Soundy

The WD tech is right: AV and "green" drives are not well suited for the particular demands of surveillance applications. Caviar Blacks, or even their enterprise-grade RE-series drives are preferred.

A TV's "video in" jack doesn't tune to a channel. Thanks for playing, though.

What sort of budget are you looking at? 5MP cameras on every aisle would be nice, but probably a little spendy for a thrift store. Budget will definitely play a role. What are the areas of concern? Are you (or the customer) worried about shoplifting in specific areas, shoplifting throughout the store, employee theft, fraud...? Does this store take drop-off donations? If so, you might want to cover the drop-off area in case people are dumping garbage or "unacceptable" items. These are the first two questions I'd ask the customer (probably in reverse order, actually), because these will have the greatest impact on how the store is covered.

NTSC and PAL specify interlaced video, so yes, pretty much all analog cameras will use this as well, for compatibility. I have seen a few that had the option to switch to progressive (the Pelco IS90 comes immediately to mind). Network cameras are not beholden to analog specs, so they don't need to use interlaced video... as such, very few will, if any (I've never seen one that specifically stated it was using interlaced scanning). I've never seen it listed... it really wouldn't be something easily quantified, since as survtech notes, it's dependent on so many different factors, most of them outside the camera itself (network latency, decoding efficiency of the VMS, etc.), and many of them dependent on specific user settings.

Lots out there. Highwires are one. GEM has a couple models. I believe NVT has some as well. And there are lots of cheap Chinese knockoffs out there...

Yeah, thing is, people generally come here to learn about *real* surveillance equipment, not consumer-grade toys like these Loftek cams.

You're not likely to find *good* megapixel cameras for $500, especially not if you factor in per-camera costs of software licensing and cabling - yes, don't forget, unless the existing cameras are already using Cat5e and baluns, you'll have to either re-wire them, or use some sort of ethernet-over-coax adapters (expect to pay anywhere from $100-$400 per camera for these). You can easily get good analog cameras that work well with low light without requiring IR for that price... with hybrid DVRs, you'd be able to use the existing analog wiring and then add megapixel cameras along the way as required (or as budget permits). Are you looking for a system that can also be centrally managed over the internet? Things like remote viewing/playback, remote system management, health monitoring, etc.? If reliability is important, you may want to consider at the very least something that supports health monitoring - systems that will alert you if a remote site goes offline, if a camera loses video, if a DVR's performance is suffering or if it's not maintaining a set amount of storage, etc.

I thought I made myself clear, I dont use overpriced crap. So yeah I never used "this stuff". But to be fair, I have used crap like CNB, just not overpriced crap. The Avigilon 4 channel encoder, ENC-4P-H264, does D1, 30FPS per channel with audio, for less than the cost of a Geovision card with the same specs. Oh, but didn't you know? Geovision is crap too. Rory's all about the Dahua now.

who on earth uses that??? twist on BNC are as easy as 123. And if you don't do them just right, they fall off or give connection issues.

Live quality usually depends on whether the system is using hardware compression or overlay to display live, or if software compression is processing the video before it's re-rendered into a live display. The former will generally look better, but in most cases isn't terribly relevant since most of the time you're going to care more about the recorded video. As far as recorded quality, that will depend on a number of factors: resolution, codec type, compression level, and to some degree, framerate. The problem with "reviewing" these factors is that codec and compression/quality are all trade-offs and different settings will work better for different scenes. A review may look at a static scene with lots of soft shapes and declare that a certain codec on a certain DVR looks better, but someone else using that on a scene with lots of motion and sharp edges finds that it looks like crap and a different DVR using a different codec might look better for his needs. Also, there's a big trade-off with space usage and retention time: the higher the quality you record in, the more space it takes. Only you can decide whether that's an issue for you, but it is something you still need to consider. And BTW, the same trade-offs apply to megapixel: different codecs, different compressions for different uses... and the higher the quality, the more space it will take.

