Soundy

Heheheh, but that's the beauty of it, these things sell themselves!

Another example... same establishment, one a MACE dome, the other an IQ511 mounted right beside it. The dome runs through a TVS text inserter (see upper-left) and was left in place specifically for that function, as that's one thing that's not yet easily duplicated with an IP camera. Both snaps taken at the same instant. MACE dome, 1/4" sensor, 3.6mm lens, recording at D1: IQ511, 1.3MP 1/2" sensor, 4-12mm varifocal lens adjusted to give approx. the same FOV as the dome, mounted to the dome's immediate right: In the video, you can clearly see exactly what the servers are entering into the terminal screens. BTW, this site was another one of those instances where all I needed to do was show the owner a couple shots from an IQ installation on another site, and his immediate response was, "I want that." Sold him three cams for this store, and one for another he owns.

Veracity HIGHWIRE IP Over Coax I've used those - very handy! Little spendy for most cases, although there are instances where it's well worth the cost (like adding IP cameras to gas-pump canopies, where all the conduit is sealed before the station goes online). Nice that they run on both 12VDC and 24VAC, too, so they powered off almost any existing analog camera's feed. That aside, my comment you quoted was referring specifically to normicgander's note on 424M, and other analog-HD transmission methods.

MACE analog dome camera, 1/4" sensor, 3.6mm lens, recorded at 1CIF: Same position, IQEye 511, 1/2" 1.3MP sensor, 2.8mm lens (note dome camera at bottom of frame): /thread

You could try VLC media player along with the K-Lite Codec Pack - between them they'll handle almost every media format known to man. It's likely a more common format (MJPEG, H.264, DivX or something) with a non-standard filename extension.

Greetings from just a little ways north in Vancouver, BC. I grew up in the middle-of-nowhere, BC, so I know what it's like living a hundred miles from the nearest traffic light!

To a point. With Windoze at least, anything over 3GB RAM won't be recognized if you're running a 32-bit version of the OS. It doesn't hurt anything having more, just anything over that is wasted. You have to go to the 64-bit version of XP or Vista to take advantage of more than that.

Vigil is at www.3xlogic.com or www.camacc.com - they make turnkey DVR/hybrid/NVR systems. VideoInsight sells turnkey systems as well as DIY hardware/software packages - www.video-insight.com Both have people representing on the forum.

Several IP cams do have a composite-video out.... most of the IQs have one that's active for a few minutes after power-up and show a focus-aid window, and a few have one that's active full-time (like the Alliance-series domes)... those are handy if you're using it for something like an ID shot and want to drive a customer-awareness monitor.

Most IP cameras have a built-in webserver, which aids in the aiming and focusing via laptop. What I've started doing recently is taking a cheap WiFi router onsite, and plugging one of the LAN ports into the network with the IP cameras... then I can use that to access it wirelessly with my laptop. I can also plug the camera directly into the router and access it wirelessly (note: this assumes your laptop has wireless). A PoE-capable router would be particularly useful here. See this threadfor more discussion of this... I also have a retractable ethernet cable with a crossover/straight switch that I use to plug directly into the cameras. While this removes the PoE power source, the IQEye cameras we use all support 12VDC power, so I also pack along a 12V/4.5Ah gel-cell battery that I use to power each camera locally, as I'm working on it. While the laptop is also handy to run the camera's locate/configuration tool (IQfinder for the IQeye cameras), to really trim down, you can even use these methods with a "netbook" type computer (anything that can be done via web browser, at least), or do as my co-worker is doing, and use an Archos. He has the PVR dock for his, so it will take analog input (and the super-hi-res screen is REALLY nice for adjusting analog cameras), and of course, it has built-in WiFi so he can browse the network cameras with it.

You may have trouble finding a DVR capture card and software that will work with Vista (at least, your options will be a lot more limited)... and really, you don't want your everyday PC doing double-duty as a DVR, as not only will the DVR functionality eat up resources, but any heavy processing you're doing could affect the DVR capture as well. Having worked with a number of different standalone units and not being too impressed with any of them, my personal recommendation would be a separate PC (doesn't have to be anything outrageous for your purposes, a $300 bare-bones system will do, or a used older machine, anything in a P4 or Athlon64 or better will do), with a card and software such as GeoVision (which I've not dealt with, BTW, they just seem to be popular here as a low-cost solution) or VideoInsight (which I have dealt with a lot and they're quite good). Either route should get you into a suitable PC-based DVR for under $1000. As far as the PTZs, I don't know about the GeoVision, but VideoInsight fully supports most models, and it doesn't require a particular capture card - you can feed the PTZs off a standard 9-pin serial port on the PC (or if it doesn't have those, using a $10 USB-to-serial adapter).

