jasauders

What for cameras were you running when you had ZM set up? I was doing 1280x800 @ 10 FPS (two of them) and it was pushing my quad core box pretty hard. I was able to run Motion with ease on a Raspberry Pi... something that I wouldn't even bother attempting with ZM, despite it sounding like it can operate on an Atom. My bigger issue with ZM was the fact that my cameras would just stop working and syslog would be littered with hundreds of lines of jibberish, which didn't really churn up any ideas via ZM forums, Google, etc. The only real suggestion was to increase the shared memory, which I did several times, but it changed nothing. That's when I switched to Motion, which despite the fact it's MJPG only and has no real GUI frontend, it's completely rock solid with reliability. It's so stable I just flat out don't even give it a second thought. I still frequent the ZM IRC channel though. There's a few guys in there who are discussing forking the code, simply because the main dev has been MIA for quite a long time. It sounds like ZM is far from dead, but also not quite fully resurrected yet. The only thing I really miss from ZM to Motion is having a montage layout of all of the cameras, but if you're not afraid of a little HTML/CSS coding you can slap together your own personal HTML page pulling in the MJPG streams relatively easily. I actually posted this on the Motion FAQ... My cams support multiple streams (4 total), so they're saving to the file server with H264 @ 20 FPS on one stream, meanwhile another stream is running MJPG @ 1 FPS... which is what the home made web page utilizes as well as Motion. That way I can pull up that web page on my 2nd monitor and keep an eye on things while I'm doing work on the main monitor. I know that dedicated DVR systems certainly have their benefits. In my case I already had a server running all the time, so having a second box running was kind of meh to me. For quite a while I was shopping around for DVR's and came within a single click of ordering a Dahua, but without a guarantee on whether or not my cameras would work with it, coupled with the no return policy, I bailed on that one pretty quick. Plus, with me being the nerd I am, I have my server configs backing up nightly. So if my server self destructs, I can simply dump the config files (which aren't even 1 MB if I recall) onto the new Linux box and be back and running in no time. Different strokes.

What are you using for motion detection? Your symptoms remind me of my first recording CCTV system a few years back, Zoneminder. While it was flexible, the motion detection sucked monkey balls. I could never find a good balance. The current Dahua box I have is nothing short of amazing. It actually picks up a black cat walking in very dark condtions. I'm constantly amazed by the little "real" stuff it is able to capture. Even my blinking Christmas lights didn't seem to trigger it. The only false positives I can't seem to work out a bushes swaying form the wind. I've used ZoneMinder in the past, but there's no way a ZM system would run on an Atom box... ZM itself requires some decent horsepower to run. I've spent most of my time using Motion, which seems far more stable than ZoneMinder. Motion runs as a daemon, which comes with a few pros and cons. It has no GUI, but it's disturbingly stable (haven't had a single hiccup in over a year), and runs as a daemon so it's super light weight. My problem isn't anything that can be solved by any specific motion detection gear unless I get some sort of heat sensors to detect actual people/animals instead of random objects. The wind blows leaves, motion. The cat walks by, motion. The branch casts a shadow on the driveway, and then the wind blows, motion. So many things beyond the control of a motion detection system is where I get false positives. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have too many feeds than not enough. But considering the magnitude of false positives that I got, recording 24/7 wasn't too much further off of the radar, hence why I gave it a shot. Here's what I resorted to doing. I run Motion on my nettop @ 1 FPS utilizing the "center" feature with a 10 second gap... Roughly translated, if you run by my camera for 7 seconds, it'll process 7 jpg's but only save jpg number 4 (center). This way I get minimal snapshots. This allows me to quickly identify based on a handful of snapshots if there's any reason for reviewing the actual feeds. Of course the majority of the time it's just a cat walking by or a bird or the sun or wind blowing leaves or whatever, but it's super nice knowing I have the full time feeds recording too. I don't know, just running Motion @ 1 FPS + full time recording just results in an all-but idle server, even though I'm effectively recording two streams @ 20 FPS each. I certainly have no complaints. I have my snapshots for quick review, I have my video feeds for a mucher smoother video based "whenever-I-want review", and it's all running on a watt sipping box double-sided-taped to my home made patch panel on the wall.

