Digiscan

I'm not an expert. However, I know a bit about networking, and I think you're going to find it frustrating to record remotely with good resolution and/or reliability over a residential grade internet connection. A single 2 MP video recording can easily be 1 MB/second, which would require a 10 Mbps upload speed--pretty rare for residential to have an upload speed that fast (mine is 1 Mbps). You'll want to record your actual event footage to a local drive at the premises on a LAN, preferably everything wired. You can certainly access the cameras remotely and view real-time at a lower resolution or frame rate from 50 miles away on those cameras. You could also then pull footage from your at-premises drive; I've done that today. My camera records at a rate far quicker than my internet connection can tolerate, but since it's motion triggered in any given hour I may only have a couple of minutes of video, which my slow internet connection can catch up on during the down periods. EDIT: I wrote this while the other two were writing. All our responses are the same more or less!

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For a camera set up with a pretty good field of view (e.g. 3.6 mm lens), what sort of money needs to be laid down for the clarity needed to read a plate on a moving car (normal residential speeds) at 50-60'? I don't think this is simply a resolution matter, as a good 1 MP image can easily beat a bad 2 MP image, thanks to lens and image processing differences. I assume at least a grand to reliably do this if not two, and maybe more, and I assume further that doing this also at night requires yet more money.

In point of fact I'd not thought of the difference when I posted, so I appreciate both views on this

I am more conservative 75 pix minimum per foot even day time So it sounds like we're looking at 15-20 megapixel images! That can't be cheap. I guess a good way to test this would be to take one with my 16 MP camera and see what it looks like, though its field of view is quite tight.

Thanks! I think OP will value this, too, so wasn't quite a thread-hijack buellwinkle I did get this camera to connect in PSS just now. This is using late-July firmware for the camera and the default port and password. I've not tried anything like playback or whatever, but the camera is connecting and streaming real-time.

My false positives are a lot better today. The default for this camera is CBR and I think it works a lot better than VBR. On variable bit rate I get a lot of flickering at the bottom of the screen, which isn't there on CBR at all. The only false positives i'm having today are clouds moving over my detection area. I do believe that a better detection algorithm could be designed to ignore cloud movements, but it's not a huge deal. I think I've keyed in pretty close what I want to grab all movement without over-blowing it.

Don't forget that dahua you recently reviewed, too Maybe this is another thread, but I'm not clear on how something like Mobotix with its decentralized software (meaning the camera is autonomous and does not require centralized DVR) differs from other cameras, many of which can record themselves. I suppose it must come down to features and management of the videos/jpgs? That Dahua you reviewed, for example, requires no PC monitoring anything for its basic recording features. All it needs is an FTP drive somewhere to stick its data on. OP, what you describe is what I have. Router with laptop wirelessly connected and a POE switch providing power to a Dahua camera, which is independently monitoring everything and recording to an FTP server hosted on this PC. If the PC goes down I lose recording, but only because the PC is hosting the FTP site. If the FTP was hosted no a NAS drive, then the PC is totally out of the equation.

Great, thanks! Have you noticed the brightening/darkening in real-time that I mentioned, throwing off false motion events?

I suppose the pros around here will ask what your budget is: $100 or $1000

Goldserve, any update on this? Is that FTP rename problem still in play? If so, once the camera releases the file can you manually rename it and still get it to work? My firmware is late April (I got your firmware but haven't installed yet) and my FTPs are being renamed properly. I have had some issues with motion detection. I have a zone trained right now on the road, and the sensitivity required to trigger an event based on cars often also triggers an event without any movement. I know why: When I watch the camera it occasionally brights/darkens the image very slightly and this apparently can fire the motion detection event. I've also noticed while watching real-time AND in the videos that are recorded that sometimes at the bottom of the screen is a fuzzy flicker about every 1-2 seconds (looks like ultra high compression, but just at the bottom). JPEGs saved to the FTP at the same times as these flicker events are 100% clear without the problem. Anyway, in short it looks like I'll end up with a bunch of extra data I don't want, since I'd rather save media that has no real movement in it than risk losing stuff that does.

Many POE switches don't have a POE power budget to support 15.4W on all ports at the same time, so you have to look at what the full set of cameras will draw. Also, many don't support POE on all ports. For instance, the Netgear FS726TP mentioned above is 24 ports, 12 are POE, and it and has a 100W POE budget, so you can only average 8.3W per POE port. Individual ports will support the full 15.4W, but that reduces the total power budget for the rest of the ports. Another example, the Trendnet TPE-S44, which is one of the cheaper switches with POE has 8 ports, 4 that are POE for a total budget of 30W or 7.5 per port if running all four. Individual ports are capable of 15.4, but at that draw only two ports at once. A modest camera without IR illuminators may draw only a few watts so one could theoretically run four at a time on something like that Trendnet switch.

I was going to say the same. Even if you get a remote FTP host and enough gigs of capacity that you can store a decent bit of info you'll still face the possible issues (speed and reliability) with uploading to this remote site. A lot of network attached storage (NAS) drives (you can find on Amazon) also have built in FTP servers. I believe I've seen wireless NAS drives. With such a thing you could basically hide it anywhere in the house, plug it into a socket somewhere, and unless a thief finds it you're good. However, I wouldn't trust the wireless on them indefinitely, so you're best getting a wired NAS drive and sticking it in a closet, or in the basement hidden behind old boxes or something like that. You could even have a portion of the cable seeming to run into a wall, which would hint to a thief that there's no way they are ever going to find it. That way if your thief is smart (99% of them are total morons, though) and tries to follow from your router or switch to the NAS drive (if he even has any idea that he's been filmed and that a NSA drive may be somewhere) if he sees a cable running off into finished wall he'd have to burn down the house to avoid the footage being reclaimed by you

