Soundy

It doesn't have to, RS-232 is what's spoken by the serial port. Point is, chances are very good that if GV can drive cameras out the serial port, the RS232/485 converter board isn't necessary - such a board would only be required if the camera doesn't accept RS-232.

I was more referring to the fact that the thread was turning into more of a "wish list". All important discussions, but getting off-track for this thread, and really probably deserving of their own threads.

It does use the serial port in ADDITION to the IO card. (At least mine does). PC serial ports speak RS-232, PTZs speak RS-484. That would be RS-485... and not all PTZs are limited to it. I've only ever run across ONE PTZ that would ONLY work with RS-485 - all the others so far work just fine with a direct RS-232 connection.

Usually because answering the more "general" threads requires a lot more typing, and thus a lot more thinking. That can be straining for most of us! Heheheh, another forum I'm on, oriented primarily to the "performance import car" market in BC, has a "Police Forum" where actual police officers participate... some questions are SO commonly repeated (like "I didn't sign my ticket, is it still valid?", which comes up at least weekly), and the cops got so tired of telling people to use Search first, that they actually came up with a custom emoticon for it: Sad fact is, stickies and FAQs and search are seldom the first tools used... they're more often something that's referred or linked to once someone has asked the same old question AGAIN...

Actually, there is no one answer to that question. How do you define "best"? Best for what? Best to whom? No single machine does everything. Only you can determine which is best FOR YOU. You mean, like in cable TV? I've never ever seen one that has that capability built-in. Main reason is probably because there's far too much variation in what's needed to integrate it, it would be cost-prohibitive, if not outright impossible, to build in the capability to work with ANY cable system.

GV can't just use the PC's existing serial port???

Good sales pitch. Did he also explain how shutter speed affects exposure? You'd need a ridiculously bright light on an object to obtain a usable exposure at that speed. What would be a reasonable shutter speed to expect (use) at about 50 feet with say a seperate 150ft IR source (playing with angles to avoid reflection after the fact)? The Panasonics that you guys like so much (484 and 504) top out at 1/10,000. Barring exceptional conditions, will I even come close to using that at night? You'll be lucky to use 1/30s at night. Consider that light is only hitting the sensor as long as the shutter is open - the less time the shutter is open, the less light gets through to the sensor. Every doubling of shutter speed means half the light. Most cameras, assuming no trickery like signal boosting, and using a "typical" lens with a wide-open aperture around f/1.4, you'll need probably 1/1000s shutter in bright daylight. 1/2000s would be half the light transmission of that, meaning an image half the brightness. 1/4000 would be 1/4 the brighntess; 1/8000 would be down to 1/8 the light level, and so on.

Well... sort of. The sensor is generating an image 30 times per second, in keeping with the video spec (technically, 29.97 times per second for color video, but that gets deeper into the nitty-gritty of NTSC spec and isn't really relevant to the discussion). The shutter activates UP TO once per frame, for the designated time period. The shutter speed can actually be LOWER than 1/30s... technically, in fact, the shutter can be open an infinite length of time - the image just becomes "smeared" across multiple video frames. Nope. Frame rate, at least with analog cameras, is designated by the video format used (30fps NTSC, 25fps PAL - in both cases, based initially on the AC power frequency in the region of origin, 60Hz for North America, where NTSC is used, or 50Hz for most of the rest of the world, where PAL is used). Nah, just sleepy - LONG day! ROFL, nicely played

Full-on PC-based DVR/NVR system - you can buy just the software, the card and software, or the complete system. The client software is included free. There's an excellent central-management/health-monitor package with it as well, that works on a 30-day trial and will let you actively monitor all your sites and email alerts to you if anything goes wrong. Depends on how you define "open standard format". Vigil can record in both MJPEG and MPEG-4 (and H.264, I think, with some cards). AFAIK, the specs/SDKs for all are readily available.

Vigil will do much (most) of what you're looking for, including a client that can connect to and view multiple sites on a single screen. I don't know about doing it on four screens - you could probably expand the single client view across four monitors with the appropriate video card, or just use one really big monitor. It will also record in a higher quality than it streams at, and can adjust the stream for your available bandwidth. Keep in mind, at some point, the downstream speed at your monitor station will start to become a bottleneck - eight simultaneous streams at 384k each is 3Mbps. You'll want to make sure your station has AT LEAST that much bandwidth (factor in other regular internet traffic as well).

Seriously... 16 video streams on a 384k uplink is going to be beyond painful. No DVR can overcome the laws of physics.

