Soundy

What browser are you using? Try clearing your browser cache and restarting the browser. Also try deleting your cookies - this will kill all your auto-logins, but should allow the browser to re-create them all fresh.

Turn it up? Seriously... that's about all anyone can tell you with more info... such as: What brand/model/type is it? Does it connect to standard phones in residents' homes, or to dedicated phones, or to wall boxes, or...? Is the incoming too low, or outgoing, or both? Is it just voice volume, or is buzzer volume too low as well? Do you have access to the base unit (electrical/phone room)? The more details, the better.

So... yes, a 4-way active video splitter would do. The exact device would depend on the type of DVR and what kind of outputs it has. If it has a "spot" output, you'd probably want to use that, so you're not using the same view as your "office" monitor - otherwise you'd have people in view of the other monitors seeing everything that's going on, including searches and playback.

The critical question is, does he want the same camera(s) showing on all the monitors at the same time, or does he want to be able to selectively send different cameras to different monitors? The former is easy... the latter is also easy, but substantially more expensive.

^Are these the cheap eBay cameras that are now causing you problems?

You can also flash a wide array of cheap/used wireless routers with third-party firmwares like DD-WRT, and use them as a wireless bridge (like above, but with ports for up to five devices). In fact, you can probably get a basic DD-WRT-compatible router for cheaper than a dedicated bridge.

I also had this problem with v3.0 of the software... they had me upgrade to 3.1 and it cleared the problem up.

You're probably looking at a two-part solution here: one would be something that senses someone lurking around the fields/nets (like a motion sensor); two would be a camera or two that would give you evidence for an actual arrest/prosecution. A camera alone with motion detection isn't a reliable alarm, because motion can be triggered by so many other things. But a sensor/trigger on its own will only let you know someone is there... you can come running, but unless you actually witness the vandals in the course of doing the damage, all you have (under the law) is some guys hanging out looking at someone else's mess. So you need something that will alert you to a problem, and something to provide proof. The important question is, what kind of budget are you looking at? Is this something you might be able to get the other clubs to kick in on, as the desired outcome is to everyone's benefit? The more budget, the more options, and the more likely you'll be able to prosecute effectively.

Yeah, pickup pattern/area/distance is a FAR bigger concern than audio/video sync. It's not like a camera, where you can focus on one particular area - a mic will pick up EVERYTHING in the room (or within its pickup pattern, but most mics used for this kind of thing are either omnidirectional, or a very broad cardioid pattern). Our brains have an ability to "focus" on sounds in a live environment, especially where we can see what we want to hear, but once it's recorded, you really lose most of that ability. Stand in the middle of the room, close your eyes, and just listen to everything going on around: that's what you're recording. Other voices, traffic noise, HVAC noise, EVERYTHING is recorded. Makes it very very hard to separate out specific sounds later.

How's that, now? A wide-open iris is a wide-open iris at night, regardless of whether it's auto or manual.

As the customer is not concerned with keeping the data for long and that the recording will be transaction and motion based we're using a single SATA 500GB drive. If I had it my way it would be 2 x 1TB HDD's striped. But the director always gets the last word eh! Disk I/O has nothing to do with how long you keep the data and everything to do with the disk keeping up with the flow of data from the cameras. That said, I would avoid striped or spanned disks at all costs - the loss of one disk then leads to the loss of ALL the data. My preference is for a SEPARATE system drive, and a dedicated data drive; or, if they're worried about the data, a pair of mirrored data drives. Sure, the director gets the last word, but if that drive dies, requiring time to rebuild the system AND losing all their data, guess whose fault it will be?

Helen, are you able to post some pictures of the "grainy" images? Either photos of the screen, or ideally, some stills exported from the DVR, would be great... "grainy" is a vague description that could mean a lot of different things, most of which would have different causes.

I got a $20 four-channel USB video adapter from an online store (just for curiosity's sake), plugged it into my Win7 netbook... Windows downloaded and installed drivers automatically. Installed the bundled software and I was good to go. Ditch the Q-See. The whole brand name is well-known and loathed in these parts. If you'd dropped the $200 on a "decent" solution, you would have saved at least that much in Rogaine and Just For Men by now.

