Soundy

How important is your data? RAID 5 isn't overkill if it's critical that your data be able to survive a disk failure. RAID 0 and 1 don't provide any kind of redundancy. RAID 5 allows one drive to fail, and allows you to swap it out without losing any data. Most RAID 5 controllers also allow hot-swapping of the drives, which means NO downtime. We just put an Enhance Technologies RS8-IP rackmount enclosure on a site, loaded with eight 1TB SATA-II drives, and set up for RAID 5... 6.5TB of usable space (with system overhead and parity space), all hot-swappable. Drive dies, pop it out, put in a replacement, and it rebuilds the array automatically. I think the enclosure ran around $3k (without drives)... not bad for what it does and the reliability it provides.

Pelco makes a number of housings with heater/blower/thermostat assemblies that you could "pilfer" parts from. I've used both Pelco and Capture outdoor PTZ enclosures as well, that have their own heater/blower/thermostat units... some are less conducive to mounting off-brand cameras but it may work with others. Check out Pelco's DF5-P and DF8-P housings: http://www.pelco.com/products/default.aspx?id=168 "The DF5 Series pendant models mount directly to any recommended mount, flush to a ceiling, or to 1.5-inch NPT female threaded pipe and are available for indoor and environmental applications. All environmental versions include a sun shield and heater kit and are suitable for use in temperatures to -60°F (-51°C). Heavy-duty pendant models (DF5HD-PG) are strengthened by a thicker sun shroud and dual wall construction." http://www.pelco.com/products/default.aspx?id=169 "The DF8 Series pendant models mount directly to any recommended mount, flush to a ceiling, or to 1.5-inch NPT female pipe threads. They are available in a black or gray finish for indoor applications or gray only for environmental applications. The environmental domes include a sun shield and heater kit and are suitable for use in temperatures to -60°F (-51°C)."

That's the other issue - the more you record (higher framerates, higher resolutions, more sensitive motion detection), the more it loads your processor, AND your I/O channel. I've seen significant dropped frames on some systems that are underpowered for the amount of data the users are trying to push through. Or have it record ONLY on motion-detect. Decent systems will pre-buffer a definable number of seconds or frames, and will continue recording a definable amount of time after motion ceases as well, so you don't miss any of the action.

What are these for? An environmental camera enclosure? If so, first place I'd suggest is the enclosure manufacturer. Little hard to suggest anything else with such vague information.

Regular NTSC video (TV, DVD, etc.) is just a hair under 30fps (about 29.97, actually - google "drop frame" for more details, if you're really curious). In most cases though, even 15fps will appear to be smooth-flowing video (until you start getting into fast-moving objects). Dropping from 30 to 15 will approximately double your retention and most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference, or if they did notice a difference would have trouble figuring how or why it looks different. I'd even challenge that you would have a hard time telling the difference if you didn't know the setting had been changed Most systems we put in, we actually only run at 1fps, sometimes 2-3 for certain shots. For things like retail and fuel-service coverage, this is typically all that's really necessary.

There are some, but they tend to be fairly rare. Video Insight's analog system does support the Mozilla family and Safari but might be out of your budget range if you're looking at a 9 camera system. I do work for them, so feel free to take my words with a grain of salt. As a customer/user/reseller, I'll second that... we have a number of VI systems in place that clients are accessing with a variety of browsers, including "mobile" versions of IE, Mozilla and Opera on assorted mobile devices (Moto Q, HTC Touch, Palm Treo, etc.) Surprised Thomas didn't give you the link to their demo version: http://www.demovi.com

^Excellent advice, there... I got into CCTV coming from the IT field, just as my employer was getting into PC-based DVRs, so my skills were particularly attractive for him. Now that we've been moving into megapixel IP cameras, my networking experience has been even more valuable... to the point that we've "stolen" at least one major customer from my friend's employer, because the client wanted IP cameras, and the systems they sell don't have IP-cam support and nobody there (at least, nobody who has a say in things) cares to get into IP-based video. Access controls and alarm systems are more and more getting network support as well, so if you're making a jump from from IT, this is the perfect time to be doing it, because your current skillsets will be particularly valuable.

3.5 should improve that. Unfortunately the release date I have is....soon. Any idea what the upgrade path is going to be?

I've seen the Costco systems: one here on their website has a DVR and four cameras for a whopping $479. I routinely install cameras that sell for $450. Each. Without lens. It follows that a $450 camera is going to be better than a camera that you get as part of a full system that costs the same. Another Costco system I see is a DVR and 16 cameras for $3,800... one of the DVR lines we sell, the bottom-end machines alone sell for $4,000 (others they make sell in the $8,000-$10,000 range). The point is, you simply can't expect these low-priced systems to provide anywhere near the power, flexibility and quality of more expensive recorders and cameras. You wouldn't buy a Ford Matrix and expect it to have the gravel-hauling capability of a dump truck, or the raw speed of a $1.5M Indycar racer. It's pretty simple, really: you get what you pay for. If you're on a tight budget, there's nothing "wrong" with cheap Costco surveillance systems... just keep in mind that they are CHEAP. You won't get the detail, the clarity, the capacity, the low-light performance, or the features of higher-priced, professional-grade systems.

