Soundy

What is the cable at the bottom of the picture - is that connected to the RJ11, or just something there for illustration?? I wouldn't assume that black and red are power, or even that black is common - the color codes you show on the jack are standard layout for RJ11 phone connections. It would make sense that they would use those colors as such, but I wouldn't count on it. Are you sure the cameras are actually working? Do they at least have a power LED that comes on when you power them up? You shouldn't NEED baluns to get a signal. You might get a noisy/scrambled picture if the camera has an internal balun, but you should still see something.

No pictures necessary. To put it simply: I looked up your PVR, and it's not capable of accepting input directly from the camera, end of story. You need a box called an "RF modulator" that will accept the camera's signal, and put it on a TV channel... you would then connect that to the PVR's "Antenna In" jack, and tune that channel on the PVR. This is the only way to do what you want, with the equipment you have.

What we've done with smaller beams is to screw a regular octagonal box to the bottom of it with self-tappers, then use a cover plate with center knockout... From there, use a length of standard 1/2" EMT, with the appropriate locking collar: (I also like to drill a small hole in the EMT for the locking screw, so there's no way the pipe can slip out).

I HAVE NO OPINION ON THE MATTER! Maybe the question should be, why are all the other box cameras so much bigger? They certainly don't need to be these days, except maybe those like the Panny CP484s that cram a whole motorized auto-backfocus assembly in there as well I know with some of the older ones, like the National NLC5500/5700, Panny CP224s and such, they actually have a transformer inside (I've never dug in far enough to see if it's part of the power supply or something to do with balanced video output... I suspect the former). I suspect with newer cameras, it's as much to maintain the "classic" camera look, although I'm sure some of is space for additional processing, power supply, etc. My experience, the 1370 is pretty good for a small-form-factor camera, although not as good over a broad range of conditions as its larger 3701/3751 brothers.

The Esprits are pretty good cameras... really ballsy P/T motors in'em, they can move FAST.

Is the camera in direct sun? If so, it could well be the heat - try putting up a piece of cardboard or a tarp to shade it, see if that helps.

Obviously you're no rocket scientist...

The camera's cables are not component; the yellow will be composite (CVBS) video, and I would guess the white is audio. You would need to use a composite input on your PVR, if it has one, and the PVR would have to be able to record from that input (I would expect most WON'T, as an anti-piracy measure). From what I can find though, this unit has no inputs other than the antenna. Your only option, then, is an RF modulator, a box that will take the video input and re-modulate it onto a regular TV channel. These are plentiful online, and probably available from most of your better local electronics retailers.

Hard to diagnose without more knowledge of how the camera is actually wired: is it using coax wire for the video feed? Or twisted pair? If twisted pair, is it using baluns? If you connect a monitor directly to the camera, does it still get noise? What is its power source - is there low voltage running the full distance from the DVR to the camera, or is there a 120V outlet on the car that's supplying a transformer?

There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here. Do you have a job, Pearwood? Do you do work for someone, to make them money? Do you expect to get paid for the work you do? Tell us, where do you think this software comes from? Do you figure that it writes itself? Maybe you think that some guy sits down in his basement and bangs it out in an hour or two? That hundreds of thousands of lines of code used to implement dozens of features and complex video processing just magically appear? Developing the software itself takes hundreds of hours from several software coders... hundreds of hours more of testing to ensure it works on a wide variety of hardware... hundreds more of debugging. All these guys doing that work want to get paid for their time. Then someone else has the task of selling that software, making sure people will choose it instead of something else. They want to be paid for their time. And when Joe Consumer buys the package and installs it on his home PC and has problems because he also games on that box, or has under-spec hardware, or is confused about some of the settings, or because he just doesn't know what he's doing... he's going to want to phone up someone at the company and get some help, and those people answering the phones want to get paid as well. And then as time goes on and newer hardware becomes available, and competitors add more features and abilities, this company needs to keep up with that if they want to keep selling, so the coders and testers and debuggers have to keep working away... and keep getting paid. So where do you think this money comes from, for these people who put in all the time to CREATE this software? It's not coming from your fleaBay vendors, who take that completed software and hack it to work with their copied cards... they spend maybe a couple of days figuring out how to work around the protection, then just sit back and rake in the money. They don't test it, and they won't support it... but they'll be happy to take your money. And BTW, the others are right: the hardware itself IS protected by patents AND copyrights. The boards are more than "just a few lines" - they actually have several layers of lines, interconnecting the DOZENS of pins on those chips, and doing so in just the right way to make everything work properly. Designing those lines also took some guys hundreds of hours - you don't just buy the chips, glue them to the board, connect a few random dots with a Sharpie, and voila, there's your card. Your pirates can also sell those cheap, because again, they didn't do any of the work to actually produce them. But then if it's really that easy, why do you worry about fleaBay cards? Why don't you just make your own systems? Surely with a soldering iron and a few rudimentary parts, you could sit down at your kitchen table and just knock these things out in a few days? Couple more days to write the software, and then you have your own product to sell? Piece of cake, right? Think of the money you could make, jacking up the prices of something that took you a week to build. In any case, when it comes down to the rules of the board, they don't have anything to do with protecting the manufacturers, since I'm sure everyone here would love it if this stuff was cheaper, too... it has entirely to do with the fact that pirated software and cloned cards are ILLEGAL under copyright and patent laws, and allowing the members to support them could leave the board's owners open to legal action. Plain and simple.

