Soundy

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.

I've NEVER used aluminum shield, except once when we subbed a couple satellite installs and the suppliers sent us aluminum-wrapped RG6. This is an inherited system for a client we've recently taken over... we've just quoted to replace the Geo with a Vigil and a ton of NAS, to match the new spec we've used on some of their other sites, and add some IP cameras to the store, although with the current economic clime, we're not too hopeful it will go through. I'm dreading how much more of this aluminum stuff I'll run into.

It is a central 12VDC power supply, I'm told, but I have yet to dig it out from its home behind a filing cabinet. However, simply re-terminating the outdoor connections cleared up the problem with the noisy camera and so far, with the random dropouts to cams 11/15, so I'm chalking the root of this problem up to a corroded, poorly-sealed connector. The weird thing for me, is how noise on ONE channel can affect THREE other adjacent channels, and cause two of them to drop out entirely. In five years of dealing with the ComArt cards used in Video Insight and Vigil systems, I have never seen an instance where noise/weak signal/dropouts on one channel affect anything other than that one channel. I don't have the version info handy for this system, but I believe it's been in place for some years; I don't know when or even if it received regular updates. However, I don't see how this kind of behaviour would be software-related... it looks to me like something related to the hardware, possibly a shared buss on those four channels or something.

I know the IQ cameras have an option in their settings to limit the max framerate... maybe the Areconts have something similar?

Same as with any standard, I suppose - the idea is that if all devices comply with the published standard, you're guaranteed compatibility. Obviously nothing like this is 100% guaranteed, but at least that's the idea behind standards. By the same token, a device being non-conforming doesn't guarantee you'll have problems, either... sometimes they'll be based on the spec, but add their own tweaks or extensions to it. Sometimes the only problem is that they fall just short of meeting the spec in some insignificant way that won't affect 99% of what you use it for. The problem is, you don't usually know WHY the spec isn't met, or how those deficiencies will affect you.

As far as I'm aware, there is no theoretical limit on subdomains... or sub-sub domains, for that matter... like if you had sites in various areas across the country, you could have city.state.maysky.com. EasyDNS with DynSite to handle the dynamic changes should handle it all nicely. So the idea is to have cameras in different user locations? That's really the only reason you'd need multiple subdomains. As far as places to shop, if you're in any major center, there are probably these sorts of small retailers (we have literally dozens of them here in the Metro Vancouver area)... probably more likely to find them than any big-box stores in smaller towns, too. Otherwise, there are plenty of places to get custom systems done online... www.tigerdirect.com comes immediately to mind, although there are lots of others.

I haven't hit a limit yet on subdomains on EasyDNS. Don't know why there would be, unless it's to charge you extra for more. Why would you have separate subdomains for users?? You probably do - where do you live?

^WANT!!

Ahh, I dunno... only problems I've ever had with subdomains were caused by my own incorrect configuration of something. Domain registration and DNS service for most TLDs is US$35/year with EasyDNS. Does that $26 for dyndns include registering your own domain, or is that just with a subdomain, like maysky.dyndns.com? Sure they are, but it's still cheap. I'm looking at the *cheapest* machine from my regular supplier here... 1GB RAM, 80GB drive... whole thing is CDN$245. Upgrading to 2GB RAM adds a mere $17 to the price. http://a-power.com/product-2515-458-1 Finger slip on H.264 there? For a single camera to the DVR, it won't make a big difference... start streaming multiple cameras to multiple users, it can really add up.

This is maysky's: