Integrated camera solution with in-room entertainment

[gunsmoke 0]

Hello, this is my first post here. Stumbled upon this website while searching around, I'm quite impressed with the knowledge here so I thought I'd drop by and see if anyone had advice with a project I have to deliver soon.

 

First of all my background in CCTV is not extensive. Most of my knowledge dwells in-room hospitality entertainment and communication (interactive tv, video on demand, pay tv, channels, that kind of stuff.)

 

I'm in the process of commissioning the interactive system currently to a luxury maternity hospital. My goal is to integrate cctv cameras into the interactive system to enable mothers to monitor their newborn babies anytime from their hospital room while the babies are still in the nursery by going to a specific channel directly through their television.

 

Now I have found that there are 2 options, IP or analog cameras. Both routes run into complications. First I'll start with the IP cameras.

 

I found that every IP camera on the market today streams mpeg4 output. This is great, but the media world is still using mpeg2 for budget reasons. I have simulated an mpeg4 stream from a server of mine and converted it to mpeg2 and restreamed it using a different class D IP, which seems to be a solution, but not too robust. On the other hand, with the camera I have tested (Axis 207w) it seems that the mpeg4 stream is encoded in a format which I can not decode except without the software which is provided by the camera using a browser, etc.. Are all IP cameras this way, or are there any IP cameras on the market that will provide a direct mpeg4 stream which I can just open from any media player such as VLC?

 

Now on to the analog cameras. This seems like the most stable solution so far. I am able to take the analog signal and distribute it through an amplifier and modulator into a regular RF channel which can be tuned by the television. The only issue is that the cameras I need to install need to be wireless. I am having a hard time finding an analog wireless camera (I don't know the terminology, correct me if I'm wrong calling an analog camera wireless, but I think you get the picture.)

 

Thanks for reading this, does anyone know of any good products that would work well with what the solution I'm providing? And if anyone has any tips, advice, or comments feel free to post them.

 

Also, the building is already wired with cat6/fibre and also coaxial, so both technologies are viable.

 

Regards,

 

Hesham

[CollinR 0]

I'm in your boat, dunno why I hadn't see this post before. I do residential systems but out troubles are the same.

 

I do not know of any IP cameras that put out an MPEG2 transport stream. Generally they all use some strange undesirable codec.

 

 

Your best bet is probably to find a multi channel DVR capture card based on conexant 878 enoders, you can then use VLC to stream the individual inputs to specific TCP ports without transcoding (I assume that what you were doing before. h.264>MPEG2 TS).

 

What does your current video on demand system want coming in?

 

EDIT: Why wireless?

 

How big is the nursary?