blakem

You are right, if you aren't going to buy anything and just want to view their pricing then registering your home address does not make sense.

You can browse their products but to see acurate pricing you must log in which means you must first register. It looks like their pricing is driven by purchase volume so that is why you must log in since that pricing is variable. There is a hardware store in my area that sell items by part number since everyone that walks through the door pays a different price. It is annoying since you cannot see the price on anything until you checkout, but that is just how it works.

ACTi has local storage on some models. Look at TCM-7811 or KCM-7111 for example. I also agree if you are spending money on new cameras why gamble on using an indoor rated camera in an outdoor location.

I can see the mailboxes, and the pathway to the door, but somebody standing at the door I would only see the top of their head and its like you mentioned before with the sunlight washing out faces. Its not ideal but the way I have it pointed at the door I will at least be able to see who and how many people are there. I will probably put a camera on the far right side of the porch, it will either cover the mailboxes or I can point it at the rest of the front porch. I am facing a similar problem with the camera at my front door. If it were me I would search for a dome that has a wide dynamic range(WDR) that you can replace it with someday in the future. Being analog it should not be too expensive. It will give you the in your face view without being quite in your face like the bullet.

"FontDoor", I like it! I think it looks like what you got would give you something for a minimum investment. To optimise it, you may want to go walk around the car, mailbox and front door to see how a person looks in the scene as you adjust the cameras. The driveway view is nice that it gets the mailbox as a bonus but if it means cropping out someone on the driver side of your car it may not be worth it for example. You just got to test it and keep adjusting its location and angle until you are happy with it. Even with all that though i have found the real test comes as visitors approach your property since they won't be posing for the camera.

I don't think a fisheye in that location would be of much use. I suppose the idea is one fisheye dome would look better aesthetically than a couple of bullets and be less expensive, but I dont think it will give you much useful information. If you look at a demo of a fisheye, objects on the horizon are compressed or distorted and lose too much resolution. They can be useful in some situations but I don't think this is one. I think you first need to determine what are your goals. It is my understanding that you place cameras for two reasons. To protect a specific asset or to get an ID of a person or vehicle at a choke point. A good system would have a mix of both. If all you want to know is if someone walked by the side of your house a fisheye may work fine for that, but I think that is all it would really provide to you. Just thought of one more thing. In an outdoor environment like this you will probably have one side of the house in sunlight and one side in shadow which will make the exposure hit or miss. The image will probably be overexposed on one half the other half underexposed. Just something else to think about.

I think you would want a video multiplexer that can do a split screen display mode, but wont the resulting video have the wrong aspect ratio? Why not just by a second tv instead? You could get a small knock off brand tv for cheap

90 to 180 degree fov is quite wide Before you search too hard for cameras you should consider using some CCTV design software to nail down what resolution and lens focal length you need to cover with each camera. Once you have a list of cameras you can go shopping with a better knowledge of what you need to meet your goal for installing a CCTV system.

Im guessing the connection you were given was compressed, but it looks more to me like they just need to adjust the focus on the camera. Those youtube videos are impressive and got me looking a little closer at these Dahuas. In the first video the lighting is fairly flat in the shade so the exposure is very nice, in the second video I believe a different lens with a longer focal length is used. The lens in the second video may not be as good a quality. If you look at some of the specular highlights in the video you will seed a blue shift or halo which is chromatic aberration and an indication of low quality optics. That is probably what is contributing to the second videos lack of sharpness in places. To spite this however you can almost make out license plates at a harsh angle while they are traveling around 20mph. I suppose in the end you are taking some gamble buying one of these because they vary from seller to seller. Maybe if you found a reliable source that others have purchased from you will know what you are getting.

Take a deep breath and wrap your head in bubble wrap. Have to say, please don't actually try it

You are wanting to manually remote into each NAS and download a specific file(recording)? That should be possible. You could set it up to automatically push new recordings to the main site but you will need big bandwidth to upload all recordings assuming these are megapixel cameras. You will need to use the raw video viewer for your band of camera when viewing the files.

Is there a free email service better suited toward IP camera notifcations or snapshots? My problem is that my camera is sending snapshots several times a day to my yahoo email, but after a week yahoo suspects my email has been hacked and locks my account so I stop getting messages from my camera. I tried gmail as an alternative, but I think their spam filter is even worse. When I setup gmail on my camera the camera locks up and stops responding to the web gui or video feed. So is there an email service that will not flag my cameras snapshot emails as spam and force me to change my password weekly?

I suppose I was thinking Gmail has 10Gb free email service. I thought most free online ftp services were only 1Gb unless you pay for more. Less storage would work, but I would need to login more frequently to purge the old and free up space right?. I am open to suggestions, my goal is I just would like some offsite redundancy that is reliable.