This is generally not recommended. Security recording should have a dedicated system, not only for performance issues, but for stability. Video processing, especially of megapixel video, can be processor and disk-I/O intensive. The camera recording can cause pauses and dropouts in your gaming and HD playback; likewise, gaming and HD playback could cause dropouts in your camera recording. A game crashing the system means your recording is offline until the thing reboots, and a virus invading can also affect your security recording ability. Now that said, with only a single camera, you may not see the two purposes affecting each other much... but the possibility is still there, and will only get worse if you add more cameras later. You'll want to either create a separate partition dedicated to surveillance recording, then... last thing you want is to go look at some video from a few days ago and find out it's been recycled because the drive is filled up with movie downloads or something. This is another reason it's generally recommended to have a dedicated system for surveillance video.

No way! I made anonymous login with write and list permissions only, so the warez kiddiez can upload, they can list and see that their files are there, but they can't download. You'd be amazed some of the neat stuff they've deposited for me

Yeah, I just have an old PIII running XP Pro with Apache webserver. Host a couple of my own domains, plus a few sites for friends.

They would if they new the difference. Most people don't. They get the card, then plug it in, they install the hacked drivers to make it work with the legit software, and it putters happily along for them recording their two or three cheap cameras. If there are crashes or conflicts, they probably assume they've done something wrong, or that their Windows installation is screwed up (and spend hours running virus and malware scans), or figure they have some failing hardware... Then they'll post on a site like techguy.org asking about the crashes and be put through the rigmarole of posting HJT logs and crash dumps and have smart techs scratching their heads over what's wrong with the system, because nobody outside the CCTV industry actually stops to consider that it might be a hacked card that's causing the problem...

"Popularity" doesn't tell you anything, other than maybe which has better marketing. We use mostly Superior Essex, because that's what our main supplier carries.

That should be no more problem than wiring them into any standard 12V power can. A terminal block designed for car audio installs would facilitate things - something like this: For that matter, you could just use the distribution board out of any regular Altronix/Enforcer/National/etc. power can: http://www.altronix.com/index.php?pid=2&model_num=PD8 It's not possible to "send too much amperage". Current is determined by load across voltage - devices will DRAW the amperage they require, up to the maximum provided by the power source.

Yeah, seems to me Tremclad is a Canadian brand - it's a "rust paint" similar to Rust-Oleum. Anything of a similar "pro"-type designation in a different brand should do - the Tremclad Pro runs about $10/can vs. $7 for the "regular" stuff. Something like "bumper" paint or "BBQ" paint should work well, too - it tends to be extra-durable. The nice thing with the Tremclad Pro is that it also dries really fast (non-tacky in 10 minutes if you don't glob it on), so it's great when you have to paint the cameras on-site, but if you have lots of prep time, drying time isn't such an issue.

Yes (with limitations) - there ARE decoders that will take IP video from some cameras and spit out analog video. These would need to support the specific cameras though, and if they're megapixel cameras, you'd lose the high resolution as it's scaled down to D1 resolution or less. I assume you're referring to baluns, which don't "convert" the video signal at all; they just use transformers to create a "balanced" signal pair on the Cat5, which allows the signal to travel farther with less noise and better rejection of interference. IP cameras plug into your network and send streaming digitized video data via IP protocol, just like any other internet application. To over-simplify, think of the camera as generating its own YouTube video, on-the-fly - you're just watching a video like you would on YouTube. Short of feeding high voltage into something and blowing up the camera, there's not much you can do to mess it up... all the above still applies if it's an IP camera; PTZ functionality is incidental to all this.

wOOT!

Ah, ya know, there are no so blind as those who WILL NOT see. Probably best to let these guys labor under their misconceptions, hawking their cheap junk systems and allowing their to customers throw good money after bad for the sake of a quick sale... The rest of us will always be there to pick up the pieces when those customers decide they need to go to something better... to sell them a 3/4-ton pickup for their monthly dump runs after their little Korean hatchback snaps in half under the strain Those customers are a much easier sell for a better system - I know, we've snapped up a number of them in the last couple years.

That would be my choice. There's little you can capture at 30fps that can't be just as effectively captured at 7.5-10fps. There are exceptions of course, but they're few.