Currently I'm recording at 20 FPS @ 1280x800, mostly because I wanted to see exactly how many days I could get out of a higher FPS setup with my existing HDD space, mostly based out of curiosity. I really wanted to retain higher FPS feeds since with my H264 cams they seem so fluid. I used to think lower FPS levels were just bad quality, but I think that largely came out of MJPG feeds. Most of the cameras I've used that were MJPG based (which is more than 1, but not exactly dozens upon dozens) seem to be a bit more inconsistent, because there are times where the feed feels like it's more like 8 FPS one second and .5 FPS the next second. Things with MPEG4 and H264 just seem much more consistent even at a lower FPS level. Having that high of quality feeds is super nice, but it definitely takes a toll on HDD usage. For fun when I get home I may downclock it to 5 FPS or something to compare. My train of thought was if I can get at least 3 days of recordings out of it, I'd be happy. If anything is missing or damaged I should absolutely notice it at my own house within 3 days, so that's what I went with. Using bash scripts with the "find" command along with cron'ing the job at midnight it keeps the feeds automatically rotating in a "out with the old in with the new" fashion. I've heard of a feature like that open eye before. It definitely sounds interesting, but I'm sure it's still taxing on the CPU to some degree because the CPU would have to be doing continual calculations to determine motion vs no motion. That's one thing I do like about the 24/7 recording since it requires so little processing power since it's one continual flow, which has its benefits when you're trying to use as little electricity as possible by utilizing a low powered Atom based server. I used to consider getting a DVR/NVR until I realized I could just get a fat HDD and continue 24/7 feeds for a fraction of the cost of a DVR/NVR (which often doesn't come with a HDD to begin with...). SSDs are pretty solid, I must say. While I'm not sure I'd trust my life to an SSD with critical data, there's something to be said about their reliability (so far) versus HDDs. That said, if I'm hurting on dishing out money on a 3TB HDD, you can bet how badly I'm hurting on the thought of purchasing a 500GB SSD. It is re-assuring that you guys share a similar outlook on this. I'm currently moving my feeds over to the internal 2.5" HDD, which is where the feeds will be housed from here on out. That should allow a bit more breathing room with backing up my more important data on the external drives.

I'm trying to balance the importance of different files. I do 24/7 recording, which is nice because there are things that motion detection just struggles with picking up. I'm either not able to catch the cat on my deck or else I'm picking up events from every little finch that flies by. It's just hard to get a balance between false positives vs not sensitive enough. Not to mention, 24/7 recording uses substantially less processing power, which is super nice for somebody like me who runs an Atom based nettop as their server like I do. My setup is with the above mentioned nettop running Ubuntu Server 12.04.1. It runs various services, such as Subsonic music streaming, Samba file services, etc. Since my cameras support recording-to-NAS (via Samba), it makes things significantly nicer for me because I don't necessarily need an NVR/DVR as I can utilize my existing server which sips energy to begin with. The only crossroad I run into is the hard drive space, which comes with the territory of any 24/7 recording setup. I have three 500GB drives... one internal 2.5", and two external 3.5". Currently my feeds are saving to external A and rsync to external B once a night, which takes about 45 minutes. Since I have a lot of pictures and documents I want to back up, and because I'm not sure I value the home CCTV feeds are needing 24/7/365/absolutely-no-questions 110% uptime, I'm halfway thinking about moving the feeds to the internal 500 and not backing them up anywhere... then just utilize the two external drives for pictures, documents, etc. That would give the two cameras a full 500GB of room, allowing me to save upwards of 8-9 days of 24/7 feeds (whereas now I only save 3 because external A 500GB is pretty full of other things that need backed up). The only downside is... if the internal drive tanks, then I lose whatever feeds I have. However, even if I kept them synchronizing, if external A dies before it syncs to B then I just lost that days feeds anyway. Perhaps it's less of an issue than I originally realized? Perhaps surveillance on the internal 500 and other data on the external 500 with external B being a direct nightly backup will be the way to go? Anyway, I was just curious what you folks did. Thanks for the insight and/or listening.

