Soundy

But IP bans can also block "good" users from that same locale. Only if you wildcard your pattern. If it's a specific company, you'd probably only need to block one, maybe two IPs to cut them out. If others there have a legitimate reason to access the site, it might encourage them to have a "chat" with the offending over-zealous employees... Yes, but at least it forces them to work for it. If you're getting spam from random salesdroids at various offshore companies, they likely aren't internet-savvy enough to work around the blocks, and even if they are, it's probably not worth their time. Well, obviously nothing is 100%, but every bit helps. Do you "de-implement" the post count thing now, because some spammers find a way around it? Or is it still effective at HELPING to reduce the problem? Similarly, do you not bother moving to a CAPTCHA for signup and IP bans for offenders, just because some people will be able to work around them? Anyway, the point is, they're there in the upgraded version... they CAN be used, if desired, but they're certainly not forced on the admin(s). There are plenty of other reasons to upgrade, those are just a couple more that may be attractive.

Sarcastic? You?? Noooooooooo, never, not at ALL!! You forgot bitter and just plain mean. Also your request may take a little while....WoTLK comes out tonight Bitter?? Noooo... cynical and jaded, maybe, but certainly not bitter?! Er... WoTLK?

Well I dunno about v2, but v3 also supports IP bans...

Well, keep in mind that's just shy of £1000 for 24 channels... to make 200 you'll need 8 of those, so there you're up to £8000. You'll need some serious processing power to handle that as well - keep in mind that while raw video itself is a lot higher bandwidth than audio, most DVRs are using hardware compression, reduced framerates, and motion-detection recording, all of which help reduce the "continual" demands on CPU and I/O. Unless you have software that only records audio when there's sound detected, you're going to be recording at full bandwidth, on all channels, all the time, which will require a LOT of CONSTANT processing power and some pretty fast disk I/O. And keep in mind, too, if you can only run one card in a PC (depending on the card's driver design and the software), then you're looking at multiple PCs, also adding to the cost... And of course, there's the software cost, as you're looking at a somewhat specialized usage, and may require some fairly custom, and therefore fairly pricey, software... All told, £65,000 may not be too bad for a ready-made solution, once you factor in your total costs and the time involved to "roll your own". Just something to consider...

Sarcastic? You?? Noooooooooo, never, not at ALL!!

Where is the spam coming from - actual users, or bots? phpBB3 integrates a CAPTCHA to the registration process, which on the site I'm running has eliminated any bot signups (so far, anyway). We had a real problem with them on the phpBB2 system, to the point that one of the admins banned all new signups from gmail.com addresses...

Sounds like possible ground issues to me as well... with each camera on a separate transformer, however, it shouldn't be directly related to the power source. One possibility is if the affected cameras are in grounded metal enclosures, giving them separate ground paths from the coax shields - unplugging one of the affected cameras and shutting it down would then eliminate the ground loop. Disconnecting one of the noisy cameras' video lines should also clear up the noise on the other. The other possibility is that one or more of the lines run near a source of strong, randomly-occurring EMI... such as HVAC, an elevator, etc. See if you can correlate the noise to anything else turning on in the building.

Agreed, it may depend on local codes, but in most areas, I can't see this being a problem - codes likely won't come into play unless it's all new construction. I'm familiar with these Pelco supplies and they're very solid and well-designed. Your main concern is more likely to be access to the thing in case you need to change/add wiring or change a fuse.

Wow, haven't seen a rackmount supply like that... it's very pretty, and probably very pricey as well, for what it needs to do. Fact is, you can probably get by on your current cameras with something like a single 75VA-100VA closed-frame transformer, and a simple 12V/500mA "wall-wart" adapter, at a fraction of the price. If you want to go with something for later expandability, you could go with a standard "metal can" power supply like the ALTV2416300CBM, and put a 12VDC regulator board (similar to this) inside it to feed the 12V camera(s).

Hey Thomas, I sent you a PM too, never got a reply...

