Soundy

Tip: If you remove your pantyhose and put a couple of wraps around your fingers, you should not suffer as much damage to the skin, Sally. As far as pain in your muscles and ligaments, I recommend you change beverages from mineral water bottles to mini kegs for the purpose of strength training. You left out the part where I question why anyone would willing want to subject themselves to this when there are plenty of other options available. As you say, lack of proper tools is not an excuse. A few twist-ons are great to keep around for those "oh crap" moments when you don't have the tools handy, but... Do you use the super-expensive tape that will still work at -20? Would be cheaper and easier to just use crimp/compression at that point, no?

You have to make sure all the other comm parameters (baud rate, etc) match the camera, and you need the correct camera ID selected for PTZ control to work.

Interesting link there, tom... I wonder if this is useful for DVRs in general? Well, that certainly addresses pochrist's concerns - for Avermedia at least, it's not a matter of being "under Intel's thumb" but a matter of not trusting the stability of those other chipsets. I see they DO list some AMD motherboards and ATI chipsets that are tested and known working with their systems. This is nothing unusual, of course - back when I was working IT support for a digital-arts school, 8-9 years ago, we had a couple of high-end digital video workstations (Discreet, Avid) that were very, VERY specific about the motherboards they would work on - not just chipsets, but only a very few motherboards that would work with them AT ALL. I can hear the "Well, I have a gaming machine using those chips and it works great" but this sort of video processing is a whole different matter - gaming needs its power in bursts and a lot of it rests on the GPU; DVRs need to do CONSTANT heavy processing and are much more I/O intensive on a consistent basis. A weak I/O chipset is as deadly to a DVR as a weak GPU is to a gaming system.

Kinda jumping the gun a bit - the Paralympic games are just getting underway: opening ceremony is tonight!

Welcome aboard!

A polarizer will block reflected light when adjusted properly, which could cut sun glare off reflective objects... but it will also reduce the overall light by about two stops (1/4 the light getting through), which will darken EVERYTHING in the image. Again, it's hard to say whether this would be more hindrance than help, without knowing the actual application.

I dunno about R**y's tweaks, but the first place you want to start is with nLite...

"Recommended" doesn't necessarily mean "ONLY works with"... usually it means, "this is what we've tested it with and know for a fact that it works well". That said, the main thing to consider when going to Win7 is not just whether the software runs (which it probably will), but whether the hardware has driver support (which is much less likely). Unless there's a burning need for >3.5GB RAM, there's probably little need to go to 64-bit, and even less need to go to Win7 for a DVR. Remember, a DVR 's OS doesn't need to be pretty and friendly and latest-and-greatest... it NEEDS to be efficient and stable.

Resolution and framerate are two parts of the quality equation... the other is compression. All else being equal, you won't see a significant difference between 640x480 and 720x480. It may be measurable, but it won't be noticeable in most cases. 720x480 is the upper limit for analog NTSC video capture resolution - if you want higher than that, you have to get into megapixel cameras, which realistically right now means IP cameras.

I'm afraid to click on your links... I'm not gonna get Rickrolled, am I??

Yes. "Autoscan" on some (many? most?) cameras means simply setting a start point, an end point, and a scan speed, and the camera then cycles between those points at the defined rate. At least, this is the case with the Capture and Pelco PTZs I've worked with. Your two other options are typically called "Tours" (where you define a number of preset positions, then have the camera step from one to the next), and "Patterns", where you set the camera or DVR into a "record" mode, and drive the camera through the pattern you want (left, right, up, down, zoom in, zoom out, pause, etc.). From my experience, most better cameras support these two functions internally, but I've more often set it up within the DVR.

Depends how much realtime control you want over the display. If you want to be able to readily and easily change up displays, splits, banners and such, you'll probably need something specialized for video wall display. If you want the wall to be fairly static (same monitor will display the same thing all the time), you could do what you want with Vigil HD Viewer, using either all IP cameras, or analog cameras via a Vigil DVR. You could use a multi-head card, or multiple dual-head PCI cards to drive the monitors off a single machine - we have one site that's running a desktop monitor and one store display off the main PCI-E card, and three more store display off two basic PCI video cards. Windows XP supports multiple cards like this natively.