Software is irrelevant if you don't have working drivers. The software doesn't talk directly to the device... the driver does. From there, the software talks to the driver. If you have no driver, then the software has no way to communicate with the hardware.

Repeat after me, this mantra for CCTV: YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.

"Headless" meaning it generally runs without monitor/keyboard/mouse (not that it CAN'T) and that management and playback is done remotely rather than locally. Storing video streams is low-CPU. Playing them back is what takes a lot of processor power. If you're not doing that on the same machine, you don't need a monitor, and you don't need a lot of CPU.

Auto-iris merely allows the camera to close the iris in bright lighting conditions, thus extending the range of lighting the camera can handle. Most cameras can control exposure to some degree using electronic shutter control, but they're still limited in bright light by how much light the sensor will actually handle. If there's not a wide range of lighting between day and night, you may not see a difference. Fixed-focal lenses tend to use much simpler optics than varifocal, which IN GENERAL means they have sharper images... but actual lens design and construction quality plays into things a lot as well (ie. a well-built varifocal lens will usually be sharper than a cheap fixed lens). Overall, auto vs. manual or fixed iris has little to do with this. What lenses are you comparing, specifically?

^Hey Rory, your disk is full....

Oh, sorry for getting you two confused... didn't mean to insult rory like that

Well, a number of TVs will do Picture-in-Picture from multiple inputs, but that just gives you one little picture inside the big picture. This is normally the kind of thing that would be done by a multiplexer, or the DVR itself (many cards have a multiplexed output). Again, two cameras on a split-screen is uncommon, as there's no way to get a proper full display... it would probably work in this case if you're just showing the sheets, because you'd have a long, narrow view that could have the sides cropped off... but finding a mux or DVR that will give you that display will be, I suspect, virtually impossible - you'd need some sort of broadcast switcher to give you that level of control. Honestly, a two-by-two quad split with all four cameras would be MUCH MUCH MUCH simpler to implement. If you don't need to record, the display system could be easily done with some analog cameras and a "quad" box, like this: http://www.gviss.com/products/quadsmultiplexers/gvq4chrtcbr.php This has daisy-chained inputs, which feed the signals back out again, so you could then run all the cameras into a DVR for recording - four sheets, four cameras per sheet, 16 total... 16-channel DVR and you're good to go.

If it's not on the recorded video, and doesn't show when you connect the camera to another monitor, then it's probably not the camera. Does it show on any other cameras? Does it show with the same camera if you connect it to another input on the DVR? If the DVR has a composite output, what shows if you connect that to the CRT?

Can you post a photo or screenshot of the line? Does the line appear in recorded video, or just on the monitor?

Hmmm, yes and no. This topic has actually been discussed here extensively. The thing is, H.264 really benefits at 30fps, but as framerate goes down, so does the benefit over other codecs as far as storage space and bandwidth. They're also comparing to "standard" codecs, but many manufacturers have their own proprietary recompression systems that can equal or even better H.264 under many conditions, with less loss of quality. Check out this article, for example: http://www.3xlogic.com/aztech And yes, you're correct, different types of scenes and circumstances see different results with different codecs; there isn't one PERFECT codec for every instance.

No.

Depends on the NVR, but in general, no: the NVR just receives the stream from the camera and writes it to disk. Decoding the stream on playback is the CPU-intensive part, but that's usually handled by the client/VMS. If you're building your own machine, you'll need SOME kind of software to at least receive, store, and manage the video. Many cameras can send direct to an FTP site, but include no management capability (ie. the ability to clean up old footage when the space fills up, etc.), and even then, you'd need an ftp server running. Many camera manufacturers do include some basic NVR software that will work with their cameras only. Rory claims to regularly build Exacq NVRs on Atom systems... For just the system, software and maybe search database, you shouldn't need more than maybe a 16GB drive... you can save some money there by using a smaller SSD.