Soundy

With VGA, PAL/NTSC video standards don't apply. Bingo! If you connect the original cameras to your TV, you'll probably find a similar effect to what you had connecting the PAL cameras to your DVR. Your DVR may require a reset to "factory settings" before it will re-detect the format used. There may also be the ability to manually set the video standard used (either through a menu option, or through a switch inside the DVR).

Not knowing that specific DVR, my expectation would be that it will do one or the other, but not both at the same time. The two video standards are based on the AC power frequency - in North America and a few other areas, our power is 60Hz, and NTSC standard is 30 frames per second; in most of the rest of the world, the power is 50Hz and PAL standard is 25fps. As for what it has to do with television, well... what are you going to watch the DVR on? It needs to output video using whichever format your monitor uses, which if your power is 50Hz, is probably PAL as well. Try disconnecting the original cameras and fire up the DVR with only the new PAL cameras connected... see if it switches to PAL then.

It really comes down to one simple thing: design priorities. A home-theater PVR's design priorities are video quality and easy of use for one, or maybe two video streams. Retention amount is not a main concern. With surveillance DVRs, the priority is usually maximum retention, for SEVERAL video sources - in some cases up to 16 or 32. The software interface is also generally far more advanced than your basic PVR recorder, which equates to higher development costs. And of course, you have the economy of scale: the market for satellite and cable PVRs is probably 100 to 1000 times larger than that for CCTV recorders... thus it can be sold far cheaper.

A DVR with alarm-trigger outputs could do it - the Vigils I work with are able to do it with a number of different models of output modules. The problem with this idea is that if it's too dark to begin with, the camera may not catch the motion, especially if the intruder is dressed all in dark clothing. Standard motion-sensing lights may still be preferable.

Ah, but that's MY point - BEFORE you spend a lot of time on it, give him a nice BIG ballpark number that immediately accounts for what it will cost YOU for such a short-term rental... then offer him price breaks over longer terms. If the camera's going to cost you, say, $400... tell him a two-month rental will be $600... six-month, tell him $800... full year for $1000... or tell him he can buy it outright for $500 (not a big markup, but just as an example - if he's buying it, it does save you the extra hassle of the rental contract, etc.). Naturally, make the point that any other equipment and installation costs are on top of that... Of course, if you've already spent a lot of time on it, well... can't help you there This strategy works best to weed out the cheapskates before you invest a lot of time - hit'em right away with a high-scale estimate of what it's going to be and see if they still want to go through with it. If so, then you can make your final quote a little less, and they'll be even more impressed. My boss was asked to bid on one job (small retail outlet)... the guy told him that we'd come highly recommended by a friend (another customer of ours) and that he wanted a price from us, but noted that he'd be going with the lowest price he got. My boss said straight out that we could give him a GOOD system for a good price, but he could also guarantee we wouldn't be the cheapest... then he thanked the guy for his time and left. Sometimes you just gotta know when to cut and run

Despite a "star" topology being "not recommended", I have done it, and/or seen it done on sites I've "inherited", on numerous occasions, and never had a problem with it. Look at it this way, you have nothing to lose by trying - it will either work or it won't, and if it does, it may save you some wiring.

The catch with #1 is that YOU have to buy it, and after the customer is done renting it, you're stuck with it. The solution is easy: make sure the rental per-month is about half the cost of the camera, so after two months, it's paid off anyway. Better yet, make the monthly rental about 75% of the value of the thing, so you can offer the customer the option of either buying it outright, or paying half again as much to rent it. If he still wants to go for the latter, you end up with a "free" covert camera and a few extra bucks in your pocket. From the sound of it, if you're lucky, he'll just decide it's not worth the cost.

PoE actually uses TWO pairs - 10/100 uses only the orange and green pairs (assuming standard 568a or 568b wiring), leaving the blue and brown pairs free. And actually, PoE spec DOES allow for power to be run over signal pairs, even with 10/100... see the diagrams near the bottom of the page here: http://www.joejava.com/poe.htm - the picture on the right is actually exactly the same way "phantom power" works for microphones and other phantom-powered audio gear. Given that, there's no reason it won't work over gigabit either.

I think you'll find most cameras are only 10/100, as there's not (at least with current technology) a lot of benefit, if any, to using gigabit on a camera, other than "just because we can". A single camera simply doesn't need the bandwidth, so there's no justification for the added expense. And if, as ver2go posits, gigabit and PoE are mutually exclusive functions, I suspect you'll find PoE winning out almost every time when it comes to these sorts of devices.

This is what I've been using most often - 8-port 10/100/PoE for the cameras, with two gigabit uplink ports, one for the DVR and one for the NAS... been pretty happy with this unit so far: http://a-power.com/product-6481 http://a-power.com/product-5428 "SRW2024P Managed Ethernet Switch PoE with WebView" "24 x RJ-45 10/100/1000Base-T LAN" http://a-power.com/product-6485 "SGE2000P 24-Port Gigabit Managed Ethernet Switch with PoE" Exactly how they do it, I don't know... consider that phantom-powered microphones run the power over the same wires as the signal, and have for decades - it's not a totally foreign concept It could also be as ver2go suggests, the switch auto-senses and runs either GB, or reverts to 10/100+PoE as needed. I would expect, if you look up the PoE spec, methods of handing either scenario would be documented there.

