buellwinkle

You should never use DHCP with a camera but if you insist, you can set the camera to DHCP in the Network menu, it's a check box.

From what I've seen from professional installers, your budget would easily include 2 analog cameras and a DVR. Yes, $300 worth of equipment, the rest is labor and profit. Figure closer to $5K for 4 name brand analog cameras and a name brand NVR installed. Also depends on neighborhood and competition. Resolution these days would be 700 TVL. Go with IP cameras and it would easily double in price but the resolution would dramatically go up, mostly 3MP-5MP is common these days with 1080P and 720P being the lower end. When you say read a license plate, do you mean during the day or at night also and is this dedicated for this purpose or is this going to be the main camera for your driveway? What's the lighting like on your driveway? Is this reading a plate at night on a car with headlights on or off? Most DVRs or NVRs would have smartphone apps and remote access to live and recorded video. Could not see the item you have in your link to the Swann site. But buying it ahead of time without an installer may not be the best idea. The reason is that you are shifting the responsibility to yourself. If a cameras breaks, they will not come and warranty it, all up to you to deal with. Where if they sold you a complete working system, they would be liable for warrantying the cameras. That's why many installers will not install something you bought.

Where you able to change the focal length and re-focus?

Are you sure you can do this? You had so much trouble with the easy stuff. Have not seen that specific camera, but in most you unscrew the front cap that's over the lens and there's two wands on the lens, one for focus, one for focal length. Each wand usually has a slot on top for a screw driver or knurled ends. You loosen the wand and that allows you to move the wand to turn the lens. This is a long tedious process, if this is your first time, it's best if you go to café in Amsterdam and relax first. Use full resolution, open the Iris (I believe that camera has auto-iris), use a large monitor, a 65" LCD TV works best and enjoy. The tricky part is not getting focus and focal length, the tricky part is tightening the wands without losing it.

Mobotix D15 or M15 has 2 way audio built in with microphone and speaker. The Axis P33 series has microphone built in, but requires an external powered speaker. Both do not have illuminators built in, don't know if that's important. Cube cameras tend to have audio but not PoE, a few do like the Axis M1054 and the Brickcom MB-300Ap. Also trying to get some new cameras that do this for a review from Hikvision. Some cameras have 2-way audio with illuminators but you need to add a microphone and speaker if you want to use that feature like the Hikvision ds-2cd2732f-is.

If you can see it, use that software to change the IP address to your home subnet and then you can use Safari to access it.

What I did before SADP was change my laptop to 192.0.0.60 and plugged in the same switch and connected to the camera via a browser to 192.0.0.64.

I would use local disk with ACTi NVR.

Mine does not work with 5.1 that used to work with 5.0, so there's some improvements left to do although some people claim success. I haven't had time, but if you are Linux savvy you could telnet into the camera and see if there's any logs that show errors.

Any tips on what to download, how to compile it (I currently don't have a C compiler on my Windows PC). Did you use the CLI to run it or wrote your own app calling the API. I'm not a C developer, but maybe I can develop a vb app around it if it's possible.

Sounds awesome, but it only appears to take still images. Are you going to develop an app that takes streaming video and calls OpenALPR for each frame? Have you downloaded the source and compiled it yet? Because he includes a CLI, I guess you can write a shell script to extract images from a camera pass them to the CLI to get a plate number. Be curious what frame rate you can get. I would be happy with a few frames per second as we currently use 4 fps at VGA resolution.

No, but there's Windows you can run on a Mac, I use Fusion and Windows 7 on my Mac. Also, there's an Hikvision iVMS for the Mac at the link below. It's not as easy to use as SADP but Mac users are used to adversity. http://www.hikvision.com/en/download_more.asp?id=958

Nope, same problem, tail lights are pretty bright.

The next step up in my eyes is to move away from cameras made in mainland China and go with cameras made in Taiwan which are considered better made and better supported. Out of all the camera brands made in Taiwan, I'm happiest with ACTi because of good prices, good service and support. The other thing is they provide very good NVR software for free and takes very little resources on a PC so you can re-purpose an older PC and it will likely be fine. Also, they provide a good website with many resources like firmware updates, manuals, knowledge base. The downside of an NVR is what if you get an 8 camera NVR and now you want 9th camera you can't add it. What if the NVR fails after the warranty period, who can service it. Where PC's are universal and easy to repair or replace, just my 2 cents. And lastly, the most overlooked, putting 8 3MP cameras on an NVR with an ARM processor has it's limitations, may not be as responsive as even a lower end PC.