He's asking how you're exporting from GeoVision to that AVI file. You say you're recording at 720x480, but that clip is only at 360x240.

How far is this troublesome PTZ from the power supply, what size wire are you using, and what voltage is the power and camera (12VDC or 24VAC)? PTZs tend to draw a lot more power than fixed cameras, and if it's too far away or the wire is too small, the voltage drop caused by the higher current draw could cause the camera to "dip" in and out.

Wowzers... and it was just three years ago that we put in a FLIR Wide-Eye 180-degree view that listed at something like $25k

Ummm, not really... this forum is for security and surveillance video cameras, not consumer still cameras. I'd recommend sites like http://www.dpreview.com, or http://www.photographycorner.com/

Each shutter actuation does not produce a frame of video. You're looking at it backward: the video's framerate is fixed. It will be 30fps (assuming NTSC analog video) regardless of whether your shutter speed is 1/100,000s, or 1s. Are you familiar with photography at all? That may be a simpler way to look at it: every time you press the button on your camera, you take one image, completely regardless of what the camera's shutter speed is. The faster the shutter, the less "motion blur" you'll get, but the less light you get as well.

Move away from Alberta?

Good sales pitch. Did he also explain how shutter speed affects exposure? You'd need a ridiculously bright light on an object to obtain a usable exposure at that speed. No; the two are unrelated. Not necessarily. For one thing, NTSC video is limited to 30fps anyway: the camera itself is still only snapping 30 pictures per second, but for each of those, the shutter is open - and the sensor is collecting light - for only 1/100,000 of a second. See previous paragraph. The camera is still only sending 30fps. Double-shot of Crown. Helps make everything clearer.

Whoa, don't blame me, you started this! Some interesting stuff going on here, but let's not forget the original query: dejota works for a manufacturer and wants to sell his products to a distributor/installer company, and was looking for selling points to highlight that would be attractive to installers... Things that he can say, "Look, as installers, I know you'll appreciate these features...."

Unfortunately, no, not really. Neither is a model name, and HikVision makes a number of different standalone units. Maybe if you have pictures of them, someone (scorpion?) will be able to identify them. Scorpion has manuals for just about every DVR ever made

Auto-iris allows the camera to control the lens iris to adjust for varying lighting conditions. There are often two related options as well, DC and Video - DC means the camera actually controls the iris, Video means the camera only supplies power to the lens, and a sensor in the lens controls the iris. Backlight compensation, to simplify, brightens the image so that dark objects can be seen in strong lighting conditions. This is most often used in instances where, say, the camera is facing a door where bright outside light will cause it to dim, and the lower indoor lighting means people (and particularly their faces) will simply be dark blobs. White balance allows adjustments for different "temperatures" of lighting. Incandescent light, for example, tends to have a lot more red and yellow than other lights, while fluorescent tends to be more blue/green-ish. That's why you'll often see fluorescent light over the fresh veggies in the supermarket, but incandescent over the meats. Your eyes and brain process light to compensate for such color shifts, but because camera sensors see all colors equally, they'll show those color castes, unless you adjust the "white balance" to allow for it. Slow shutter provides better low-light images by reducing the shutter speed below the normal, which allows more light to be collected by the sensor... however, that also allows motion blur to occur. Because of this, slow shutter is not normally useful for CCTV; there are instances where clear picture is more important than lack of blur, however, so this option is provided on some cameras. The Mirror option simply flips the picture left-to-right, as if you were looking in a mirror. Some cameras also allow you to rotate or flip the image vertically (top to bottom). This can allow you to compensate for a number of different installation situations.

That is a very cool link! Interesting that my no-name Bluetooth adapter shows up with a Logitech-assigned MAC address! Don't know if it helps with chipset manufacturer though... my motherboard's onboad NIC comes up with a range assigned to ASUSTEK, but it's a Marvell chipset.

Interesting... I've never even thought about what ethernet controllers were being used in these things, or how 'hackable' they might be. Pretty much all IP cameras do support firmware updates, so it should be entirely possible to hack that for added/different functionality, but I don't know to what level you might be able to alter the network interface. What sort of modifications were you thinking of performing? I'm not a coder, so I can't really help in actually doing the mods, but I'm interested in this as a concept...

Yeah, touching the lens is a way bigger concern - nothing like getting in there with a microfiber cloth trying to scrub the fingerprints off a board camera's little lens element

And this, kids, is why a $1000 DVR is better than a $100 DVR... Sometimes you gotta look BEYOND the specs and numbers!