Soundy

Tell'em you're new to the site and the previous owner/manager/etc. didn't leave any of the paperwork behind Only thing you won't be able to really prove is purchase/install date, which is when warranty coverage usually starts, but if the serial numbers are on the cameras, they should be able to at least determine the manufacture date, and if you're within the warranty period from THAT date, I'd think you should still be covered. And there's always the chance that a problem may be a known defect that they'll repair or replace for anyway - I have run into that before with a broken laptop (was long out of warranty, so I called to see if I could order a part to fix it myself, but they said the problem I had was a known manufacturing defect - they sent a courier to pick it up, had it repaired, and couriered back to me within a week... completely free, including the 1-800 phone call. This was NEC, by the way - they bought themselves a TON of goodwill with that one act).

Speaking of Ryobi... for those of us in Canada at least, Home Depot is currently offering a price drop on most of their Ryobi tools.

Heheh, you bet - I use the systems and I love'em Avigilon is the freakin' Lambourghini of this industry. (where's that :drool: emoticon??)

You could always try contacting the manufacturers and ask about warranty coverage. Worst they can do is say no.

Vigil and Video Insight systems using newer capture cards (XECAP line for Vigil, VJ-series for VI, although both are essentially the same hardware) have both a switched-analog spot out, and a software-multiplexor spot output. I don't know about the VI software, but Vigil supports split-screen display of mixed analog and IP cameras on the software-MUX output. CAMACC/3xLogic make a product (Vigil HD Viewer) that works alongside their Vigil DVRs (although it also works independent of the DVR) that will generate split-screen views of IP cameras to multiple video heads *completely independent of the desktop display*. We've put in systems with three video cards running a desktop display in the office, plus split-screen outputs to four other VGA monitors using this system. VGA baluns allow the runs to be extended easily via Cat5e. The main benefit of this setup is that you're not limited to 480i analog video resolution, which usually looks terrible on LCD monitors - megapixel cameras can be displayed much more cleanly on 24" monitors at 1600x1024

Depends on how you define "enterprise-level", but our big customers are pretty much all Vigil. That includes two of Canada's largest oil companies that have standardized on it, as well as a major Western Canada upscale restaurant chain (we've been gradually upgrading them from GeoVision). In fact, we do corporate jobs almost exclusively, we've largely moved away from "mom & pop" stores and have never done residential, and we're pretty much exclusively Vigil (with the rare Video Insight for lower-cost PC-based systems, and Digital Watchdog for the budget-conscious).

Yeah, hard to say without knowing what camera you're talking about. Most cheap ones will almost certainly be cooked. Better ones will withstand the reverse voltage for a short time... some will actually work that way (ie. they're not polarity-sensitive). If it is dead, it's probably NOT repairable, as most cameras that would be damaged by that are small board cameras that use mostly surface-mount components.

This really sounds to me like a ground-loop issue, albeit one you'll normally just see with cheap 12VDC cameras that share a common ground between the power and video. How are these cameras mounted? Are any/all of them attached to metal? Is the DVR itself grounded? How about the power supply? You could try a ground lift on the DVR and/or power supply and see if that helps...

Welcome aboard! If you're lucky, your dabbling in your store's CCTV systems will lead you to a far more rewarding career than pumping gas Just one note of caution: you might want to check if your region requires any certification or licensing for CCTV installers, and look into obtaining that before continuing much further. You don't want to leave yourself open to liability issues!

Cost and number of cameras would be the main concern, to me. If you're only talking one or two cameras, injectors would probably be more cost-effective than a whole new switch. Beyond that, though, individual injectors can become a logistical nightmare, as each will probably also have its own wall-wart power supply - you end up with a mess of power bars, power adapters, and injector boxes. If you have structured wiring in place (camera feeds into a patch panel), a switch is definitely cleaner and easier to integrate.

For me, the most common failure I see is a dying sensor... most often, it seems, in older Panasonics (CP214s and the like), although some of the old Sanyos on our sites have developed similar issues - color balance and contrast start to go, the image gets softer and softer no matter what lens you have on it, etc. If you're handy enough to do some repairs yourself, it can sometimes be cost-effective to combine two or three dead cameras into one - take the guts from a cam with a bad sensor and swap them into another of the same model that has a good sensor but bad guts, for example. But as survtech notes, by the time most cameras get to this point, they've reached the end of their designed service life and there's a good chance they'll just fail again soon. Such cameras I find useful to keep around as service spares - go into a site, find a dead camera, and have to wait for replacement approval, or backordered stock, or whatever, you just slap in a "refurbished" old camera to keep up the coverage until a new one can be installed.