I can't speak for any sort of standalone units, but the Vigil DVRs will do what you want, in a slightly roundabout way - camera permissions are assignable to user groups, but you can create an infinite number of fully-customized user groups. Worst case, you could create a separate group for each user, with that user being the only member of his group. I believe (although I'd have to look to be sure) that Video Insight will do what you need as well.

Yeah, you'll have a pretty hard time finding something that will record at HIGHER framerate that your local video standard supports... particularly since you'd have to get a specialized camera to be able to output at higher than that framerate as well. Even if you could record higher than PAL's maximum 25fps, no standard CCTV camera will output more than that anyway.

Yeah, one thing to keep in mind, you really need high-speed, broadband internet (cable or DSL) for this to be viable. It can "work" with lower-speed connections, but it will be very limited.

As scorpion notes, you'll need a modulator for this - your analog camera video operates in a completely different frequency band than your satellite and TV antenna inputs. A simple version would be the devices that are used to modulate video games onto channel 3 or 4, for a TV to tune. A more readily-available one might be a VCR, that can take a composite video input (the yellow RCA jacks) and output it on channel 3 or 4. More typically, these sorts of installations use a commercial unit that output to a channel in the 200-300 range - most cable providers leave a "hole" in their programming for just such uses (for example, channel 199 may be listed as "security camera" and carries no other programming). These tend to be a bit pricey, however. If you want something that you can feed into the dish inputs on your satellite boxes, though, that's a whole other matter... I wouldn't be surprised that such a thing exists, but I've never seen one, and I can imagine they'd cost a pretty penny.

Sounds impressive! I deal with Vigil systems in a number of analog, IP and hybrid systems, they're really a great system. One thing I might suggest is going to RAID5 or even RAID6 for your storage, for data security. We've got three sites set up now for the same customer using Enhance Technology's R8 iSCSI RAID systems - eight 1TB drives at RAID5 gives about 6.5TB of storage. The Enhance arrays are super easy to set up and interface through iSCSI. Oh, and maybe stop by that one other IP-cam thread and check out what "cctvexpert" says about using IP cameras in a casino - I'm sure you'll find it enlightening

There's not really such a thing as a "long range camera". Any camera will do, all you need is a lens with a long focal length. Depending on the area you need to cover and the size of the camera's sensor, you're probably looking at a minimum 50-70mm lens. Keep in mind that with that kind of throw, even the smallest amount of shake in the camera will be magnified greatly in the view, so you'll want to make sure the camera mounting is VERY solid.

Thanks for the tips, EBen. Vibration is a good concern too, although I've never yet known it to be an issue.

Well, since you haven't yet... I've always done it with USB-to-serial adapters as necessary. The exception to this has been this recent project with Camacc and Squirrel for a client that has 11 POS stations around a restaurant, which has led to their solution of having the Squirrel backend push the data over the network to the Vigil DVR, instead of taking an ASCII stream from the terminal itself. Serial adapters would work in this instance, but would be extremely unwieldy, particularly for the fact that you'd need a wire run to every terminal (well, you could run four feeds over a Cat5, but this site wasn't wired for that anyway). But in any case, I find the USB adapters work just fine - we use models made by A-Ten and have had no problems using them for POS interface, or for PTZ outputs off the DVR. Once the driver is installed, you can just keep plugging them in, and they keep popping up and more and more serial ports

The one other concern with wireless is, what's in the way? It may only be 20 meters, but I suspect that's not open air. Are there walls? And if so, what kind? Wood, steel stud, concrete? Each of these will successively have an adverse affect on your range...

Good advice in general, but we're specifically talking about CCTV lenses... There's not often a lot of choice in maximum aperture (most CCTV lenses are in the f/1.4 to f/1.8 range), first-party selection tends to be fairly limited (with not a huge range in quality between first and third party), there's not generally much in the way of "extra features" to be had (auto or manual iris is about the gamut), and even fewer reviews to be had. CCTV lenses simply aren't studied and debated to death the way SLR lenses are...

It's not a problem with IP specifically, but with 10/100 ethernet. Go to gigabit and it's not a problem anymore - heck, most basic cameras will work fine over 10Mbps, it's only with multiple ones that you start to have issues at 10/100. I have a site with 13 IP cameras, all feeding a gigabit switch, and an DVR with a gigabit interface, and no problems at all. When I was working in IT, I was on a site where the entire Head Office building used token-ring... most 16Mbit, but even at 4Mbit, users had no problem running MS Office directly from server shares.... using Netbios-over-TCP/IP. IP will work over pretty much every type of transport - ethernet is common and cheap, but it's by no means the BEST transport method. The aforementioned 13-IP-cam site, we put in a dedicated network for the CCTV system. In fact, all but one site I've rigged with IP cameras have used a dedicated networkin the last, the site's corporate people determined that the cameras would share a dedicated partition on their network switch). Lack of netowrk control is a cost/design decision, and hardly an argument against the viability of IP cameras. IP video itself has definite benefits for some applications, but the real benefit to CCTV is the ability to transmit higher-resolution video than analog, at relatively low cost with easily-available existing technology. Sure there are other methods available, but they're either non-standard or highly proprietary or still have limitations, and are far more costly to implement. For example, HDTV spec improves on analog, but requires either an expensive digital transmission method (HDMI, DVI, both of which are distance-limited and require thick, expensive cables), or a more complex, pricier analog method (component video), and still maxes out at effectively 2MP. Why? Main reason is cost, I would guess... additional hardware required for the capture system, which would be expensive for some time until the economy of scale can kick in. Other than that, it would be a nice solution if it could use existing coax put in place for CCTV. This is exactly the point, and is why arguments like cctvexpert's really grate me - it doesn't work well for one particular instance, ergo it must be useless for everything. Another thing is that "megapixel" and "IP" are used interchangeably, and they are NOT the same thing.

