MR2

what pricing are you getting direct? www.techcctv.com

I have bought Milestone from www.techcctv.com Milestone is a little techy to setup... so if you want what I'm told is "easier to setup" Avigilon might be it Milestone have installers that you can download straight off their website, you can easily put them onto disk or USB key whatever to transport

What he said, camera's these days can be so well hidden you have no chance of finding them

Another vote for the on-CPU Intel video. Scaling/displaying and recording nine primary streams at once in Grandstream's software, and piping it over a Remote Desktop Connection, my i3-3225 comes up to full speed (3.3GHz) and 30% CPU load. Recording the streams without displaying them, it throttles down to 1.55GHz and 2% CPU load. Based on my UPS's wattage readout (typically mid-30W area), the system itself (not counting monitors) is sipping about US$20/year in electricity, which seems good. I spend more than that on all sorts of foolish things that is awesome! I can't wait to get one of the new Haswell cores! how much do you pay per kwh? we're 24cents

please provide figures backing this. Specifically idle power usage & DB in operation keep in mind people doing home security systems may not necessarily want to spend $2-3k on a Dell server which (Especially if you go the the 1/2 RU ones) creates a lot of noise in another-wise quiet environment over a normal desktop PC or HP Micro server that are designed to work in environments that are already very quiet.

Probably that... I would always go with the latest processor you can if nothing else but for efficiency, when i was shopping for an updated PC to run my VMS at home the first thing I looked at was idle power usage, to give you an idea, we have some old HP Rack server that at idle, chew somewhere around the 200-300w range... the PC I just grabbed (an ebay HP 6300 pro) idles at 41w then have a look at the drives, the best power per watt Vs space I found was the Seagate 4tb, it only costs $220 AUD, but running at 5900rpm it only draws 5w, you can get lower power drive but they have a lower capacity, and to get a higher capacity the amount of drives needed for the array means you end up using more power in total anyway) I found it's cheaper to get a PC & NAS combo, and both of them together will use less power than building a massive single PC & easier to get parts 5-10 years in the future

we do a similar setup except life is a bit easier for us... we are using a PC based NVR, so all I have is two IP addresses bound to the NVR, one that it talks to the camera's on, and one that it talks to the rest of the PC network on, the one that it talks to the rest of the PC network on is the one that I forward to the router etc

Figured I'd throw a post up since I've been here a while (Oops) my story generally is that I've been employed as internal IT for a group of 8 companies (they are all on the same computer domain) fast forward a few years we had a few companies come in and sell one or two of the companies security systems, they did a shocking job but we got what we paid for, we had a few quotes for what I classed as decent systems however the pricing for those ended up between 1-2k per camera, at this point I'd had my own garage broken into and started looking at something for myself, this was 3 years ago when IP camera's were greatly reducing in price and we were not forced into the Axis/Mobotix etc just to get a high resolution image, so I started deploying this system through a few of our sites and so far the various bosses/managers have been blown away, it's not been without a whole heap of learning and quirks though... which is why I'm here! to both share my experience and get help from the great people I've found on the forum!

haha interesting fwiw Milestone GO is free as long as you live in it's limitations, but once you're past what... 9 camera's? you're going to be spending enough on hardware that I cannot see spending a few dollars really hurting for software

I think part if the people having issues with "Pro's" is that a lot of the CCTV stuff is moving into the IT industry, so back when the security system had nothing to do with the business's IT system these guys were king of their castle, things have now changed to where the entire system is managed/run through the companies existing IT Infrastructure... when one of the companies I do the IT for had some security consultants come in and offer advice they were offering all sort of options and obviously had not a clue how much easier the whole thing would be when they just used existing hardware and networks... funniest stuff, people tell me that our gigabit links are going to be overloaded by 640x480@20fps IP camera's maybe if we bought 100 of them anyway since seeing the frightening bill that this first system came with, then seeing all the feedback from that companies manager about how the placement and quality of the camera's I ended up just digging into it and researching it all myself.

it is possible to get 60gb SSD's for Sub $100.... Brands of SSD's I've had good luck with so far are Intel & Kingston, ones I've had BAD experiences with are OCZ/Corsair

OH MY GOD THAT'S IT! you need to contact the producers of CSI

I would not go with a raid card, I would split up the camera's to save to various drives... would save raid for an external NAS where the raid card it has comes with plenty of cache and loads of performance. don't really see the point of SSD for CCTV, it's not at the right price points yet & price per GB is the MOST important thing as long as the drive is fast enough

lol that's a very ordinary image I've always wondered if it would be possible to clear up a single picture using all the other pictures you have of the same object... I'm not aware of any software that does this though

yeah, I'm sure it's working fine, but it gets fuzzy so fast! I thought we'd get clarity to slightly larger distances.... oh well do you find yours are quite slow to change & update settings?

