Birdman Adam

Many people come to the forum looking for help in bringing out details in their images - usually after something bad has happened. One of the most common is trying to re-focus, sharpen, or deinterlacing a license-plate image. Unfortunately, this is not "CSI". There is no magic! BUT, there are things we can do to bring out a bit more detail - possibly enough to get you something that will help in an investigation. Here is a crappy license plate picture, with a lot of motion blur: That image is about 50px wide, by 23px tall. Can you read it? No. Now download Gimp (free), crop the image to the details you want, and deinterlace the image - choosing the best fields: After deinterlacing: Already much better! That interlacing is common in crappy systems... Now I will show you some free software I found, called Focus magic. There is not much more to be done, but this helps some. Choose the Focus filter. Click on the image to do a preview. It wants you to pay to do the whole image, but we don't need to do that - just a segment! It will suggest the best blur width and amount of focusing to be done. Play with both, although the defaults it chooses are usually best. The final image: Comparison: There are other things that can be done (Rory I know you had some examples?). As you can see, its not like in CSI! But even with this horrible pixel size that was captured, I now have at least a partial plate - probably 11244, with north carolina's "mountain environmental support plate" (green with the bear).

Sounds fine to me. I have always simply connected power and video to my cameras and left them be - no grounding or anything. Although, none of my cameras have a mechanical connection to any metal, (all screwed into wood). Some may say you should ground the cameras to prevent surges from destroying the equipment. I tend to not believe in that, because if lightning hits nearby a camera, each and every conductor will have a current through it if it leads to a reasonable ground. That means your DVR, etc...

Looks like Cisco is down the toilet. Every once in a while I see companies go on pointless rampages like this. Oh well. They are useless, old, slow people. Many companies are providing a better service at a much better price!

This is disgusting. I will never buy cisco again. Now, is my Linksys WRT54GS affected? I will probably switch to DD-WRT soon either way.

Where in the world are you? Laws differ depending... But generally, if they are viewing YOUR property, they should NOT be - and you can certainly tell them not to, and get the law involved if needed. There is probably some wiggle room for what is considered an invasion, but if its really just stopping and staring directly into your property that is not right.

Wow, that sounds like a hard aspect of the job. Could potentially come back to bite if you make a wrong decision! At first thought I would check whether they own the property and then whether privacy is expected in that area. If the answer is yes and then no, it is OK to put a camera there. But still - hard decisions... I suppose the property owners should err on the side of caution and advertise the cameras, either by making them stand out or placing signage? All it would take is one mad employee who thinks they shouldn't be watched in the back to get you in trouble! I wonder if there is law that more clearly draws a line. I would love to know all about it.

Huh. I always see lines like that in low-light on the IP cameras I've been able to peek at. I always thought it was just normal, like maybe a section of the sensor's wiring is not being amplified or changed as much as the rest, causing the change. I would bet its some sort of slight manufacturing thing, and all cameras have a couple lines, just some are more/less noticeable. If you want to get technical, take the camera apart and observe the lens, filters, iris, sensor, etc for anything that could potentially correspond to the lines! (Magnifying glass may help.)

HDSecurityStore's comment is kind of scary to me. Sure, D1 (or close: 704x480 4CIF) is far superior to CIF quality. Recording at 30fps is basically a useless over-working of your DVR's HD unless you -really- need it (think moving cars, casino hands). I set my home channels for 7FPS D1 (really 4CIF), and set the driveway to 10FPS. If you don't know what to do, set it for 10-15, just not 30 - thats crazy.

Easiest way, just take the power wires from the fan (red and black most likely) and connect them directly to the incoming power for the cooling system or for the camera. As long as the voltage and power type match (12VDC fan will fry on 24VAC, 24VAC fan won't work on 12VDC), you should be good-to-go!

Not to mention some lead in his head! Its funny, when I went through the story with the deputy, as soon as I mentioned that I had the gun out he reminded me that I could shoot as soon as the bad guy enters the house. I am glad that right still exists here.

Well, for starters why not permanently wire the existing fan to run 24/7. I really doubt heat could affect the camera like that. But hey, I've never used IP before, maybe their electronics are more sensitive. Could be some loose connections that is made worse by the heat as well?

