Soundy

I couldn't even follow that... "4th can't make it"? What does that mean? "run 2 cat5, one for power 2nd video" - are you using multiple pairs for video? Baluns should be connected to a single pair ONLY. "Is it camera? I got same one on another side works fine?" Have you swapped the two cameras to see if the problem moves with the camera or stays on the one connection? Have you tried swapping the two cameras' connections at the DVR to narrow down whether it's that input? "so now its OK but once in while im getting beauty full bar across screen." - Pictures or a link to a video clip would help... if the problem is intermittent, I'd suspect either faulty equipment, or some outside source of interference.

Very Nice Soundy! You must lack experience with Baluns to make such a foolish comment... I didn't expect that from you... We're using Cat5 with baluns almost exclusively now, and have been for a couple of years. I have *literally* hundreds of installed baluns out there and could count on one hand the number of wire breaks. Plain and simple: be gentle stripping the wire, and it won't break without a LOT of abuse. We started using baluns *regularly* when it became seriously cost-effective, starting with these that we got for $13/pr.: Then we started getting these for $8/pr. (they're even cheaper now), and never looked back: Both are GEM branded (www.gemelec.com). The tool-less ones are nice, but substantially more expensive. I repeat: be gentle stripping the wire, and it won't break without a LOT of abuse. If you're having that many issues with the wire breaking, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. Sorry, I don't know how to sugar-coat that for you.

Only if you're a complete klutz putting them together. Be gentle stripping the wires, and there's no reason then should break without a LOT of abuse. Or use tool-less baluns, so you just insert the un-stripped wires and snap down the clip.

If your router only has 10/100 ports, there's no benefit to connecting it to a gigabit port. And unless your internet connection is over 100Mbit, there's no benefit to anything higher either. I'd just leave the other GbE port in case you want to add a NAS for storage in the future

Unless physical layout is aided by separate switches, there's no benefit to not just running everything off the one for that small number.

30fps is overrated anyway. Most of the time you'd be hard pressed to even see the difference between 15 and 30, or even between 10 and 30... and yet recording at 30fps will take three times the drive space of recording at 10.

The black wire on the camera also has to connect to the braided shield of the right side - again, the video needs a return path to the DVR as well.

The center conductor on the right side is your video signal -that goes to the yellow wire on the camera, and to the video input on the DVR or TV. The braided shield around it is the signal ground. On the left side, red is your power, and black is power ground.

It's not for an earth ground - "ground" in this case is relative to both power and video. Every type of signal, be it power, video, audio, whatever, needs a return path.

I haven't heard that they DO charge to re-license to a different camera... but it certainly gives them that ability.

IP cameras should be wired as well, unless there's no possible way to get wire to them. WiFi cameras will probably only be 802.11g anyway, which is 54Mbps max... and they're probably only VGA resolution so you won't get anywhere near your bandwidth limit. A bigger concern is that your available speed will drop rapidly once you get to the edges of signal range, which could be as little as 20-30 feet depending on what's in between the camera and router. The numbers may seem to add up here, but I predict you'll find it produces nothing but headaches.

Not hard to rack up $8000 with all-analog... MSRP on Panasonic CW504s is in the neighborhood of $900, if memory serves...

If you look inside of those things, there's probably either switches or jumpers to configure it for 120V use, or there may be a diagram showing how to re-wire the transformer for 120V supply. If you follow down the chain, you'll probably find the power is simply stepped down to 24VAC internally and you can just bypass the transformer and power them off a standard CCTV power supply. If that sounds like too much work, feel free to send them to me for proper disposal... or even just send me one and I'll figure out for you if it can be done

Unless it's a super-high-power green laser aimed directly into the center of the lens and held steady there for a period of time, pretty much any camera should "survive" this just fine. A standard red laser pointer doesn't have enough output to damage a camera sensor, and nobody, let alone a sugar-and-caffeine-fueled kid, would be able to hold it steady enough to do damage even if it were. It may temporarily blind the camera because of the light reflecting off impurities on or in the lens, but it won't cause permanent harm.