At night, you would not see anything with the Hikvision ds-2cd2023-i with a 12mm lens or any lens, but during the day, yes. The problem is the IR LEDs are not as bright as car headlights, so you will see 2 lights coming down the street, could be 2 motorcycles, could be Ferrari, Hummer H2, all looks the same. To say capture a plate up at 30-50' or so, I would get a Raytec RM100-30, it's what we use and works well for this purpose. If you want that to be covert, you would need the RM200-30 with 940nm. Not going to tell you the price, because if you have to ask... The RM100-30 does not glow that bright. Also, some people like the Axtontech illuminators, a little cheaper. But try to get close to the specs of the RM100 or RM200 as I know that works well. As for the D32, any camera with one LED vs. a ring of say 25 LEDs, is going to be way brighter and more visible. I'm doing a review on the Hikvision eyeball camera and it's one bright LED, light a red star. Also, the D32 has like a 4mm lens, not good for plate capture, we run about 30mm on our LPR camera for plates about 40' away. 12mm would maybe cover 20'. We just had an incident at night and with a 3MP camera and a 6mm lens on a $1,600 camera, 15' away at most from the camera, 2 light fixtures with three 60W bulbs say within a few feet of the car, I spent at least an hour with Photoshop tweaking it to be able to give law enforcement a plate number and I bet if I sent you the photo, you would never guess the plate number. Not our intent but the LPR camera was down that day. And I was lucky because he stopped. The camera is set at 1/60th max and still not fast enough to stop motion blur.

There are cameras with no LEDs, but are day/night cameras, but you can add covert illuminators, is that what you looking for? You can also turn IR LED's off on some brands and use it that way. Also, there's a few cube cameras that use bright white light LEDs, you will see blinding white light rather than dim red LEDs. If you want a more covert setup, check Raytec, they make some of their IR illuminators with 940nm LEDs that are much less visible than 850nm most cameras use, but you'll need maybe 2-3x the power to illuminate the same area. A good choice for a small location would be the Raytec RM50-AI-50 940nm, says lights to 40-59' depending on light angle (narrow gives you more range, wider gives you less range, typical 3-4mm wide angle camera would use the full width, so 40') but in real practice it may be half that number, figure under a grand though, good buy.

Either the camera is malfunctioning and you should get it replaced or repaired or the PoE injector is faulty and not providing the correct power. If you know someone nearby that you can test the camera on a different PoE injector or switch, that would be easiest. What city are you located in, maybe someone on this forum can help.

Yes, the Hikvision, even the lower cost ones can do "corridor mode". It's the rotate option in the Image menu. The reason I've never played with it is because I didn't think the software would handle it well, meaning if I have say 4 cameras displayed on a screen, an one is a different orientation, say portrait vs. landscape, it may look odd. Ideally it would be smart enough and present a layout that has this mixed well. Let us know how it works out in that regard. So you have a solution for now then? The doorbell housing is here - http://eholovision.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=210&Itemid=244 I talked them into using Axis M10 cameras. Before that it worked with some obscure Panasonic model that was pricey compared to the M10 series and not as good.

Port 8000 is not really relevant, it uses port 80 for the web browser interface and 554 for RTSP. When you set the camera up, make sure the subnet and default gateway are the same and use the IP address in the same subnet as you did, 192.168.1.64 as you said but you said you made the gateway the same, it should be the 192.168.1.1. It's common, wasted hours trying to figure out why I couldn't access some cameras from my laptop via the router to find the installer used the wrong gateway address on some of them. It would work if the Laptop was on the same switch, but once you connect to the router, the router gateway address is key.

The bundles are a good deal, but those cameras bought separately with the Hikvision branding are 3MP, so 50% more pixels. Also, being a bundle means you take the cameras you get where buying them individually you can pick which cameras, which lenses, etc.

I think it's just a typo, but turns on when you start the car and turns off when you turn the ignition off. This depends on your car, for example, my Smart car does this, but my Audi has power on all the time for the 12V socket. I'm probably going to check with an installer to mount it permanently in the Audi so it's on ignition power. I would do it myself, but pro's know the tricks to make it look right. I would love a rear facing camera but all my cars are convertibles so it may get crushed with the top down. Nice video of the bridge. I miss bridges and tunnels when I moved from NYC to So Cal, I even miss the snow.

I reviewed one of their new new eco savvy cameras but did not make note of the actual bandwidth other than the default was 8Mbps as seen below, ironic don't you think that they say it would be half, but the default is that when the default on their other cameras I have are 6Mbps. Basically, on most h.264 cameras, you can control the network bandwidth by reducing the bit rate but by doing so you are increasing compression. Not sure Ambarella can double compression and still maintain the same image quality. Me thinks it's more marketing than reality but definitely could be wrong.

First make sure your PC is on the same subnet. Open a command window (I believe in XP you click START, then RUN, type in cmd or command. Then enter ipconfig and usually the top one is the one you are using and it will have 3 things you need, it's IPv4 Address, it's Subnet Mask and the Default Gateway. Tell us what it says there...

Finally came to your senses. Yes, wired is the best way to go. Do you still need audio or just video? Cameras are made all over world, where would you like it made keeping mind that prices depend on country of origin. In terms of general price from least to most expensive I would say; 1. Mainland China (Hikvision, Dahua are the top brands) 2. Taiwan (ACTi, AVTech, Brickcom, Messoa, Geovision, Vivotek) 3. U.S./Canada/Europe (Axis, Mobotix, Stardot, Avigilon, Arecont, IQInvision)

I had one of those small net top computers with an Atom processor running ACTi NVR software for over a year and worked well. They make them where they attach to the VESA mounting holes on the back of the TV, so can't get much smaller than that.