Back in the day RIGID tools were top shelf, I don't know if they still make their own stuff nowadays. If you want to pay the money Hilti is a great brand. Bosch is great. I still use the 'Bulldog" made by them. SDS bits are great. As for Dewalt, they are OK for throwaway tools and Ryobi are pure crap. True about the Ryobi, but they do have their place. One construction site we worked on, the super kept a Ryobi kit around - drill, impact, skill-saw, sawzall - for any of the trades to use. He figured, they were useful when needed, and cheap enough that if something walked off, it wasn't a huge loss. My co-worker picked up a seven-tool Ryobi kit for about $250, stock with Nicad batteries, then later added a pair of Lithium batteries, since both are designed to Ryobi's "One+" system. That setup has served him well for a couple years now, as it's quite versatile for the price... although it doesn't come close to keeping up with my six-year-old Milwaukee 14V drill Common sense, alas, is not so common anymore...

Only three years behind the rest of the industry...

If it's the same two-pin connector as the CNBs, I can mail you one... or several.

IR LEDs are cheap, so they provide a good workaround to give cheap cameras acceptable low-light performance, rather than actually spending money on a camera that does well in low light on its own. Of course, IR illuminators can also be used with GOOD cameras for even better low-light response... but in general, they're a cheap hack, particularly for cameras with the LEDs built-in.

The problem is, if you try to display two machines on one 16:9 display - whether it be a single 16:9 monitor, or a 2x2 or 3x3 or larger video wall - you either get only half of each machine's display; one PC will have to be a small PiP display in the other PC's large display; or worst case, both will have to be stretched vertically to fit. Draw an imaginary vertical line up the center of your current display and imagine how you'll fit two computers' displays in that, one on each side... that's what you have to deal with. Plain and simple, your best course is to have a separate display for each PC, whether that display is a single large screen, or a matrix of multiple screens.

I suppose you can't really go wrong, for <$70...

Is there a lot of instances of people lurking around the office in the dark? If not, there's probably not a lot of call for IR cameras.

eSATA is good too, but more limited in distance. Great if you can put the array within a foot or two of the DVR. NAS is handy if you want to put your NAS in a different, more secure location.

If you're going with that many drives, why not just go RAID5? With RAID1, you still have to shut down the machine to swap the failed drive. Here's what I'd suggest: Get a small RAID5 drive enclosure with four drives, like something from QNAP or Synology, and iSCSI interface (be sure it supports this). Load it with drives and configure as RAID5. Be sure to use one with hot-swappable drive bays (some don't have this; defeats half the point of RAID5). Generally, these will beep madly and can usually email you if a drive fails; RAID5 will then allow you to hot-swap the bad drive without ever shutting things down, and will rebuild its array seamlessly. Then use a single small (40-80GB) drive for your system drive and if your software supports it, a separate partition for a "backup" data drive in case the NAS is offline temporarily. Once your build is complete, use an imaging program like DriveImage, Acronis, or Paragon, to create an image of your system partition on the backup partition, then copy that onto a DVD-R (Paragon, at least, supports imaging direct to optical disc). Now, if a data drive dies, you can hot-swap it with no downtime and no data loss... if your system drive fails, it's relatively easy to drop a new one in and restore your image. Mirroring system drives can be done, but it can be a major pain if there's any other kind of failure - say, of the motherboard itself, or the disk controller. It's usually less hassle to simply have that backup image.

What kind of connector does it use? Most Pelco domes I've seen use a 2.5mm submini TS (aka headphone) plug - readily available from most electronics suppliers. A number of others use a two-pin connector and actually include the "adapter" cable - I have dozens of these.

Umm... how?

Actually, the SAFEST way is not to open up your network to outsiders at all - cameras pushing their streams out to an external webserver eliminates the need to open ANY outside ports or give ANYONE else, ANY kind of direct access to your NVR or cameras. The IQ511 I have here on my desk will push time-lapse stills to an ftp server at minimum 1s intervals, effectively the equivalent of 1fps. Such a method would give coherent "video" to the webserver with relatively minimal bandwidth requirements - all the load would be on the remote webserver. Sign up with GoDaddy or a hosting site like that, a little HTML code to display the images, and away you go.

"I assume I can connect to a single camera via a web browser provided I have the right IP address and port forwarding setup, thus bypassing any NVR software frontend" Not with Arecont cameras Yeah, well, I don't like Areconts anyway (you may have heard ) To the OP: they're a bit pricier, but I recommend IQEye - they'll handle everything mentioned above. Newer versions even have a "cameo" function that lets you pre-define different views and crops.

"I assume I can connect to a single camera via a web browser provided I have the right IP address and port forwarding setup, thus bypassing any NVR software frontend"