I've always been interested in CCTV, just because it's a way to have remote eyes on a specific location for a secure reason. When we bought our first house this past year I was beyond excited. It's a great neighborhood but it doesn't mean it's a free-to-be-naive card either. I set up two cameras, one out front and one in the back. Both sides of my house are entirely covered by these massive massive bushes, so front/back was more than sufficient. I order a lot of stuff online and I often do IT work on the side, which sometimes requires me to buy parts for somebody. The last thing I want is to take a loss because somebody decided they wanted the mysterious brown box on my porch more than I did. My system is exceptionally simple. My cameras just save their 24/7 recorded feeds right to my NAS over Samba. (I'll never buy cameras that don't have this support built in again) No need for a DVR/NVR, just a straight up simple file server which I already had prior to getting CCTV to begin with. We have our first child on the way now, and already I'm feeling the protective side of me kicking in more than I've ever felt before. We're going to have a family soon... so you can bet I'll do whatever I can to ensure everybody is safe at all times. It's very reassuring to simply roll over, wake up my phone and see instantly what might have caused that noise outside.

Hm, that's disappointing. I really had higher hopes for the Y-Cam and the Mole. I wonder why they would restrict the H264 stream to only utilize within their app? Is this some sort of actual restriction or just some crap that they're pulling off? My Vivotek's can pull the H264 stream... anywhere. It doesn't matter I can pull it through Totem, VLC, etc. I'm exceptionally hesitant about getting another Foscam. After seeing the reports of the awful audio from the one I have (8918) and seeing Foscam devs say "yes we're working on it" since back in January 2012 and NO fix yet, I just don't trust them anymore. That being said, if there is a decent Foscam with exceptionally amazingly awesome epic reviews and the audio is spectacular and the price is right and I can pull H264 through VLC with audio and it's perfect... I might consider it. EDIT - Man... the price of the 9821 is super attractive when you consider the features. 160 bucks for all of that? Plus they specify in the release notes: Improved audio and reduced static on microphone. If that's true and the audio is actually not terrible... we might have a winner.

Good call. Did you get those gizmos in the mail today? I saw some people saying the Astak had blurry motion images, kind of made me a little about it... curious to hear what you think though.

Have you by chance considered a Wansview camera? I just found the Wansview NCZ540w and 550w. I'm unable to find any direct reviews of them though, but their specs vs price look decent.

The Astak looks very good judging by the reviews. There's only one little tiny thing that would make this camera a monumental fail to me... - 2 Way Audio only works with Internet Explorer on PC. Any time I see a company only support IE like this, I normally walk away immediately. I use Linux systems at home for many reasons, so naturally this would be a dead end. I would however consider this camera still if the audio/video works fine in VLC, which is the primary way I'd be utilizing the camera to begin with. If it is literally IE only no matter what, no questions asked, no way to work around it, period, then I'd keep looking around for a more suitable cam. That being said, the H264 is also a nice touch, especially considering the price... It'd be a real shame if this didn't fly in VLC. I'm anxious to hear what you find (literally) with these cameras. If you can give VLC a test drive too that would be awesome!

I'd have to agree there. I think the reviewer sounded relatively inexperienced, because I have yet to find a night vision camera that looks downright amazing at night without adding a ton of IR LED lights to the field of view. I tried to be informative without coming across as a prick. That being said, the Polaroid turned me off once I couldn't find it on their site as well... I'm super curious to hear what you have to say about the Y-Cam... crossing fingers here.

I'm failing to see why anybody wouldn't want to have eyes on their newborn at all times. Based entirely out of the security of the child, it only makes sense. If the child were a 17 year old we'd be having an extremely different conversation. Considering the fact that the HTPC is on the other side of the house, along with the fact if I'm downstairs working in the office I'd never hear any fussing upstairs, it only makes sense to utilize a solution that allows for flexibility - something a computer/VLC or Android/IP Cam Viewer provides. That way I don't have to worry about if I'm outside on the deck, downstairs working, watching something on the HTPC, etc. I'm always connected and available.

