buellwinkle

Haha, and it's already "discontinued".

Most cameras let you use a feed on a webpage straight from the camera, the issue that I see is browser compatibility. Some require an ActiveX control, some require Java, some require Quicktime and not all PC's, tablets, phones can display the live streaming video without having to install some other component. To be more compatible with most browser, you have to put the video in a format that all browsers can understand and the most common is to stream to software that converts RTSP to RTPM and then get a player that can play RTPM. So what it looks like is a flash video playing on your website. The easiest way to do this is to pay a service that takes your feed and provides the conversion and output. An example is this site - http://sundiegolive.com Using an Axis Q60.

anyone involved with clones are bad for the industry and the innocent people that spend hard earned money Clones are what they call cameras made that resemble the original Foscam camera. Not even sure if Foscam was the first one to make a camera that looks like it does. What I learned from one of these companies is that in China, there's companies that make the components, like the lenses, the electronics and the plastics and several manufacturers buy the same plastics but the electronics, the firmware may be very different. These cameras were buggy and poorly made and Foscam offered firmware upgrades that people tried to use on non-Foscam cameras that looked the same and bricked their cameras which clearly made them angry. From my experience with Foscam is they have a short life expectancy. Had them fail in 3 days and 3 months. Frankly, don't know why anyone would make a copy of Foscam. If I was going to make cheap copies, I would start with a $1,500 camera, not a $80 camera You don't see people on street corners in NYC selling fake copies of Timex watches.

Lo siento, pero no hablan el mismo idioma que usted está hablando.

They don't show Dahua camera in their list of supported cameras - http://www.averusa.com/surveillance/download/EHseries/EH_EXR%20IP%20Camera%20Support%20List.pdf You do know that even though they call it an 8 channel NVR, it only supports 4 IP cameras, same as their 4 channel version or 16 channel version.

He speaks the truth and you can't handle the thruth. Red 5 is a way to go http://www.red5.org/. I'll try to type slowly so ak357 can understand. Red 5 is software that takes the video stream for the camera, converts it to rtmp protocal and then you can use player box software to play it as a rtmp feed in a window. Someone was just asking about that in another post.

Didn't even know you can manually focus that camera. I know on the 5211E and 5611 I never saw a way to manually focus. You can try and old school way of autofocusing by having it focus in a different direction on a point that's comperable to what you want and then swing the camera back. It should re-focus unless you change the focal length.

There was this company that Cisco bought and apparantly ran into the dirt called Flip. They made an underwater enclosure for it that I've used with my Flip camera that would probably work if you stuck a WiFi camera of the same shape like an Axis M1011-W or AVTech AV812. Of course the wire for power may create a leak so you may want to check that first, maybe caulk around that area. At least the power cord on these camera is very thin compared to an Ethernet cord for PoE. http://www.amazon.com/Flip-Video-Underwater-UltraHD-Cameras/dp/B002OT4NN0 Also, there's these plastic bags you put a camera in that have a lens that the camera can see out off. Seems more of temporary solution for a vacation shot rather than the more permanent looking Flip enclosure.

Every camera is different, the manual for the camera should have information. Most let you specify the user/password. What brand of camera is it?

This is how it's done, in case you don't know. You signup with a streaming service, They take the feed from your camera so you'll need enough bandwidth to support this single stream. For a 1080P camera using h.264 compression, say at 15 fps, you need about a 4-6 Mb/s upload speed link if you have a good circuit, half that at 720P. What they do is convert your feed to flash like the one you provided above and you add the code on your site to play that in a flash player box. The player box is really designed for videos like AVI files, but they adapted it for live feeds, hence the controls or times that read zeo since it's streaming a live feed, there is no end time. Pretty easy to do, especially since the service you hire will probably give you the code you cut/paste into your website and you are done. I heard there was a service in South America that was cheap, like $100/mo. I can look for it if you want that and I hear they speak english. Most are going to probably be closer to $300-500/mo and up depending on how many people use your site. Can you do it yourself, heck yeah, but it may cost you more as you'll need at least a partial D3 digital circuit depending on the number of concurrent viewers you want to support and the resolution you want to support them at. Also, you can't use BlueIris or direct to camera for that, can't handle the load. You'll need a rtsp to flash streamer and there's open source for that, but it takes a while to set it up. I did it for fun once, but it wasn't easy and I was a software engineer. If you really only expected 2-3 people using it at at a time, then you can just embed the video directly from the camera on your site and run it on your webserver at home or work. Then cut the resolution and frame rate down a lot until your internet connection stops crying.