I trust Amazon reviews with some caveats. A highly popular item is likely to have a lot of quality reviews. I totally trust Amazon, btw. I've seen some products with horrendous reviews, and I've not ever witnessed behavior of Amazon manipulating reviews. I've personally reviewed 200+ products on the site. Some other items, particularly those sold by third party sellers, may be lacking in reviews and/or appear to be padded by company shills. So the problem isn't Amazon, it's their reviewers. Unfortunately, cameras like a pen camera are dead on in that territory. You can go to Amazon and you will not find one well reviewed. If it is well reviewed it's probably nonsense; click on the reviewers' "other reviews" and often there aren't any. Pen cameras seem to me to be like dash cams: there are few good ones and the market is mainly saturated with cheap garbage that isn't worth a penny. At least with dash cams you've got 95% cheap worthless trash and then 5% that's good--and you'll pay through the nose for it. Not a ton of middle room necessarily.

Amateur home type here. I put my first camera in this week. I've looked into home surveillance a little in the past but the price was always too high until now and quality always too low, so I never bothered. I live in a very safe place but every once in a while somebody on my neighborhood facebook group posts about strange behavior by somebody in a car (and we've had a couple of break-ins over the years, but I think only to cars in driveways or garages) and it seems that nobody in the entire darn 'hood happens to be looking at the window during broad daylight as these vehicles move around. That won't happen again. I don't want to read that a "red sedan" was parked and staring at a kid for a while or "a Jeep" was looking in people's garages. Now I'll be able to tell you what time it drove by, the exact make and model, and a half decent image of the driver.

Can't speak to the timeline, but you're right. DropcamHD already does this for all its users--literally everything is streamed up to their servers. As time goes on cameras will either drop in price or get much better (or both); a $100 camera will have a multi-megapixel clear image and be wireless and reliable

Terrible video quality for sure, but yeah I think this guy was up to something else, frankly. Probably going to rob the place and didn't realize she was home until he looked around.

I have to know, what exactly do you mean by this? Does he drive a truck around in the mud? Fling it like a pig? Sorry I can't opine on the cameras, but your neighbor sounds interesting.

If you want to use the camera to try and solve a crime, hide them. If you want to prevent it happening, make them visible. On a typical suburban street I am assuming that most houses have similar levels of valuables and the one with the camera just has a guy who likes to protect his stuff, so makes him a really bad target! There is a residential house near me with a bullet on the end of the garage and I think it looks terrible, FWIW. Domes are better, hidden under eaves and things, just for aesthetic purposes, even if not preventative.

I tried that, but I have less of a reseller/distributor and more of a guy just selling it online, so I don't expect even that level of support. Thanks again

Excellent, much appreciated. I spent a while last night looking and nobody had firmware for this. I have an April build of firmware and my FTP is simply not firing, no matter what, though I'm hopeful it's a network issue (will know tonight). EDIT LATER: Yep, that was it, a network issue, FTP firing now. Is there a way to backup the current firmware? I know the web client has backup, but I assume it's for web config.

For $100 there really aren't any nice IP cameras. Probably the most common in that price range are the Foscams on Amazon, Ebay, etc., but they aren't megapixel, and the cameras have so many features in them that they don't really do any single thing particularly well. From my research the best camera close to that price is possibly the $150 Dropcam HD. It's a genuine HD camera. Very small, wireless. The most glaring drawback of it is that you only get real-time monitoring with it unless you pay $9.99/month, which then gives you history and what not of your vids. I've seen some sample vids and they are pretty decent. There are lots of reviews on Amazon. The benefit to it is that its setup seems absolutely drop-dead idiotically easy--and reliable. No need to mess with port forwarding, IP assignment, firewalls anything like that. It handles everything for you and is constantly streaming its HD stream to the Dropcam servers (60GB/month!). There are now megapixel IP cameras in the $150-200 range, but they aren't necessarily for the faint of heart: you won't have responsive US-based support for them. There may be exceptions to the above; Full disclosure I'm a total newb in this stuff but have been reading up on it for a few months. As mentioned, prices are coming down fast. When I joined this site in September I think that the Vivotek 8332 1 MP camera was about the cheapest megapixel IP cam and now approximately the same amount of cash will get you a 2 MP from somebody like Dahua.

This is one of Dahua's resellers and they have a guide on their site for the activex settings--give them a shot. http://empiresecuritycameras.com/?p=184

Your link isn't working for me...

There are some but they can be tricky to find at times. If you're looking for a virginia.gov type link that clearly outlines what you can do I don't think you'll find it. Instead, you can find specific laws against behavior and legal precedent. It's all tricky, and this is why we have so many lawyers. I've googled this a good bit and my essential understanding is that video and audio have different laws. Audio is much stricter. I don't think it's clear that you can set up a microphone even on your front step, since it can record people's conversations elsewhere. Video however you should be able to record ALL of your property, external and out. A huge exception to this is where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy, e.g. a bathroom: you cannot have a hidden camera over recording your visitors in the bathroom. It also appears, though with less certainty, that you can record a public space. Obvious exceptions would be setting up a camera in front of the white house, but recording a public road next to your house as part of your frame should be fine. You can search for, and ask for free, legal questions of bonafide attorneys here: http://www.avvo.com/free-legal-advice They have a lot of questions in there on surveillance cameras. Finally, you asked for Virginia. Here you go: http://piava.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/surveillance-photos-privacy-what-is-the-law/ Also http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+18.2-386.1 The summary gist I glean from what I've read is that as long as a person isn't being a buffoon, they can set up a camera to their heart's content on their own property. If your neighbor's house is in-frame I think you want to black out any area that's pointing into a door or window. It's obviously not kosher to be zomming in through their living room window.