Actually, it works with a variety of devices, including Avigilon's 4 channel encoder, so you could use your $40 bullet cameras with it. The net cost of an encoder and one channel license wouldn't be much different than the cost of a higher end capture card, and you'd be able to use Avigilon software. Only problem is, the Avigilon encoder isn't compatible with twist-on BNCs... *ducking*

Anyone else think of these other threads when they saw the subject line of this one? viewtopic.php?f=1&t=21984 viewtopic.php?f=5&t=16013

Bandwidth is probably the biggest factor - most residential broadband has fast downstream but fairly limited upstream speeds. VMS could have an effect as well - if it's re-encoding the video to a smaller stream, that will take time to process and add some delay. Not necessarily - it depends on how many cameras you're trying to view/stream at once, and whether the VMS is re-encoding them to a smaller stream.

Of course. I have sites with probably 8 different brands of cameras on the same DVR. Nope. Analog cameras all output video using the same NTSC or PAL composite video standard - the DVR has no way of knowing who makes the camera (or whose name is on it, since a lot of cameras, cheaper ones especially, are all made in the same place and just have different names stamped on them). IP cameras of different brands tend to "speak" different dialects of the same language, but typically, you just need to make sure the DVR knows how to talk to that specific camera. I've got systems with three different brands of IP cameras on them and there are no issues.

Think about it again. Let's say you have one camera at each end of a north/south aisle. A customer enters from the north. The camera at the south end will see their face. If another customer enters the aisle from south. The camera at the north end will see their face. Maybe if they entered, turned around and immediately exited the aisle, it would be difficult to ID them but if they just walk less than 1/4 of the way down the aisle, their face will be ID-able. By the way, the cameras don't have to be at exactly the end; they can be maybe 1/8 to 1/10 of the way or so from the end. The closer they are to the center of the aisle, the less zoom they will need. However, the less the zoom, the longer the aisle will appear to be (people at the opposite end will appear smaller) and the less likelihood of ID'ing them. The key to this working well is to adjust the zoom so that the aisle width fills the horizontal frame at the halfway mark. The other issue is, the camera in the middle will have to be on a steeper angle when focused on the end. The further you move it from the target zone, the shallower the angle you can use, the more face and less bald spot you get. Remember, you're technically not concentrating on the center of the aisle, but on the far entrance to it.

Person still has to exit the aisle....

Yup - if that had been your average bullet cam, it would be looking in a completely different direction afterward... at the very least.

If the switch fails, your cameras are going down anyway, regardless of where they get their power.

its stupid, the first person to come into shot is criminal, the others are fine and the camera does not even look at them. The camera doesn't know that.

Terminators won't help. The system is looking for the presence of a video signal. Splitters are a bad idea, too - it will very likely result in a degraded picture for both cameras, so instead of one "100% quality" image of each, you'll get two "80% (or so) quality" images. The loss may or may not be noticeable... but I'd suggest just not bothering.

This will not work. At all. First and foremost, baluns do not turn analog cameras into network cameras. You use one on each end of the run to make a balanced signal over a wire pair... that's it. Given the above, everything else is moot, but just for reference: PoE switches require specific circuitry in the device being powered, that tells the switch there's a PoE device present and it should turn on power for that port (it may also tell the switch whether to use Mode A or Mode B power, and how much power the device will require). Hooking things up this way would NOT tell the switch to power that port anyway. Plus, your power/video balun would use different pairs for power than the PoE output, and the switch would probably detect a short, and not power the port either. And if it did, well... PoE spec is 44VDC, which would fry that camera in quick order. (Completely irrelevant at this point, but to answer the other part of the question: yes, a PoE switch would have plenty of capacity for these cameras - they only require 2.2W, and PoE spec allows up to 15.4W per port.) This setup WOULD work with IP cameras (no balun)...

There's also the benefit, if you use a managed switch, of being able to remotely power-cycle your devices (camera, phone, whatever).

That's not really a disadvantage of the concept, though... just a limitation of certain designs. And realistically, probably not an issue in most cases (I don't think any of the PoE cameras I've installed need over 4.5W or so, less than 1/3 of spec for 802.3af).

A lot of the DVD burners I've bought for the past few years have come with a CD that includes Nero 6 Express... I just install that (it doesn't seem to care that it's not being used with the brand of drive it shipped with). It's an older version, small, lightweight, works well... there's no need for all the bells and whistles with the newer version, so what's to stop you from continuing to use an old version?