Good work!

I guess my situation is I am sending a single snapshot when there is motion to one email address, but I also send ~100 or so snapshots to another email for archive incase my nvr gets stolen I still have something. Usually I get around 3-4 emails a day and it works well until there is too much activity in a short amount of time. Each of those emails is around 15Mb each so it may be hitting a bandwidth limit, but it could just be too many emails in a short time period. In any case since I am using the yahoo smtp it locks the account and I never know if its locked or there is just no activity. I think my best option will be to setup my own smtp server on my nvr pc. I will use it as the primary smtp on the camera and use the yahoo smtp as the secondary in case my pc goes down or missing. If I send too many emails with my smtp it may just go into the spam folder on the other end but I can deal with that. Thank you all for the replies.

There is probably a thread on how to set it up at the readynas forum. I don't own one so I don't know all the details. https://www.readynas.com/forum/

You could setup a cron job on your readynas to purge old recordings each day. That would be a much better solution than letting a remote client modify your file system.

I do not own a HFW3200CN but I would guess the "auto delete old files" setting is referring to the internal SD card and not FTP. I think the ftp only pushes the file and does not manage the file system. Just a guess and I could be wrong.

I have an ACM3701 and from my observation I believe its idea of night mode is lose color data by going to B&W and drag the shutter as much as possible. If I had a true night camera then I would worry about night mode transition but since I have 2 13w fluorescent lights just out of frame which is enough to keep the noise down and stay in color, but there is still lots of grain in the shadows. Your camera my have a better night mode but my camera's "night mode" is not worth it since it is still just as noisy, but in black and white. Now this thread has got me very interested in the KCM5611. Forgot to mention that ACTi has a great event handler, you should be able to transition from day to night on a schedule, but I would image as the sunrise/sunset times change you will have to adjust it frequently.

Can you not adjust the day/night threshold in the camera firmware? I thought that is what that value controlled allowing you if your application required to adjust it from the default.

I also agree an SD card or NAS might be your best bet since you don't have internet. If you did stream to an offsite recorder, I would think you still need some local storage for when the connection is lost from time to time. Either way I know when I cooked at a restaurant that had cameras everywhere I was conscious of it and probably worked harder as a result. So even if you don't review the footage every day I think the presence of a camera goes a long way as a deterent.

I was hoping I could get some advice on good placement of an IP camera for my front door. My goals are to monitor the front door for any activity and hopefully to deter any potential crime. It would be nice to be able to identify or at least recognize someone through this camera, but that is where I am sort of stuck. I already ordered a cheap SD IP camera with a wide but not extreme wide angle lens. It is around 60-70 degrees fov. After reading some on the forum I have found that I really need a 90 degree lens and if I want to id someone I need a higher resolution camera. My budget for now only allows for what I got, but I may want to upgrade in the future to something like an ACTI E12. That is sort of where my question comes in, where is the best place to put the camera I have now and run cables where I can easily install and upgrade later? I will have to run the wires through the ceiling regardless so I think that means I will end up with a ceiling mount but I can run the wires down and paint them if necessary. 1. Mount it on the top back right corner of the picture looking down and away from the door. The door would be visible in the very edge of the frame and you could see the top and side of peoples faces. 2. Mount it on the ceiling centered right above the window. This looks more natural since it is not looking from the side but is looking down at the path to the door, but this also leaves a dead area right in front of the door since it is looking at the path to the door. 3. Mount it lower more at eye level. This would help you see someones face but gives even less visability of what is going on around the door. I was not sure if there was a standard positioning or setup for my style of entry. In just about any positioning I think I will be able to meet my goal of notification of someone at my front door. It would just me nice to get the best out of it for future upgrading. My future goal would be a camera or two for the back door and patio area and replacing the front door with a higher resolution camera. Any advice would be appreciated.

Well, now I got an ACTi ACM-3701 megapixel minidome. I have this camera taped to the wall just below the top of the door frame. I think it gives a good perspective like what I was wanting. It just was not possible with the other camera. Maybe someday I can buy a true WDR camera to replace this one and move it somewhere else, but I just don't have to budget for it right now. In any case I think this meets my original requirements so I am happy. I just wanted to post this picture to hear some final thoughts on position before I drill the huge hole in my wall to run the ethernet. I will probably install it tomorrow afternoon.

I think that sounds like a reasonable plan. When you start adding more cameras you may need to rethink but it should be good for now.

I'd agree. I think having a dedicated network might scale better for adding more cameras later but with 4 cameras you probably won't notice much difference in performance.