steve~

Rory, I concur! I think you and Rory are mistaken here. Web crawlers like google, can and do index php web pages and forums, without static pages being necessary. A search engine crawler works the same way as your browser does when you are viewing this forum. When it requests a php web page with a certain set of arguments, the php script is interpreted on the server end, and html code is sent back to the web crawler. The crawler can then parse the html, and extract all links inside (which in this case is the same php page but with different arguments). Then those links are crawled. As long as http://cctvforum.com/robots.txt does not explicitly ban viewtopic.php, then google will index this page. If you want proof, try searching for “VGA baluns at Muxlabsâ€

Rory, can you recommend a product that has both a UPS and a voltage regulator built-in? I'm looking for the most cost effective way of having reliable surge protection, and a UPS that only needs to last long enough to signal a DVR to shut itself down. Thanks, Steve

I think also when that was available, it would have required people to compile a separate plugin binary for the Mac, using only a limited subset of the libaries normally available to Windows ActiveX programs. The strategy of Microsoft is to make sure that ActiveX ONLY runs on Windows, and hopefully only on IE. The idea is to force developers to write plugins in ActiveX. Since the majority of users still use Windows and IE, and Windows XP no longer has a Java virtual machine by default, developers don't have much other choice. Then since developers make websites relying on ActiveX, people are forced to use Windows and IE if they want to be able to view those websites. This is one of the main reasons why Microsoft can remain so dominant without having the best software.

If your email and personal info are not actually publicly accessible (unless you want them to be), I don't see what the problem is. I think all of Larry's points seem to be valid. No matter what you do in terms meta data and DMOZ, if this forum isn't publicly accessible, a web crawler like google would not be able to crawl this forum and index its text. So say, for example, someone is interested in learning about the reliability of the GV-900, and there is a thread on this forum about that, someone could type in "GV-900 reliability" into google and that thread might be one of the search results. That person would then learn about this forum and be able to join and contribute to the discussion. I think it's also likely that advertisers would be more reluctant to advertise on a private forum. Whether or not it's public or private, this is a CCTV Surveillance forum, so the audience is going to be focused on that niche. If this forum is private, there are going to be much fewer people reading or signing up for this forum. A person is unlikely to blindly sign up for a forum without knowing what kind of content is inside, especially if it requires signing up with an email address and risking exposing oneself to spam. I think if the purpose of this forum is to provide a tool for communicating knowledge about the CCTV/Surveillance industry, then obviously a public forum will work better toward this cause. I understand that the regulars in this forum have worked hard over many years to gain the experience and knowledge that you have, and maybe you don't like the idea of a less experienced person (like myself) being able to read this forum and learn what you know so easily. If you are so worried about keeping what you post private or exclusive, why are you posting on a public forum? Wouldn't it make more sense to email each other, or use a private chat room? Or have a separate private section of this forum (isn't that what the Dealers Only section is for?)? Also (and probably no one here cares), this poll is pretty biased toward regular members of this forum. I mean, if the "lurkers" were able to vote, this poll might not be so one-sided.

Rory, what I meant was a system with motion detection that is: 1) Reliable enough so that a person can configure a DVR to trigger an alarm on a certain type of motion event, without the alarm going off all the time 2) If a person is interested in reviewing only the video clips where, for example, a human entered through this door then sat down in this chair, to have a search tool that can deliver exactly those video clips. These are the kinds of things that a company like ObjectVideo is doing (or is trying to do). ObjectVideo have made it so that their algorithms can run on a portion of a TI DSP chip, such that the chip can double as a hardware MPEG4 encoder. I have heard that the Bosch DiBos will interface with ObjectVideo software (does anyone know if this is true?). In general, I think tracking, human identification, automatically filtering out background noise, and to some extent face recognition, are all things that are technically possible at reasonable accuracy. Most or all DVR manufacturers could substantially improve the motion detection that they have, without adding any cost hardware-wise. The problem is that it is something that is difficult to develop, and also might be hard for an Asian company to do well, since it involves research and reading academic papers.

I think you can only specify up to the minute in crontab, but instead of calling your program directly in crontab, you could have it call a script that does something like: your_program sleep 30 your_program Or instead of using crontab you could have a script like this running constantly: while true do your_program sleep 30 done

It sounds like you have a Pentium 4 1.7 GHZ CPU with a PCChips M930 motherboard and 256MB of memory. PCChips is kind of a low-end motherboard manufacturer and I would probably use a different manufacturer if I were building a PC, but as long as it is working for you now it will probably be reliable enough. So I guess you should be able to use any card that doesn't say it requires more than a 1.7GHZ P4 and 256MB ram.

I was wondering if anybody has had any experiences with an intelligent video system such as ObjectVideo and what your opinion is of these things. By "intelligent video" I mean a system that can at the minimum distinguish between objects like humans or vehicles, and filter out background motion such as a tree blowing in the wind. How valuable (how much more would you being willing to pay for a DVR) is the ability to do searches like "find all occurences where a person walked by this area," or "find the exact time when someone removed this object from the scene?" Also, how useful would it be if your DVR had a face recognition capability and allowed you to search for all instances where John Doe walked by?