This is just a guess based on the 484-series cameras, but if you go to the bottom of the screen, there should be an END option, and to the right of that, should be SETUP ENABLE - move the cursor right to that, press the center button, and you should be able to access all the menus.

You left out one important criteria: price. How much are they willing to spend? And an important piece of information if you want to reuse the existing PCs is, what are their specs? Processor, RAM and operating system will affect what software they'll support. Personally, I'd suggest looking at Vigil: the software can be installed as an unrestricted 30-day demo, supports a number of IP cameras, will work with their own cards or several other chipsets (such as Hikvision and ComArt; doesn't support Conexant, and I don't think it does generic BT878), and has an excellent Windows-based remote client that's easy and painless for noobs to use once you set it up. However, it's not among the cheaper end, so it's important to know what the budget is. In this business, you really do get what you pay for.

Make sure it has an auto-iris lens, for sure. I'd adjust the lens level as low as possible, too, so it closes as much as possible when it's bright. It's really hard to know what to suggest without SOME idea of the application, as most things done to guard against sun damage will also reduce light for that application. If they want to watch the stars, for example, things become a lot more complicated, and you might be looking at some sort of timed mechanical shutter/shade. If it doesn't matter what area of the sky, it could be simply aimed away from the direction of the sun - problem solved.

I dunno about for a network camera, but for analog video, there's this: http://www.ovation.co.uk/video-stabilization.html I haven't tried it, but give this a look: http://ptf.com/download/video_stabilizer/08455/

Not familiar with that MUX in particular, but many have the ability to show you a live OR VCR feed; if the VCR feed is selected, it may be showing a slight delay because of the extra processing. But just curious, why wouldn't you use a MUX(es) with proper loop-throughs, so you just run the cameras direct into the MUX, then out from each channel to the DVR? Would save a fortune on the active splitters (not to mention removing a lot of complexity).

Where did you get the value 33%? Sensors are two dimensional and the length (e.g. 1/4", 1/3", etc) is shorthand for one side of a rectangular sensor. A 1/3" sensor is approximately twice the area of a 1/4" sensor, and a 1/2" sensor is approximately twice the area of a 1/3" sensor. Not quite right. From http://www.cctv-information.co.uk/i/Equipment_Overview

$2500 is a fair retail price for a Spectra V - these ARE among the better PTZs in their class/style. Edit: Just to be clear, I'm replying to the OP, not r**y...

Whatsamatta, Rory, has the heat wilted your sense of humour?

That was out-of-the-box. We had to hurry and close the cameras up as it was starting to rain, and it rained the rest of the time we were at the site, so were never got a chance to fine-tune them.

You'll find that most cameras with 1/3" or 1/2" sensors use C/CS mount lenses, while 1/4" cameras usually use the "mini" lens mounts (not sure exactly what that form factor is called). Not ALWAYS the case, but that's usually how it works.

What's impressed me most with these so far is their low-light capability. The first ones I've used went on a restaurant patio that's in near total darkness at night (dark enough you could easily trip if you're not watching very carefully), and the cameras show it quite clearly.

You mean this stuff? http://www.megalithia.com/elect/cable/index.html Noooooo, this is not good CCTV cable. Insufficient shielding, for starters. Will probably be a *** to attach most BNC connectors to as well. Certainly not worth the extra cost - most of the "benefits" listed in the above link sound like Monster Cable-type snake oil. Unless you already have a ton of this stuff that you got for free... get the proper wire for the job.

11n allows 2.4GHz *and/or* 5.8GHz. My DIR-655 has only 2.4GHz (that I can see); 5.8GHz has only just recently started to appear in routers. Note this portion of the Wikipedia article you linked: "Multi channel" can mean different things, but if you're talking about separate independent streams, that's something normally seen on more advanced routers. My DIR-655, for example, has an isolated "guest zone" network. My brother's DIR-825 has a separate channel intended for multimedia streaming, the concept being that it doesn't affect the bandwidth for users on the main channel. There are a number of variations on the concept. All these are in the $100+ range. Edit: BTW, keep in mind, 802.11n is still a *draft* standard - "certifying" products to a "standard" that's not yet written in stone is a specious endeavour at best.