survive submersion in up to 1m of water. Is IP67 *really* necessary in this case? For a bar or restaurant interior, I would suspect not - even IP65 ("Water projected by a nozzle (6.3mm) against enclosure from any direction shall have no harmful effects") is probably more than sufficient. See, this is why we ask more detailed questions: because of our expertise, we can think of things that you might not have, or explain why things you think you DO need, you really don't.

Wow, so convoluted... Look, as long as the cameras are on the NAS's supported list, it should work fine (not sure what all this is about "blocking"??). This is probably extreme overkill, though: bandwidth really is not that great - you'd be looking at MAYBE 30-40Mbit if the cameras were streaming full-res, full-framerate, constantly. As it is, on motion-only record, bandwidth needed should be minimal, and if there's not much traffic, as long as you configure motion detection well to avoid things like tree branches in the wind setting it off, you should get MONTHS of storage out of a couple terabytes. And yes, it will be capable of live viewing, whether you want it or not.

Unfortunately, thewireguys is correct, nobody can say for certain whether a certain camera will work "correctly" *in your situation* without knowing more about the situation. In this case, even knowing the situation, it may not be possible to say for sure whether it will work the way you want - I'm sure the camera does switch "correctly", but the threshold at which it switches may not be suitable for your purposes. What I'm finding with the AV3155DNs, for example, is that the default light level at which they switch is higher than the standard lighting in many of our restaurant sites. Add the fact that in most of them, the decor is very dark, and we find many of them simply stay in B&W unless I substantially tweak the threshold. Will a similar camera work for you? The best anyone can say is "maybe". If the lighting is a little better (it also depends on how it's laid out), if the fixtures and decor are lighter... it may be less of a problem. I find with the 3155s as well, the metering seems to be very center-weighted, so if the center area of the image is dark, it's more likely not the switch to color. That may not be true of the 10MP.

This would be my suggestion as well - use good low-light cams to capture general activity, use the high-res cams to help ID people where the light is better.

Yup, wire nuts are fine... or any number of different types of crimp connectors. The other problem with just twisting-and-taping is that it doesn't provide any physical strength and if it's stranded wire especially, could work itself loose over time.

Depends on what type of connector it is...

There appeared to be two or three different people using "ikegata" names. IP ban FTW

That's okay, I've banned him now - he basically just took to replying to everything with "PM if you want more info". Apparently he was unclear on the purpose of the forum.

You'd have a ton more options using XP instead of W7.

That's a pretty good one, yep.

I don't know what the Aver costs, so I can't say how the price point compares, but Vigil should do what you need as well.

A netbook should work as long as you're using it only as an NVR (just to capture and store the streams). I don't think it would work well as a VMS - you'd want to view the video from a separate machine.

We've only used the AV3155DN models (3MP) for these particular installs, and in most cases in these restaurants and lounges we've put them in, they won't switch to color in the day unless I lower the threshold to almost nothing. The Visix/HIK models we're using are only 2MP.

Hmmm, the M6300 looks like a fairly new machine... meaning it should have a gigabit ethernet port on it... meaning it should auto-switch for crossover... meaning a special crossover cable should not be necessary. If you go into the adapter settings in Windows, does it show the adapter as being connected when the cable is plugged in (like the picture on the left)? If so, that part of the equation should be fine. If it shows "network cable unplugged", then you need a crossover (or just plug the camera into a port on your router). After that, the camera needs to be configured to an IP on the same subnet as your laptop - for example, if your laptop's IP is 192.168.1.something, then the camera needs to be 192.168.1.something as well.

We've used (progressively) IQEye, Arecont, and now 3xLogic Visix (rebranded HIKvision) cameras in a low-light restaurant environment (arguably darker in most cases than Fridays/Applebees), and been pretty happy with the results. The day/night Areconts don't switch out of B&W in most cases, while the Visix cameras look just as good in color, with less motion blur for a given lighting level. And they're about 50% cheaper.

Actually, we've had several - for every two or three DIYers, there's an electrician or computer tech or someone else at a larger company who "knows about this stuff" and as such has been asked to implement a CCTV system. In that case, you are in the wrong place. The purpose of this forum is not to solicit business, it's to exchange knowledge and information. If your purpose here is to push your own products, then you need to just move along. And as I already warned you, if you don't remove the advertisement from your signature, you WILL be banned. Last chance.

Changing the NVR wouldn't affect the network load - X frame size at Y framerate with Z compression will still present the same data stream regardless of what is viewing/recording it. Where is the saturation occurring - is the NVR's NIC crapping out, or is the switch just not capable of the traffic?

By the way, Alex, did you happen to read the forum rules when you signed up? "Signatures are not for advertising. Please keep them a reasonable length and free of advertisements and images." Putting PRICES and a "sales" email address in your signature constitutes advertising. You can edit your signature, or be banned. Your call.

Depends how many times it's been overwritten... more than a couple times, your chances of getting enough pieces back to reconstruct video intact are pretty slim. A data recovery service may be able to do it, but that won't be cheap.

i am shame to show my cheap products. yours are so good. what? you afraid to show? It's not relevant to the thread. Plain and simple: OP's problem appears to stem from using cheap cameras with poor sensitivity. Deal with it.

The "cut off point" will really depend on the DVR, what codec it uses, the level of compression set, framerate, resolution, etc. For some cases, even 512k won't be enough. Some DVRs have the ability to record at higher quality, and re-stream at lower quality for remote viewing, specifically to address low-bandwidth connections like this.

I recommend the products I work with when they're appropriate. Your advice is NOT appropriate. "Buy cheap stuff because you don't know what you're doing anyway" is NEVER good advice.

Okay, here's something: ARE YOU FREAKING SERIOUS? You "advice" is basically this: "Hey, you've never used this stuff before, so why don't you just buy something really cheap?" Would you suggest everyone get a golf cart for their first car? Maybe a first home purchase should be a run-down shack? Because, you know, maybe they won't need that second bathroom... or air conditioning... or seat belts... You know what happens when they take your advice? They buy a cheap DVR that does a half-assed job of a very few things, with low resolutions, low framerates, and excessive compression... they then find that the quality is far below what they expect, and that it doesn't have any of the features everyone else is talking about. So they come here and ask why the picture is so poor, and why they can't do this or that with it... and we get to tell them, sorry bud, you get what you pay for - you pay nothing, you get nothing, sorry you wasted your money. They list off their REAL needs... we give them REAL suggestions, BASED ON THEIR NEEDS, not just "buy the cheapest thing you can find!" And then they have to go out and spend more money - the money they should have spent in the first place - to get the machine they actually NEED, while the cheap machine if relegated to boat-anchor status... well, it would be, except being all air and plastic, it barely has enough mass to be a paperweight, let alone a boat anchor. Either way, it's wasted money.