That's exactly the point: even a $200 CNB will give a better image than your $40 IR cam. This is an industry where you really do get what you pay for. What good is it to spend even a pittance on a system if it doesn't provide usable images? As for the "need" for megapixel: say you have a retail client... he has a customer who paid for a purchase, got change, then claims the clerk short-changed him. Your counter shot has to be wide enough to see the whole counter, which with the cheap camera means very little actual detail is visible. Is it helpful to have a view of the counter that doesn't let you see what money was exchanged... or to have spent a bit more and be able to actually read the denominations on the bills? This doesn't cost "5x more"; this capability is available for only marginally more than the price of a "good" analog camera. This makes sense if you're comparing the SLK to an Accord... of course it doesn't work if you're comparing it to a skateboard (even if the skateboard does have bling IR LEDs). Thanks, that's exactly what I was going for. In fact, that's what the client asked for - "I want cameras here and here, so they look like crap." Of course it is, it's not meant to ID anyone anywhere in the store. It's meant to give a clear view of the entire store. There's another camera with a tight shot on the front door that's dedicated to identifying people (an analog dome with better backlight performance) and assorted other analog cams throughout the store and in the cooler. We're certainly not asking one camera to do ALL the work. It's meant to watch the paypoint - to see (roughly) the usage of the terminals, so it can be correlated to the data being logged from them, and to see payments, as well as monitoring the bar activity itself. Some bars have issues with bartenders going overboard comping drinks to friends... this is intended mainly to combat that, by letting the owner see what the bartender is serving, and then ensuring it gets entered into the system (note the text overlay on the B&W cam). The angle is purely a function of the ceiling structure and architectural details over the bar: the cameras were mounted the only place possible that would give them the view required without obstruction. I know you're used to dealing with stores that no doubt have flat drop-tile ceilings with unobstructed sight lines... in sites like this, that's just not an option. And yet if it doesn't do a good enough job, it's really not much of a bargain, is it? Read through the forums here, you'll find a LOT of people have pretty unrealistic expectations of the budget to put in a good CCTV system. I don't know about you, but I consider it my job to educate them on the real costs of doing it right, rather than simply pile cheap junk on them just to make the sale within their budget. If they still want to cheap out, fine, but you're not doing them any favors if you just say, "Oh yeah, I can hook you up for cheap". This doesn't apply just to mom-and-pop stores, either. We did a system for a car dealership a few years ago... brand new building, cost into the millions to build. Prime real estate right beside a major commuter route. These guys had no shortage of money. We gave them several options for systems, from basic analog domes to all-megapixel. They went with the cheapest option. We pointed out that they'd wanted to be able to ID people walking through the lot from cameras mounted 30' up on the side of the building and that the cheap cameras wouldn't do that... they decided to go the cheap route anyway. A year later when they called complaining that they couldn't ID the guy that went through the lot and keyed a bunch of cars, we had to remind them of the choice they'd made... even though they didn't have to. The point is not that you need to run out and start replacing everything with megapixel systems and sell nothing but megapixel systems... the point is that you should educate yourself in the FACTS of higher-end equipment, rather than simply dismissing it based on the misinformation you've apparently been operating on. As this stuff gets more and more play in the news (check out this item - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tm6goa5oWI), more people will be asking for it... you might want to bone up on it before they find the need to go elsewhere. Selling this stuff really isn't that hard: the two MP cams pictured in my stills literally sold themselves to this customer: I'd installed some on another site, I took some screen caps, I showed them to the owner of this pub... he took one look and said, "I want that." We sold him two on this site and another for another site of his... and later added a third to this site. They even integrated into his existing DVR (which, incidentally, is the same system seen in the video above). We do this all the time for customers with plenty of money who've been sold cheap junk, because someone insisted on a tight budget, and another integrator just came in and sold them something cheap without thinking twice about it. They later found out that the systems were just plain ineffective, and the "great deal" they thought they'd been getting turned out to largely be money wasted. And yes, we do it for the same kind of "real world" businesses you do: car lots, gas stations, restaurants, pubs, liquor stores, convenience stores, professional buildings, apartment/condo towers, and so on. In the real world, people think they can buy $400 all-in-one package systems from Costo and do the kinds of things they see in the movies, reading people credit card numbers by zooming in on a reflection in someone's sunglasses from across the room, and stuff. It is (or SHOULD BE) part of our job to counsel them otherwise... not to make the upsell, but to find out what they REALLY expect, balance it to what they REALLY need, and come up with a SUITABLE solution, not just a cheap one.... because invariably when they go for the cheap one, they end up pissed off.

That really depends, because a Cat5e connection could be for network, or it could carry video, control, and even power combined. What's required would be entirely different for each one. And assuming the latter, you'd then have to determine which pair in the cable is which. If it's just serial control, a DVR with PTZ support is all you need - just connect the "TX" pins on the RS-485 output to the "RX" pins on the camera's serial input... to oversimplify horribly If it's a network camera, you'd need a DVR or NVR that specifically supports that brand, if not the exact model, of camera.

Hard to say, without actually seeing the pictures, but offhand, "grainy-ness" is usually a result of too little light. If the cameras have manual-iris lenses, try opening up the iris more. If they have auto-iris lenses (with a wire connecting the lens to the camera body), look for a "DC level" or "Iris" adjustment and dial it up a bit. If the cameras have some sort of "gain" settings, try reducing that, as it could be boosting the level excessively, which boosts grain and noise along with the picture. Would probably help more to know the exact model of the cameras...