I see. I do intend to utilize computer systems though for monitoring, but that might be the IT guy in me speaking out. My plan is to put some sort of a netbook or my Raspberry Pi in the bedroom. This will run 247 at night so if we hear something we can look up and quickly see on the screen what the little one is doing. Since our HTPC is, of course, built on a computer, I intend to have a similar setup there so we can quickly see what's up if it's nap time and we're out watching TV. On top of that, my office is downstairs, but I'm surrounded on 3 sides by a desk with 5-6 LCD monitors. It's a geek's heaven... so naturally I'll have a screen going so I can see what they're doing when I'm downstairs working on projects. That said, for my mobile solution I'm just going to utilize IP Cam Viewer Pro on the Android platform (phone & tablet). I already have DDNS set up, so I'll likely use that full time whether I'm on the LAN or not (I already have that set up for my two IP8332's I use for outdoor surveillance).

LOL - I like your style! I'll surely be keeping an eye on my PMs. I am curious... how do you intend to utilize this camera for monitoring? Are you just going to pull the MJPG stream over VLC or something?

That price is more like it, however I'll have to talk to the wife first. We just got ourselves rocked this Christmas so dumping 100 bucks when the baby won't be here till August might be asking a lot. I would certainly trust Y-Cam sooner than many other brands out there if I was forced to pick one on a whim. I also love how the Y-Cam is listed as NAS ready. I love it when cameras have the capability to write to Samba shares. It just makes life so much easier if you need to do any recording (assuming you don't want to dish out for an actual NVR/DVR system). My Vivotek IP8332's are saving 247 around the clock to my Ubuntu Server nettop... love it.

I'm beginning to get frustrated enough with this hunt that I may just blindly purchase a camera and see how it goes... of course, one that isn't a Foscam or any sort of clone. There are so many clones it's the definition of a pita to find something different. Ultimately I think I'll just be looking for something that is physically very different from the Foscam I have, as that would significantly lessen the chance of a direct clone. I hear you on the PT options too, but I think I'm going to pass on them. I really haven't ever used the PT functions of the Foscam I have, but in my case whenever I've placed the camera, it's always been in a corner far enough that I can see the entire room to begin with. Plus once you introduce PT it begins ramping up the price and/or sacrificing other features/quality of the camera, unless you're prepared to dish out bigger bucks. When I was looking a while ago, I was particularly interested in a Y-Cam as well as a Tenvis. I know nothing about the Tenvis, but I heard a few people report good experiences with them... however nobody directly commented on their audio. I was interested in these because they are vastly different from the Foscam/clones I was seeing littering the internet. http://www.y-cam.com/y-cam-black-s/ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1EF0H19589&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleMKP&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleMKP-_-pla-_-NA-_-NA The price of the Y-Cam is a little steep for what you get, imo. Wireless b/g, 640x480 @ 230 bucks? Eh. But hey, if it's a home run, it's a home run. On the flip side, the price of the Tenvis, if anything, has me nervous. 60 bucks seems far too good to be true... Meh. EDIT - I'm now looking into the Polaroid IP200 and IP300 camera. They seem to be available for 80 and 90 dollars respectively. The specs seem to be a little more uplifting in terms of the way they talk about audio: "The Polaroid IP-300 has a high quality intercom system with built-in microphone and speaker" ...but I'm also no sheep who will take a spec sheet as the gospel. I'm trying to find reviews on it now... but so far it seems to be slightly differently designed, suggesting it may not be a direct clone of the Foscam. I do however find it a little off-putting that it's not listed anywhere on the Polaroid site, and it seems as if it's largely available on target.com and amazon... Hmm...

I could, but the Raspberry Pi's come with an inherent issue though, seeing as though they are hard wired. I've heard that you can get wireless adapters for them, but I'm not sure I'm all that interested in it considering both USB ports and the NIC are bound under the same singular USB bus, so speed issues are inevitable except for ultra light duty things (part of the reason why I moved the RaspPi off of being my server). The command I got wasn't necessarily a command not found, but when I Googled around, RaspiForums included, I got nothing. Overall, I really cannot put into words how much I'd rather just get a new camera and use that... After all, to utilize a client for the RaspPi you need to deal with SSH things, which is great, but I want this to be easy for myself and my wife. Being able to utilize a standard wireless camera would be the best of all worlds 100 times over again, because that way we could easily set it up from our phones, HTPC, laptops, etc., that way we've have multiple baby monitor who can tap into the wireless camera just like that.