Here's a guy likely casing my house, happened yesterday. I was home at the time, he pulled in really fast and started looking in all over the place. As I walked downstairs with the .38 in hand he left. Sheriff caught up to him and the guy said he was 'selling children's books' door to door! What a joke - if you are going to sell stuff door to door, why not actually RING the bell up front instead of sneaking around back! Stupid camera gets that message whenever we have a lightning storm. I need to ground the lines and tie them together...

HAHA, that stop sign gave me a good laugh! Glad to see your into scanning too!

Wow, that 29MP only does 2ips! Talk about useless, unless your crooks are 80 years old... Why is there always some huge downfall to stuff like that? I thought that it was better! I guess if I'm paying so much, it oughta do more than 2ips.

DynDNS and No-IP have free hostnames. I've used them for years for free and it has been great. If I needed that option commercially I would certainly pay them. Also, I have an 8-ch Qvis Zeus and it has been wonderful. Does everything I could want: Latest thing I just finished setting up is the 2-way audio! Now my voice thunders throughout the home if I click 'start dialog' in the browser. " title="Applause" />

Aww man, I've wanted to do one of these for a while now! Never got into it because routing the wires at the back of the door would look like a mess (the way I am envisioning it at least). You have to run the wire down to the corner of the door on its inside surface, then to DVR?

Technically, open up any outlet and tap into that ground (the bare cu wire of course). That will give you a decent ground as long as your house was wired properly and they drove the ground good.

Looks pretty stupid to me. I know very well how to use my nice DSLR, and how to achieve the same effect of that camera, except better with my knowledge of how to change it. Maybe its cool for the average consumer, but I would much rather choose my stops, shutter, etc for myself. I do wonder how it works - how can we record light data at an infinite range of focus? I bet the image files are like 1GB each if one focus level is equal to the one-focus-dimension volume of my DSLR.

Sweet choice from an awesome company! Dahua is a good costwise brand and will help you all the way!

Yea, I just stick with small, white domes under my soffits. No one has ever noticed! I think the smaller size of some domes is better - some of the more vandal-proof designs are naturally bigger, and stick out more. Whatever you do, try not to waste your best positioning for good images. Hiding them good isn't worth having to give up resolution of your car/front door/etc.

This video is awesome!! " title="Applause" /> Your narration is great, did you come up with the melody too? I think you could start a complete CCTV series!!

Well, I would do some tweaking... Particularly that through-the-door shot would benefit from a WDR camera, or maybe zoom in on the door more. ESC3 wasn't my favorite, out of those bunches but for $90 you are doing well. I think it has some BLC and whatnot, try that out maybe.

Under 1k is easy if you choose good analog cams, a decent DVR and do it ALL yourself. I would buy a D1 Qvis 8-channel (I have the Zeus) with 1TB HDD, up to 8 CNB Monalisas (VCM-24VF outside) (maybe DBM-24VF inside). For wiring go cat5 + baluns. Power supply, get some old wall-warts that are up to the job. Maybe get a UPS. Pepole say this stuff is expensive, but when you're not paying someone else to do it, its not. BUT the crucial part is that you properly mimic the professional by following good practice and installation to get the most out of your 1k.

IF you are talking 600 kbps (as in kiloBITs per second), that is NOTHING in terms of streaming, only equal to 75 kBps (kiloBYTES per second). Here is a relation: I have a 8-cam stream up from my home DVR, and each (compressed) D1, 7FPS channel is taking about 800kbps or 100 kBps. So yea, you may just by trying to cram waaayy to much data through a tiny pipe, while holding your thumb over the end! Think garden hoses... I recommend you stream at CIF quality, maybe 1-3FPS if you are choked for bandwidth. Us DSL users often are... Now, if you meant 600 kBps, then you are great-to-go for many channels at good quality. In general, check your ports forwarded (mobiles sometimes require separate ports to DVR).

Hmm, been a while since I've messed with smartviewer, since I did a job with it. I believe there is a checkbox either at login or in the configuration that will let you save passwords. Also allows oyu to choose among things like logout-without-password, etc.