Thanks alot for your reply. I still have the following questions left. 1. Is there a standard for this? How did you know this information? Where can I find more about it? It's what's known as an "ad-hoc" standard - nothing written in stone, but it's generally adhered to across manufacturers, for simplicity as much as anything. If there's a *separate* white wire, it's probably audio (assuming the camera has a built-in mic). The video and power share a common ground internal to the camera. I wouldn't assume it accepts AC. Cameras like that will have an internal regulator, and both power wires will connect directly to that; they will not have a common ground with the video. Yes, and no. BNC is the most common connector for CCTV video, followed by RCA for lower-end equipment. It's composite video (NTSC or PAL, depending on where you live, or more to the point, where the camera came from). You can connect it (with the appropriate connector or adapter) directly to the A/V input of a DVR, a DVR, a VCR, or anything else that accepts composite video. An NVR is a *Network* video recorder and will have no analog inputs.

My solution is to use dual-voltage cameras, which necessarily have an internal voltage regulator and thus don't have a common ground for video and power. 12VDC cameras with internal regulator will avoid the issue as well, as will 24VAC-only cameras. Haven't used any of those, but I've used similarly-priced individual and paired baluns with no ground-loop issues. Again, this problem is NOT in the quality of the baluns (super-cheap ones may have other issues of their own) but in the design of the cameras.

I'm told Milestone DOES have a temp-license feature for just this purpose. Still a stupid way to do things and is better simply being avoided.

An NVR without such a stupid restriction would be the best solution: avoid the problem altogether, rather than trying to work around it.

Almost all baluns that provide you an RJ45 jack are already doubling or tripling the power pairs, so that's not your problem. 300mA over even single pair should be fine at a mere 20-30m. Anyway, you've already measured power at the camera end and found it sufficient, so voltage loss obviously isn't the issue. To completely rule out power loss, try powering one or two of the troublesome cameras directly (run an extension cord if necessary) and see if the problem persists.

Gotta make sure the guy who's supposed to be holding up the wall is doing his job! (That's usually ak357...)

The difference in the image has nothing to do with 600 vs 700TVL, though. They're different sensors that handle lighting differently. No doubt the better one has better image processing as well (appears to be doing some level of WDR processing).

But using RG59 cable will stop ground loops? The ground loop in this case is CREATED by three factors: the common ground between video and power in the camera; the additional wire length and DC resistance inserted by the balun in the video ground; and the two being tied together again by using a common-ground power supply and additional common-ground cameras. Separating the video and power grounds at the camera (such as cameras with a built in regulator) is one fix for this. Placing a physical break in the video line with a ground-loop isolator is another. Breaking the ground re-connection with individual power supplies also fixes the problem. And using coax so you don't get the extra resistance of the balun bypasses the problem as well. Of course, there are other root causes of ground loops (cameras mounted to an earth-ground is a common one); the above merely addresses the typical issue of balun-related ground loops.

u saying that cheap camera do not produce 1 volt peak to peak ? should rephrase I guess Why do u think "cheap" camera can't push video far ? I'm saying they may not handle the extra loading very well.

A 12/24 camera won't have this problem because the internal power regulator ensures the video and power grounds are separated.

This doesn't make sense (and apologies if that's just because of your English and I'm not grasping what you're saying - not your fault). You say the customer is stating that a bandwidth of under 16Mbps results in "still or slow graphic images"? What cameras are we dealing with here?? I've had two 1.3MP cameras run smoothly on a 10base-T network... and certain H.64 2MP cameras I've dealt with give great pictures even when set to CBR at 3Mbps. Is this saying that the available network bandwidth is under 16Mbps? I don't get what he thinks latency has to do with it either... it shouldn't have a direct effect on the "smoothness" of a UDP stream. I assume "25" is in milliseconds? Packet loss is the one thing that will cause the described issues; the level of problem will depend directly on the codec being used. H.264 will probably look worse depending on the B-frame rate and whether you're dropping B-frames... other stream types may be affected more or less depending on how severe the packet loss is.