I'd do 150 if someone told me "hey I used this camera personally and the audio is pretty clear." I just can't put into words how terrible my Foscam audio is, and considering my Foscam is a clone of 100 other manufacturers it makes it feel like a null point to begin trying others on a hunch. I just don't really care to do 300, because at that point I'd rather bail on the idea and use an audio based monitor with the Foscam I have... 640x480-ish, PTZ isn't necessary, IR of some sort (it'll be short range, so even a miniscule number of IR lights would be good. Can it be done?

I actually have two Raspberry Pi's, and I followed those EXACT instructions before I posted here, however I got held up on the last step as: arecord -D plughw:1,0 -f dat | ssh -C user@remoteip aplay -f dat threw an error about not being found or something like that. I had changed all of the parameters for the ssh section too, so I eventually gave up on that. Anyway... camera with audio that isn't terrible... is this a lost cause all together?

I suppose it's always an option, but I'm ebaying right now and I'm only finding old IP based desk phones and cell phones. I'm not seeing any sort of IP based two way system. Given that scenario, part of me is just leaning towards using the camera for video and an old school audio-only baby monitor as the audio. It'd just be nice to have both things integrated into one unit, and it is beyond frustrating to find so many cameras downright suck with providing even mediocre audio quality.

Oh man, that's one expensive baby monitor... I'm more curious about the 100 dollar range, maybe up to 150 if at all possible. Hasn't anybody tinkered with anything like that with better-than-awful audio?

I'm looking around for different ideas regarding an NVR to utilize with network based cameras. These cameras are POE cameras running on CAT 6. I have POE injectors on the line to turn the cameras on which simply return more CAT 6 wires to the switches for data, but like I said, they're RJ45 at the end. Most of the NVR's I've looked at only had one RJ45 installed as an uplink for the network, with the cameras hooking up through what appears to be an analog port. I have no idea, just getting in to CCTV and since I'm an IT guy IP cameras feel at home with me. Are there any that you folks would recommend for this instance? H264 is preferred, and hard drive size/preinstall doesn't matter as I have a 3.5" 1TB HDD here I could use. I'm open to all ideas, preferably priced on the lower end (can this be done for 100? 200? 500? I have no idea what to even aim for). I see these lower end setups including 8 cameras for a few hundred bucks. I know the cameras aren't top quality but I can't help but to think, maybe a half decent NVR with no HDD would go for that? I just have no idea what to aim for, so any/all help is appreciated. Thanks! EDIT - Now that I found one or two NVR's with ethernet ports, it looks like their prices are shooting up in the thousands. Youch, no thanks. Is all hope lost? EDIT II - I was doing some looking around and came across the Dahua NVR 3204. This looks perfect for what I'm after. The ony disappointing thing is a review I read said while it works with other cameras that in their case (axis camera) it didn't work that well. I'm using Vivotek cameras. I wonder how this would work?