You need PSS to view the stuff recorded on the SD card.

I know, it's a tough choice. I was only thinking you had this one camera. Exacq Start is the closest that I know of that works the way ACTi works where the camera does the motion detection and is reasonably priced albeit much more than BI. I understand Milestone can do this, but wasn't able to get it to work that way for me. Most of the other NVR products are CPU hogs because they analyze frame by frame on the PC, so you add a few MP cameras and it comes to grinding halt unless you have a decent CPU behind it. So for me it was buy a more powerful PC to run BI or swap some Axis cams I had for ACTi and put the Axis at my lake house.

Important info on IE6 here - http://www.ie6countdown.com/

I'm running it on Win XP Pro with IE 8, zero problems, very stable, has been up since installed. Try accessing it from another PC with a newer version of IE.

Yes, workstation is what lets you access the server, setup the cameras, view them, etc. Should be a quick install. The setup portion will find your cameras and you'll be on your way.

They have cameras for $200, but it's their indoor cube style camera, similar in style to AVTech's indoor or Axis M10 series. The wireless bullets are closer to a grand.

That is a traight of Vivotek, inconsistant quality.

You install server on the PC you want to run the server component. It just runs as a service in the background, you won't see anything going on. Then it's up to you on the client if you want to install it or not because it looks just like the web interface without the browser look around it. But I installed the client on the same PC as the server and then use the browser when looking at the cameras from another PC.

Not really a fair comparison, the Pelco is a purpose built low light camera with WDR, the Vivotek makes no such clams for that model. Also, you are comparing a bullet camera with a smallish varifocal board lens to a box camera with a larger CS mount lens. The Vivotek and Pelco have the same sized sensor, but the Vivotek has higher pixel density that may result in poorer low light performance. Not a fan of Vivotek, but it should be an apples to apples comparison. Also, some of these camera have center spot metering. By positioning one camera with the window in the center and it metering off that vs. the other with a wall in the center, that can skew the results.

I tried to use PSS and could not get the Dahua to record. Any tricks in doing that?

Motion settings only through web GUI ? that lame what do u do when u have 40-50 or more cameras kinda sucks You can do it through the GUI and it makes the change straight into the camera, I just find it easier to do through the web interface. You can even launch the camera's web configurator straight from the app without logging into each camera as it has the connection info when you setup the camera. If you are going to set up 40-50 cameras, this may not the software for you but then again, neither are his other two choices, BI and Exacq Start.

None of those. They are not bad, it's their older version but required IIS and MS SQL Server setup. Their new one is much easier to install and use. First go to the ACTi website at www.acti.com and on the left, click Video Management Systems and then click on ACTi NVR 3.0 and download the software on the next page, it's 50MB. You may have to create an account and log in. Good to do that anyway so you can open help desk tickets if you run into a problem. You setup the motion detect settings on the camera through it's web interface. The NVR software just waits until it gets a motion detect from the camera and then starts recording so there's not much CPU use if you it's running the background and you are not viewing the cameras. Then you can connect from any PC (including the one with the NVR running) via IE for full functionality.

Your best bet is the free ACTi NVR software. Their latest version, 3.1 is awesome, best NVR software I've every tried and very low CPU on the server. I switch from BI because of CPU use. When you take a 2MP H.264 feed into BI it does use a good amount of CPU. Check that to see if that's the problem. Also, tried the zoom from BI to my KCM-5611 and it works as expected so I would assume the KCM-5311 would work the same as they both probably use the same firmware. It's browser based, so you can connect from anywhere in the world using IE.

Check the specs on the cameras. I know the TCM-7811 needs 12V if it's used in cold climate (not an issue today) and I know then fan comes on when it's warmer and that may be using more power than some injectors but I've had no trouble with using a cheapie Trendnet $50-60 8 port PoE switch.

ACTi is supposed to roll out a 1080P PTZ camera soon that they demoed at ISC back in March that will come at a decent price, but decent price for a 1080P PTZ will still likely be about 3-4x what you paid. In theory, you can get a pan/tilt mount for your camera and control it from the camera and I don't think it's that's expensive to do.