O RLY? I have PC-based DVR systems that have been in place and running solidly for 4+ years. I also have one site where they went through four separate standalone machines, each one either having serious issues or just dying outright, before we put in a PC-based system. There's no inherent reason either type of system is any better or worse from a reliability standpoint. A well-built PC DVR tends to have better cooling and thus less chance of hardware failure than a lot of standalone designs (and a cheaply-built PC will likewise be problematic). PCs have the advantage of being more easily upgradeable, especially for adding extra drive space. From my experience, the most common failures of PC-based DVRs are 100% user-caused, usually because someone is using the system for something OTHER than a dedicated DVR. I've rebuilt a number of machines that were infected with viruses and spyware because someone felt it necessary to check their porn sites on it, or use an unattended work machine for their torrent downloads. Another site, they kept calling because they'd come in to check video only to find nothing recorded... because someone was closing down the DVR software in order to use the machine for DVD authoring (because his home machine didn't have a DVD burner). Standalone machines have the advantage that they CAN'T be used for anything else... but a properly-built PC system can be locked down solid to the same end as well.

Vigil systems by CAMACC meet all your specs, and they have systems that will provide up to a full 30fps on each of 32 cameras. Keep in mind, though, that will chew up a LOT of space... I recently installed such a system in a restaurant: 32-channel system, 28 cameras total: 23 analog and five 1.3MP IP cameras. All but a couple analog cameras are capturing at 704x480 (4CIF), the IP cams are 1280x1024, and the cameras are averaging around 3fps recording (some 2, some 5, most 3). At that rate, 3TB was giving them a little over three weeks' recording... and they wanted 90 days, so we added a network-attached RAID with eight more 1TB drives - a RAID-5 setup provides an additional 6.5TB of storage. That's why you want to consider a RAID-5 array - if a drive fails, it can be hot-swapped without having to shut down the system. Viewing multiple machines would depend mostly on the client itself. The Vigil client allows you to configure multiple servers in one window, and define camera "groups" with a mix of cameras from multiple servers. Video Insight also makes a 32-channel server (or provides a 32-channel card and server software that you can build into your own PC) and allows multiple servers to be viewed simultaneously via the client; the drawback with their system is that the client is designed for LAN use and really doesn't work well over a WAN internet connection. Consider external RAID storage; for the above-mentioned install, we used one of these: http://enhance-tech.com/products/ultrastor/RS8_ip.html - along with eight standard off-the-shelf 1TB drives. Setup was easy and painless: mount the drives in the drive sleds, plug them into the rack, attach a computer to the configuration port and enter the web-based configuration, and follow the wizard to initiate it building the array. Once the array is built, plug one or both iSCSI ports into the network, add the iSCSI initiator to the DVR, fire up the Disk Management console, and *bam* 6.5TB of storage Note that this is all PC-based stuff, but for the specs you're after you're probably looking for something long those lines anyway... then again, you're not paying "a bit more" for this - you're probably looking at about $8k for that DVR, another $3k for the RAID rack, and then whatever price you get for whatever size drives you put in it (I think we got the 1TB drives for about $200 each, so there's another $1k6). On the bright side, the Enhance rack was less than half the price of anything else I found in its class...

Your client wants to display these cameras, but does he want to record them? If not, you don't even need a DVR, just some quads. For that matter, even if he does want to record, a single DVR and three basic quads would do the job nicely. Here's an example (not recommending this in particular, just an example I found). Most of these have video pass-thru inputs so you don't have to use splitters on your lines.

That's what marketing is all about Frankly, I've never run across a standalone DVR I've particularly liked, most of the ones I've run into have been pretty minimalist (read: cheap machines bought by cheap customers - no offense ) Some don't even provide a way to export video - you basically have to connect some other recording device (VCR or something) to its video output. One of exceptions has been a Digital Watchdog, but I can't speak to their networking capabilities. Usually by the time we get into that price range, it's getting close to the range of PC-based DVRs, which most people prefer (clicking a mouse is a lot easier than tapping your way through a bunch of menus with front-panel buttons). We deal mostly with PC-based DVRs; we build out own using Video Insight, and we sell and install Vigil systems, which are really excellent packages. VI has pretty decent tech support; Vigil's is typically really good and responsive.

Since you're just putting data onto the disc, presumably in whatever format/codec the DVR uses normally (MPEG-4, etc.), "DVD quality" is kind of irrelevant - it will still depend on the record settings of the DVR itself. Whether you export to CD-R, DVD-R, flash drive, external HDD, network, etc. will have no further effect on the quality of the exported footage. The only concern then for export media would be the space required - from the sound of it your clients are wanting to record at full resolution and full motion video framerates (30fps per camera), which even at MPEG-4 is going to take a fair bit of space.

