Soundy

Are these wires labeled? With RS485, you'd normally use RX+ and RX- on the camera, connected to TX+ and TX- (respectively) on the controller (a few cameras I've seen label the RX pins as TX, I assume to tell you what to connect them to rather than their actual function). TX on the camera should not normally be required. Remember that once you're connected, you have to set your controller (joystick, DVR, whatever) to the proper port settings (baud rate, parity, etc.), and your software to the same protocol (Pelco D or P or whatever else is supported) and tell it the ID number of the camera. With many cameras, the port, protocol, and ID info is displayed when the camera boots up...

Nice! I gotta get me some of that!

Not to mention, IR is relatively distance-limited and would probably not be effective for illuminating an entire beach...

Video Insight DVRs do not require ActiveX for their web viewer - I've successfully used it on a number of browsers including Safari (Windows version), Opera and Firefox, as well as assorted different mobile browsers, including Blazer on PalmOS and Opera Mini on WM6. You can test it with your browser at http://www.demovi.com

One thing, if you do have to do outdoor splices... I've found it really helps to put a little dielectric grease (typically sold at auto-parts stores for use on battery terminals to prevent corrosion) into the ends of the barrel before snapping on the BNCs. That keeps water and damp air from getting inside the connection (actually, almost any thick grease should work). Using weather-tight compression BNCs is a good idea as well. After that, wrap the whole thing up tight with good-quality electrical tape - it doesn't need a ton of layers if you pull the tape really tight and stretch it a bit as it goes on, so it form-fits better. I've also successfully used a brush-on "liquid electrical tape". I've tried heat-shrink tubing, but the wide disparity in the diameters of the cable and the BNC fittings means it doesn't really seal tight unless you stack several layers.

Well, there's always alt.security.alarms - lots of intelligent, mature discussion there (not!) Hey, I'm an old-school usenetter as well, there are some definite benefits to the medium... on the other hand, the ability to embed pictures in messages can be particularly useful for visual topics like CCTV. And it can be fun too!

A lot is dependent on the forum software used... much like with newsreader features. This is a fairly old version of phpBB; the newer version is MUCH improved. A lot of functionality can be added by ready-made mods as well, and the php code can always be tweaked for different functionality if you have someone fluent enough in php. All that aside, keep in mind that you're NOT in Usenet any more, Toto One of the main differences with a web forum is that everyone is stuck with the same interface - you can't pick-and-choose individual features like you can when selecting a newsreader. Which is not to say suggestions are not welcome (obviously, they're asking for them in this thread) but there are always some limitations. BTW, as far as "user-selectable stickies" and the ability to ignore some forums... that's sort of the equivalent to thread and forum subscriptions. This version of phpBB does support subscribing to threads, which I believe you can then create a search for. Version 3 also allows you to subscribe to a forum. Subscriptions will the email you notifications when the threads or forums have new content posted. Sometimes what you want is possible, but in a different way

Oh yeah, no intention to confuse... like I say, just something as "food for thought". Two stops, btw, is equivalent to half the diameter of the aperture, so a visual approximation is fairly easy.

survtech is on the mark there... As for run length, RG59 coax is good for several hundred feet - I've had 400' runs with no problem. Passive baluns over Cat5e are good for anywhere from 1000' to 4000', depending on which manufacturers' claims you believe... active baluns can extend that significantly.

Just as a point of interest, I don't know if the rule-of-thumb applies to CCTV lenses, but with most SLR lenses, "two stops down from wide-open" is generally found to have the lens's "sharpest" performance. So for a typical f/4 lens, f/8 would give the sharpest results... for an f/1.8, the "sweet spot" would be around f/3.6. Of course, few if any CCTV lenses actually have aperture markings, and auto-iris ones are a lot harder to fine-tune than manual iris. Just food for thought

Well, I see Scott's gonna do everything he can to avoid actually showing us how to magically determine a camera's TVL using VLC. Of course, everyone ELSE here knows that it can't be done... and I suspect Scott knows that it can't be done either, but rather than just say he made a mistake, he's going to continue to dance around the subject and insist that everyone else is incompetent for not being able to make it work. You guys have fun with him, but until I see a video from him documenting this procedure, I'm outta this thread.

I've done just this in numerous installs, I've never noticed a difference. One job, we have three FLIR thermals and a Pelco Esprit atop a 50' tower, all runs up the tower using baluns over Cat5e, then connected with barrels to about 400' of direct-burial RG59 in a weatherproof box at the tower base... there's no discernible issues with this setup, all video is rock-stable (and those FLIRs can be REALLY picky about bad cabling, too). Anytime I've seen problems with barrels, it's simply been a bad connection on one of the two BNCs (ie. a bad crimp, or a corroded/dirty connection). Happens a lot with outdoor splices if they're not sealed well.

Isn't it usually the other way around? Train vs. car, the train wins every time...