So I've found a few things out that I wanted to relay back here. The onboard Vivotek motion detection that's on the web interface of the cameras themselves isn't anything I'd consider a high quality feature by any stretch of the imagination. Once you do get everything set up (I used network server, along with the video clip media as the recordings for motion detection), there's a lot of limitations that leave a lot to be desired. For example, the maximum size you can set for a motion detected clip is 4 MB. I actually thought this was sarcasm at first. 4 MB @ 1280x800/30 FPS is about 5-7 seconds at best. Sure, I can lower the FPS, but it's still far from optimal. On top of that, there's a break in between each clip where the camera has to process end of clip 1, beginning of clip 2, etc. I have to wonder if the 4 MB limitation is a result of the break time, because the camera needs to process the feeds it's seeing. As a result, if you dance around in front of your camera for 30 seconds, you're likely to see: 5 seconds of footage 5-8 seconds of downtime while the camera crunches the feed 5 seconds of footage 5-8 seconds of downtime while the camera crunches the feed Some people may only be after catching mere glimpses of motion detect, but I don't consider this to be all that usable for my uses since a single feed is A) far too short and B) the downtime in between each feed while the camera does the processing is too significant. There are other media options though, where I can utilize jpg screenshots instead of actual video feed. This too is limited at 7 shots per detect, but I have a feeling it would be significantly better in terms of usability vs the video clip recordings. I, however, wanted video clip recordings, so I didn't even explore this option. This is where the tech I was speaking to (who was crazy awesome to deal with... love Vivotek support) said this is one area where a dedicated NVR would help out, since a dedicated box of course comes packaged with the CPU power to handle things like this (which of course makes total sense). I informed him that the Vivotek NVR's are quite a bit out of my price range (I think they start at 800 or 900), and on top of that, until Vivotek makes their ST7501 NVR software for Linux, I won't be using it. I hate to sound unreasonable or stubborn about utilizing something other than Linux software, but all of my services I use work on Linux out of a single box, which means in order to use the Vivotek NVR software, I would need to set up a secondary box JUST for NVR purposes, which requires a whole separate box, Windows license, etc. No thanks. Instead I decided to just do full time recording, which works absolutely brilliantly. It uses significantly less processing power, so pulling 30 FPS H264 @ 1280x800 is extremely fluid. Two cameras on the LAN using my Raspberry Pi as the Samba file server, it barely sees 1.5 MB/s with both cams running full bore with excellent quality settings... all the while the Rasp Pi's CPU usage is all but idle. The cameras at least name the files based on date, time, etc, which makes identifying the feeds easy. There are limitations on the 247 recordings too, but it's limited to 10 minutes or 300 MB, whichever comes first. Granted, running continual streams like this around the clock is going to take a toll on disk space, but once I drop it to 10 or 15 FPS I should be able to get quite a few days out of my current 500GB hard drive. Not to mention, I'd rather spend 300 bucks on massive hard drives to use with full time recording on a very efficient box like the Rasp Pi versus spending 800 on a dedicated box powerful enough to handle motion detect. Plus I'm finding the other uses I had for my regular Linux server is working fine on the same Rasp Pi, so I just may be able to utilize my Rasp Pi for all of my server uses and keep the main server offline. This would be great from a power efficiency standpoint... but there again, all of this is just my 2c. At the end of the day, I'd love to have motion detection, but the more that I see what kind of processing power it takes, coupled with the efficiency I currently have of the cameras doing 247 recording and the Pi being my server, I have to say I'm quite happy with this setup.

Has anybody here mix-and-matched any other brands of cameras with Dahua NVRs? I'm trying to find some more information about this, as I have cameras already but I am really interested in the Dahua NVR. The lack of a return policy and the lack of accessibility to test it before hand is really killing this deal for me. I've heard people use ACTi cameras with success, but I've also heard people using Axis cameras with limited success (it works, but no motion detect features, etc.). Has anybody here tried any other cameras to comment on? Perhaps with Vivoteks?

Well, I was gung ho about the Dahua unit, but it seems as if it's had some issues with some non-Dahua devices. Makes me wonder what NVR's out there I could possibly utilize that aren't Vivotek branded to hook up to my cameras. Vivotek's cheapest system is 800 something dollars for a 4 channel. Yeah, no. I know NVR's are typically pretty pricey but I'd stick with my MJPG solution that's currently working on my Linux server before I drop that kind of cash. Are there any other NVR's out there that are comparable to the Dahua in price and features, but perhaps there's another brand out there with better compatibility? Or perhaps somebody knows of a software package for Linux besides Zoneminder and Motion that I could look into? EDIT - Not giving up yet... That Dahua is still on the radar and is Onvif 2.0 compliant. I've contacted Vivotek to see what they've had to say on the subject in terms of Onvif support with their cameras. Has anybody out there by chance tried to mix/match Dahua with Vivotek? So far the only reported inconsistency I heard of was with Dahua NVR's and Axis cameras. Another user I read about is using ACTi cameras with seemingly no issue. But, of course, it still leaves the question in the air for Vivotek. Any takers?

Hey there. Where exactly did you find a Dahua NVR for 200? I have several HDDs laying around so I was hoping to get an affordable NVR and Dahua has come on the radar several times, but I have not found any for less than 400-500.