I would expect so... they may also have an answer as to why the adapter isn't working. I've never dealt with them or seen any of their systems, but if there is an update available, that would be the only place to get it. Of course, their support may also be non-helpful or non-existent - I've certainly run into enough off-brand systems where that's the case (as well as a few big-name-brand systems *ahem*GE*coff*).

Yep, i come from a Cisco background so understand MDX. What is MDI? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_dependent_interface Sorry if you already mentioned this, but... you say you've configured the adapter using your desktop, but have you tried plugging it into the laptop when it's in the same location as the DVR? You say the wireless link light is out on the adapter, so maybe it's simply not getting signal from the router? The WLAN light on the router is irrelevant; all it's indicating is that WLAN is active, not necessarily that anything else is connected to it. I have an 8' rack in my computer room; my router, cable modem, desktop machine, two servers, and DVR are all in that rack, and all hard-wired

Okay, my bad... for some reason I was thinking this was a USB adapter or something... that's what I get for posting at 4am. Sorry. I doubt that would have anything to do with it - the problem would have to be in the connection between the adapter and the DVR, not between the adapter and router. Just a thought: are you using straight-through or crossover cables? The page I looked up for that adapter says to connect it to the network device with a "regular cat5 cable", but in order to plug the DVR straight into your laptop you'd need to us a crossover cable... UNLESS the DVR's ethernet port is already MDI to allow you to use a straight cable to a computer, in which case you'd need a crossover to connect the router to it. I dunno if that made sense (it almost doesn't to me when I re-read it) but in a nutshell: if you're connecting the DVR to the adapter with a straight-through cable, try it with a crossover cable instead. If it wasn't supported, they wouldn't release the firmware updates to the public. It's generally safe, as long as you follow their instructions.

Best way to do it, as you note, is plugging your DVR directly into your router. Short of that, if I follow correctly, your PC has a wireless connection to the router, as well as a hardwired connection to the DVR - in this case, you should be able to just bridge the connections, and allow the other machines on the network to see the DVR. The drawback to this method is that the others won't be able to access the DVR if your machine isn't running.

Yeah, as noted, video baluns ARE NOT network devices; they won't work through a hub or switch, and you can't assign them IPs. They typically consist of just a small transformer that takes the unbalanced video signal and makes it a balanced signal over the twisted pair, while the matching receiver balun takes the balanced signal and turns it back into unbalanced (thus the name, BALUN: BALanced/UNbalanced). Most will actually work over any pair of wires - speaker wire, station wire, Cat-3, etc; some just use RJ-45 jacks for the convenience of simply plugging in Cat-5 patch cables. Viewing your cameras from any networked PC means putting their signal on the network somehow, and that means either a network-capable DVR, an IP video server, or IP cameras. Any way you go, though, you have to run all your cameras to one point, be it a video server, a DVR, or a router. The video server box will work fine if all you want to do is view the cameras, but if you want to record them, you'll need a DVR anyway (or NVR for IP cameras), so the video server box becomes redundant.

No. Probably not. XB360 probably has some form of generic driver support for the adapter... I'm betting your DVR doesn't. Your only hope would be if there's a firmware update for the DVR that adds that driver... but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Well first of all, how much "control" are you after? Most software will allow you to zoom on the captured image, but it will get very blocky, very fast. If you want to actually control things like camera movement and optical zoom, you need a PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) camera, and those tend to be a lot more expensive. Which leads to the other question: how much are you expecting/planning/willing to spend?

Only other possibility I can think of is the video hardware or video driver... compare the brand/model/age of card in the machines that work vs. the machines that don't. One brand of DVR I deal with has a known issue with their remote client on machines with ATI cards: when you go to a PTZ camera, it opens up a separate little controller window; if you minimize the client and then restore it, the controller doesn't come back. On nVidia-equipped systems, it works fine; it's a known problem they have with ATI cards. The tech I talked to about it wasn't sure if it was hardware- or driver-related, but said the development people had a patch for it and it would be taken care of in the next release... In any case, point is, the problem could be specific to the video card. One suggestion: uninstall the video driver and reinstall it either from the bundled driver CD, or downloaded directly from the manufacturer's site. DO NOT allow Windows Update to update your video driver; DO NOT use a generic or third-party video chipset driver. (Rule of thumb: NEVER allow Windows Update to update ANY drivers; in my experience, 80% of the time it either doesn't work, or it breaks things.)

It's always possible the problem is simply the cheap hardware. For an experiment, try plugging a different type of video source, like a DVD player, directly into the card, see if it still has the same issues.

No, terminating the unused inputs will not (or SHOULD not) affect the problem on the other (if it does, there's something very screwy about the design of that card). Have you tried a new cable run? Even if you just string it across the floor for testing... could be a damaged cable, could be running too near a strong EMI source (lighting ballast, A/C compressor motor, etc.), could be bad connectors on either end...

Could be improper loading on the video feed. On my DVR, I split the camera lines off to run to my test bench, and when I connect them to a box I'm working on, one camera on the DVR jumps all over the place until I disconnect it. Maybe check if your DVR has termination options for the inputs ("Hi-Z" vs. 75-ohm), and if you're splitting the line off to something else, disconnect that.