Second the suggestion to upgrade to phpbb3! I just did this for another site I help administer, and there are SO many more features, especially for the administration! Much more control over site permissions and functions, as well. Takes a little learning and a little more time to tweak up, but it's worth it in the long run. There's a great portal that can be added as well, that will display things like top posts, most recent posts, most active threads... a calendar, statistics, etc. One cool addition, too, is the ability to create custom bbcode tags... for such things as easy YouTube embedding, something that would be useful for a video-oriented site

Most DVR cards (except maybe cheap some no-name ebay cards) will include software... and really, most vendors use one of two or three different types of cards, just with their own branding and usually locked to their own software. So the more important question is, what is the best DVR card/software *package*... and the answer to that is, "it depends" - mostly on your specific needs. That said, we've been using the VideoInsight systems for years and have found them powerful and reliable. They do tend to be more toward the higher end of the price range, but as with most things, you do get what you pay for. As for limiting space used, that depends on the software. Some will let you designate the free space to leave, others pre-allocate the space used for recording, and still others simply fill up all the freespace on the drive(s) they're given. VideoInsight allows you to specify the maximum size for each video clip, as well as how much free space to leave on the drive. I strongly recommend having a drive or partition dedicated to your video storage, though - the problem is, if you put anything else on the drive, that just takes away from your storage space, and thus the retention time. If you're not paying attention, and you fill up the drive with other stuff, you could end up with very little record time left for your video.

Any details Cybervision might need, we'd probably need as well, to be of any help. Probably best just to get it over with and call them directly

Yes, you could use Cat-5 with video baluns to run your signal - you can also run power over that wire. You'll need some sort of video-capture device to get the video into your PC, though, and many include the software.

Bluescreens are most often caused by hardware-related problems... have you tried moving the Geo card to a different slot in case there's a conflict?

This doesn't make any sense - is your cable modem an internal card? If it's an external box of some sort, as almost all of them are, I don't see any way your capture card could be affecting it. It might be conflicting with your network card, but that still should have no effect on the modem...

I'm assuming you need every mic recorded separately, so using a mixer to blend the mics down to a few channels is out? Your best bet might be to look into devices designed for studio use, which can have 8, 16, 24, 32 or more inputs (like this one, for example: http://www.dv247.com/invt/30292/). That might be overkill, quality-wise, but it's probably your most efficient off-the-shelf option. The downside is that most of them have an equal number of outputs and are usually balanced I/O, which add to the cost and are probably unnecessary for your purposes. Of course, if you're building your own pre-amps already, you may be ahead to simply design and build your own 200-input encoder device...

A "capture card" generically is any computer add-on that's used to "capture" video. This can include TV-tuner cards and USB modules, which will usually only have one or two video inputs, and multiple inputs are usually of different types (composite, S-video, component) and still only feed a single encoder - in other words, most consumer capture cards can only record a single video source. A "DVR card" is a specialized capture card that TYPICALLY (not always, but usually) has multiple encoders, multiple inputs, and only accepts composite video - in short, they're designed to simultaneously record multiple video sources.

I've used a variety of wiring for PTZ control - 18/2 shielded/untwisted, Cat-3, Cat-5e, 22/2 unshielded, etc. As others have noted, it depends partly on the distance. We're running Cat-5e to cameras more and more often (to allow future expansion to IP cameras), using video baluns for analog video and running power over two pairs, and where PTZ is required, you then still have one pair available for serial.

My co-worker just picked up an Archos - little pricier, but hi-res screen, and can be a video source as well (test signals, etc.). Also comes with a wrist strap, so you can keep both hands free.

Try VideoInsight?

I see that all the time in board cameras, cheap or not. Most of them will have separate wires coming out for power and video, but if you look inside, almost all 12VDC-powered cameras share the ground at some point.

Anyone here familiar with integrating a newer Squirrel POS system with a DVR? Even experience interfacing it to a TVS overlay system would help - I have a working serial connection between the Squirrel back-end machine and my DVR, where the DVR simply captures and logs the data, but need to configure the Squirrel to output it for me... and Squirrel themselves are being completely useless.

Well, as an educated guess, I'd say red should be +12VDC, yellow would be video out, white is audio out, and black would be a common ground for all three.

Well, with 6 pins, it can be almost any a few dozen different combinations. Best way to go about this is to open the camera up and determine which wires are connected to which components (power, video, audio), then use a multimeter or continuity tester to determine which wires are connected to which pins. Sorry I can't be much more help than that, but there are just too many different possibly variations to just guess at it.