Morning all! we have been using Milestone across a few sites and it's working really well, we're at the point however where we are in need of some 360 degree camera's for indoor or widely used area coverage, the problem we have is that no-one seems to show video's of how well their cam's work with Milestone, the issue is that while a lot of these camera's work with Milestone none of the reasonably priced (sub $1k) units will let me record the entire stream, but de-warp out 4 x 90 degree streams for display simultaneously in the Smart Client and Mobile Clients... So far I'd love to try the Vivotek 5mp, but it looks like I can't even get the stream to run at the maximum resolution (listing as max resolution of 1920x1920, not 2560x1920 as the sensor is? wth) the other issue is that you cannot "enable" stream stripping or de-warping in Milestone, as it's something that camera company has to licence with Milestone, I also don't want to have to buy a camera licence for each of the 4 camera's in for example the Mobotix system, nor pay the ridiculous amount of money these guys want for their camera's)

ok I got the Axis M3007-PV... I can't believe how bad the quality is, I know that your covering a much larger area than a normal 90 degree camera but it's so terrible I can see why Arecont vision put normal camera's in their larger domes!

Yes, Synology advertises different capabilities for different DiskStation units depending on how much CPU it has. However, that only results in a larger # of cams and a larger # of FPS for all cams combined. Even with the top end current generation DiskStations they still don't support higher than 1080P resolution. I am really thinking about giving Milestone a go on this i3 box that I have... assuming that they can support camera side motion detection. Otherwise I don't know that the i3 has enough juice to handle 4 cameras. if it helps I've run 2 x camera's on a HP DC7800 which comes with a Dual core 2.66ghz Core Duo, this is with Milestone Go and it ran just fine, CPU was quite low, where you'll have issues is when the camera count starts to jump and when you log in with a mobile phone or the smart client the CPU usage goes up considerably, with just two camera's my DC7800 test box handled it just fine, however I'd not want to push it past around 6 camera's. the DC7800 was $150 AUD worth of hardware if you want something with enough to kick on for a few more camera's you can get a quad core box for around $300-400 AUD, then throw in some decent sized disks and you're good to go.

well yes....

No worries, I just went and tested with a (clapped out)laptop running the smart client through wireless, and depending on where I walked with it the pings to the server were around 1ms up to 100ms, the response times of the image seemed to be from around half a second to two seconds (seemed largely dependent on the laptop and wireless behaving interesting stuff. on the Downsides to PC based NVR 1, it needs a pretty beefy computer 2, it needs a set of disks 3, if you want more than 10 camera's expect to need a good amount of reasonably fast disks 4, PC based NVR's offload processing to the client, so if you have an old PC or laptop and want to view a large amount of camera's at once expect it to struggle 5, the processing for mobile clients is done on the server, it's well capable of swamping a pair of quad core xeons even with only 10 camera's!

it would add to the discussion if you feel like posting them? I would never have even thought about the IP latency until you posted about it!

one of the guys from this site (Bullwinkle) says that the Dahua dome is available sub $200 http://www.networkcameracritic.com/?p=848 it'd be cool if a Mod could whip a copy of these posts into a HD-SDI vs HD-IP thread

Prices are lower including cost of converters? what price is a HD-SDI camera that's 3mp + connectors? I'm going to test latency this afternoon with the smart client

another question.... what industry do you consider to be expanding faster? IP Camera or HD-SDI camera? I know I see heaps of IP based camera's and only recently noticed the existance of HD-SDI... but then I'm not in the industry. if you deploy HD-SDI and the rest of the world is going IP does this mean all that gear will be redundant the next time you wish to upgrade? does this mean that when XYZ camera comes out it's got a 90% chance of being IP and you will not be able to attach it to your system?

Let me expand on this one for some IP HD Bias... 1, the saying that the connector quality is important is an understatement, on quite a few systems we've been placing the BNC connectors have been the bane of our existance, I'm at the point that any system we have which has a BNC on it gets replaced! 2, the 5 second lag may apply only to certain systems, I went outside and tested our camera systems lag, between going from the camera, to the server, which then exports the data to a dedicated mobile server, which then sends through 4g service to my mobile phone, the total lag was under 2 seconds, I expect that the lag using the Milestone Smart Client would be considerably less since the smart client connects directly to the server itself, if you like I can test this. 3, distance does not really effect IP camera's, since essentially anywhere you have network with enough bandwidth to send the stream through, it will work, for example we have camera's hanging off switch's that are on the end of 400m of cable, we could have camera's Km's away if we wished, depending on where your cabling a huge advantage is being able to just clip the camera's Ethernet cable straight into any Ethernet infrastructure, anywhere in the business without running any new cables all the way back to your DVR/NVR location 4, Ethernet cabling is also quite future proofed, the old cat5e that people still run is capable of gigabit speeds up to 100m, to give you an idea 20 of our 3mp camera's are using a grand total of 12meg a sec constantly in total, this is 12% of the cat5e capability and it takes 20 camera's to saturate it to that level, cat6a cable which is becoming the new standard & is maybe 20% more expensive for a 300m reel is capable of 10gigabit... 5, probably the biggest advantage of Ethernet is probably the PoE Capability, if you should wish you can run PTZ's, IR lights all sorts of crap straight off one ethernet cable per device.