One of the main benefits of a switch vs. a hub (which are largely obsolete now anyway) is that every port can operate at a different speed without affecting the speed of the others. All gigabit devices that are connected to the switch will work at gigabit speeds, regardless of what other 10 or 100Mbit devices may be connected.

Yeah, different-color Cat-5 for each application is a great idea too, although if you need to, say, re-use a phone run for network or something, it kinda blows your color scheme A better idea is just to make sure everything is labeled properly - the aforementioned site I was on, every workstation was numbered, every jack at the workstation was numbered, and every bix section was numbered to match as well. (They also had only Cat-3 to a lot of stations in the more remote field offices, and yes we successfully ran ethernet over that in most cases - it had been running token-ring before, which was nowhere near as picky). Of course, in theory your CCTV runs will be completely separate from any workstation network/phone runs, so two separate colors for those purposes is still a good idea!

1. Depending on the specific balun type and manufacturer claims, video over balun-and-cat-5 is good for anywhere from 1000' to over a mile. 2. Sure. I'd be sure to keep all of them well away from any EMI sources, and especially away from parallel runs with AC wiring, but that's just good practice any time. 3. That's an excellent idea. One company I used to work in, their head office had a huge panel of BIX terminals in every floor's comm closet, a bundle of runs from there to each workstation, and a single- or dual-gang box at each workstation with interchangeable comm jacks - each station could be given any combination of phone, ethernet, or token-ring (yeah, this was quite a while ago) that was needed, with the appropriate patching done via the BIX panel. Need to add another network drop? Just plug in the appropriate jack insert at the desk and punch down the appropriate wiring between the station terminus and the network patchbay. They used a similar setup at every one of several dozen "field offices" as well. It was a really effective and flexible system.

Were these time-lapse units recording multiple cameras via a quad or multiplexor? If so, it will have to play back through the same (or same model) multiplexor to get the different streams "in sequence".

Sure it's the camera and not the monitor itself? Looks like it might be a bad power supply in the monitor.

Did you replace the lens along with the camera, or move the original lens to the new camera? If the latter, is it an auto-iris lens? It's not uncommon for the iris driver to fail and the iris simply stays closed...

^Not to mention, WiFi is limited to, what, 300' outdoor line-of-sight?

Have you tried switching the polarity on the baluns?

Personally, I'd probably go with a separate power supply for each floor, to reduce the losses (especially for the furthest floor from the DVR). Since the cable is likely to route through or near each floor's electrical or phone room, that gives you a good spot to locate each floor's supply. While one uninterrupted run from camera to DVR is generally preferred, of course, having a separate PSU per floor negates running siamese cable for the entire length of each run, and probably means a junction box for the video feeds in the same vicinity as the PSU. Frankly, what I'd probably do in this instance, is use Cat-5e and baluns all the way. You can run one Cat-5 to each camera, terminate to RJ-45s, and use baluns like these to easily split out the video and power. You can then use four of these and run all 16 video feeds over four Cat-5e from each floor to the DVR locations, then use four of these (per DVR) to split that back out into the 16 video signals into the DVR. That's the "clean" way... or you could just take the video pair from each camera and splice it to a pair of the floor-to-floor "drop" runs (use a punchdown block to allow for better future flexibility), and split it out at the DVR same as above, or just using four individual baluns.

Why not?

That's what I'm saying, what's the point of recording 40 seconds of nothing happening leading up to something triggering the motion? In my experience, 3-5s is usually sufficient, and 10s is the MOST I've ever needed to set.

Hey bud, clear your browser cache... Do that every day A little paranoid are we? Actually I can see that being good, but man would I hate having to enter all those user/passwords every day. I must go to 9 or 10 sites a day that require login. Those are stored in cookies, not cache.

Cluttered cache isn't the cause of "500 Server Error" messages and various intermittent MySQL errors. Unfortunately, if it is a damaged/corrupted database, a scan-and-repair is the only real fix... just because it stopped happening doesn't mean it's fixed itself, it just means you're not running into the damaged table(s). But like I say, it's an easy fix from a command line, if anyone in charge wants to know...

I've noticed, in addition to the slowdown, some various database and server errors. Having run phpBB-based websites and other MySQL-based sites, I'd hazard a guess that the site's phpBB database is corrupted, which would easily account for both issues. A database scan-and-repair will probably fix it... it's really easy with MySQL, especially if one has command-line access

My coworker bought an Archos too, and the thing is amazing. Another bonus with it, the screen is very high resolution, probably twice that of most cheap portable DVD players, so fine-tuning camera focus is even easier. His has built-in WiFi as well, so if I plug a cheap wireless router into the network with IP cameras, it can link to them through that too Oh, and the other advantage to having an Archos or a DVD player or anything else of the sort: it can double as a signal source for troubleshooting. Bad picture on a line, is it the line or the camera? Unplug the camera, plug in the DVD's output, and see what kind of picture you get at the other end. I made a DVD with a variety of standard TV/NTSC test patters that's I've also used for setting up projectors.