There are a few options for POS inclusion... and I've just been dealing with some of them recently, all using the Vigil DVRs from CAMACC/3xLogic. Vigil has a few different database options. It can accept plain ASCII input from a number of different POS systems via a serial port, and log it to a database that's synchronized to video, and each register can be assigned to a specific camera. We use this extensively with fuel services using Bulloch POS software. We're also testing a new interface for Squirrel POS systems that has the Squirrel backend pushing the POS data via network interface to the Vigil. That's kind of a beta thing right now, though. And Vigil has the ability to link in and read some other types of POS backend databases - I've tried it on one site that uses a Squirrel POS and can pull data directly from its MSSQL database. The trick to this one is that for proper synchronization, the DVR and POS clocks much match exactly, so you'll want some sort of NTP server/client on the two to keep them sync'd on a frequent basis. And there's the good old TVS text/video inserter... I've just recently installed the latest offering from Honeywell in a site, it's HIGHLY configurable (via web interface, nice) to work with a wide range of POS and ATM systems and overlays the text directly on analog video. It can also filter the data and feed it back out for DVR serial data capture. The catch with TVS is that it won't overlay on IP video, so in this one site, I have an IP cam and a small cheap dome side-by-side watching the paypoint, with the dome routed through the TVS. There are IP cameras, however, that have realtime analog output as well as the megapixel IP feed (such as the IQEye Alliance dome series) that would work great for this sort of situation.

Hmm, a few things to consider: One, wireless transmission takes a lot more power than simply storing the image locally... thus, you may want to consider a camera that just records to an internal flash card. There are lots of them out there, from "covert" designs to megapixel cams. Second, if you're recording to internal memory, I don't think you'll see substantial POWER savings choosing constant vs. motion-activated recording: the camera must still be active and capturing images; the only difference is with motion recording, it won't store the images unless there's movement. The alternative would be to have some other sort of motion-sensing device (PIR, etc.) that triggers the camera, but that too will drain power. Third, if the camera runs on DC power, you can probably use a gel-cel (sealed lead-acid) battery to get significant runtimes out of it. Maybe pick up a couple of 5-7Ah batteries and swap them on a regular (weekly? bi-weekly?) basis - run on one, charge the other in another location. If you're recording to a flash card, you might want to check and/or change that out regularly as well, so there's the opportunity to do both at once. Also, you shouldn't need to get 120VAC (or 240, depending on where you live) all the way to the camera... you just need a small wire to carry the 12VDC or 24VAC to it, and the power supply can go in another location.

That's good advice. That way you can always use baluns to run analog over the cat5 if you choose not to go full IP. Agreed, this is good advice. Just a word of warning, though: be sure to spec 24VAC cameras if you're using analog over baluns - I've had several occasions of 12VDC cameras having ground-loop problems over baluns, if running them all off a single power supply. If each is going to have its own wall-wart transformer, that's fine, but it gets kinda messy and cluttered that way. Just to clarify, it won't ALWAYS happen, but there's a lot higher likelihood of it. With 24VAC cameras, I've never had an issue with baluns. And back to the original question: no, you don't TECHNICALLY need a capture card to run all-IP cameras, HOWEVER... Iknow of at least one system where the software is fully "hybridized" (analog and IP cams within the same interface), yet the software won't run WITHOUT a capture card. It doesn't need analog cameras connected (in fact, I'm running one site with 13 IP cams and no analog at all), but the software does check for the card. Kinda dumb, really, and I'm hoping they'll do away with that in future versions. Oh, one other thing to note: some systems limit the software to the same number of channels as the capture card - that is, if it has a 16-channel card, the software only gives you 16 channels, period. This is a problem if you have, say, 10 analog cams and want to add 10 IP cams, and it's something to be aware of when you're spec'ing your DVR. This is the same system I mentioned above, BTW, and again, I'm hoping it will be addressed soon, because this limitation IS an issue on one site of ours.