Firefox and Chrome are both based on the Mozilla engine, which doesn't support ActiveX directly. You can get around it on a Windows machine by using an Add-on like "IETab", which loads the IE engine in a single Firefox tab. As for your phone, your only real hope is if you have a browser on it that supports ActiveX, but unless the phone uses Windows Mobile, that's not likely to happen.

phpBB3 supports "Friend" and "Foe" lists. I believe there's a mod for this for phpBB3. "Stickies" are set by moderators, under the assumption that they ARE of general interest. This is often used for such things as board announcements, "user introduction" threads, and other such topics that the moderators/administrators always wants visible at the top. Having the users decide which ones they want to see would largely defeat the purpose. We already have this:

Okay, I've recently inherited a client with a number of Geo systems, so I'm trying to get up to speed on these things. I won't get into my thoughts on the whole interface right now, maybe it'll grow on me after a while *coff coff*... but I've run into a weird issue and I'm wondering if this is endemic to this system. We had a camera out on this site (#11), an outdoor dome, that one of our other techs replaced a couple weeks ago. A few days later, the site started calling that TWO cameras were out. I got on site to find #11 was gone again... and #15, right below it on a 4x4 grid. When I pulled the machine away from the wall, though, both came back... but #11 was really noisy, and would intermittently drop out again... and every time it did, #15 dropped with it. Figuring it was bad connections at the back of the machine, I did a little more troubleshooting swapping cables around (to verify whether it was the coax terminations or the the octopus) and found that when I moved #11 to #12, #16 would drop out with #12(!!??) Another odd thing I noticed about it was then if I rebooted while the cameras were out, #3 and #7 (same column on the 4x4) came up black and took forever to show a picture. So, I re-terminated the coax (bloody aluminum-braid RG59), to no avail... then I decided to check the camera... and found that the original install, for some reason, had an outdoor splice point. Great. Unwrapped that, re-terminated both ends... and found I had a good clean signal and no more dropouts. Okay, so here's the thing: is this common to Geo, that noise on one channel affects adjacent channels? This whole time, the machine has been rebooting regularly as well, when the cameras were out... something about a watchdog thread not responding, trying to restart the program, then restarting the machine... that seems pretty messed up to me, that the whole machine reboots itself in attempt to solve a video loss?? Or is this just something with an older version of the hardware? Or...??? Yeah, okay, it's part rant too - bloody thing drove me nuts.

That's kinda wacky - I've never seen that on the ComArt-based Vigil and Video Insight systems, not even with the old HiCap50 carts. I'll run that by the client as well... what's the typical upgrade cost on GV? I don't have a copy of ANY version of the software yet... No PTZs... there are four or five CP484s, the rest (up to the full 16) are cheapie no-name IR domes. Well, if we do get the bid to upgrade, it will include the Vigil system - it's their new "corporate standard" and is much preferred by their IT guy (who we mostly deal with)... plus they're already at 16 cameras, so even if we do add some IP cams, we'll also be re-aiming/re-purposing/re-locating all the existing camera positions (and hopefully simply replacing outright the POS B&W no-name IR domes), and we'll need to go to a 32-channel setup. But I'll mention the GV software updates to him and see if he wants to go that route should the bean counters intervene on the full system update.

Well, again, the problem was already solved by replacing a corroded outdoor BNC. No, nothing here is grounded that I can tell. As stated before, I don't even know for sure where the camera power supply is (I'm told it's behind a filing cabinet; I haven't looked yet). As I've said, I just inherited this site.

Is this the same cable you've been using with the camera? A faulty cable is always a possibility... or, ultimately, it could just be a flaky camera. Testing with a crossover cable direct to the computer would be the best way to eliminate everything else from the equation.

Damn, boy... you dance like a drunken cowboy at Stampede. Fine... THIS claim:

Erm... it was Alex who first questioned your claim. So far, nobody else has disagreed with him, or me. You're the one making these claims, yet you leave it up to us to prove them via YOUR methods... then when those methods don't work, you claim it's because we're incompetent. So... it's YOUR claim, so YOU back it up, using YOUR methods. Then nothing can possibly go wrong, right? You say it works, so show us how it works. Or will you continue to try to weasel out of it?

Hey Scott, the whole group is still waiting for you to show us how you can use VLC to determine the TVL resolution of a camera. Quit blowing smoke out your arse and either make with the proof, or admit you were wrong. Just a refresher for you:

Well, like I said, this wasn't a ground loop, it was just poor/noisy signal caused by a bad connection. Noise on one channel should NOT be affecting the stability of other channels, especially not THREE other channels.

Don't see why not, should work fine with any C/CS-mount lens.

I'd tend to agree... I've found references to that switch in newsgroup and forum archives as far back as 1997, meaning that unit could be upwards of 12 years old, and it appears to be a pretty low-end bargain model. I wouldn't be surprised that it has trouble handing that load... assuming it's working 100% in the first place.