SEANHAWG

Do you normally run power over Cat5? If so, at what length runs do you normally experience power loss?

Cool. I will post pics and videos once I get it up and running.

I guess I am confused on how I would do that? If each camera has 2 wires each TX+ and TX-. How would I connect them all and which ones would plug into the DVR?

What sucks about the app that was recommended to you?

Most of the spy equipment can only record 2 hours at the most even though some of them say they will record up to 6 hours, I find the battery goes dead well before that, of you can find one that you can somehow keep powered that would be advantageous. Some of them take Micro SD cards and they now make 32GB Micro SD but your looking at spending $40-50 on that SD card alone.

So its powering both the Camera and Motion light? Do you have problems with the camera running out of power at night? or do you have it setup just to trigger on when you have motion?

They dont.

Why not change the dome ID on your Vitek DVR to 3201?

One problem may be is whenever you cover up the lens on the camera or when it gets real dark, it results in a snowy picture. The snow will trigger the motion sensing on your DVR. Try completely unplugging the camera.

I am a big fan of RG59 Siamese Cable, however it would be foolish not to "prewire" CAT5 or CAT6 cable throughout your house that is under construction. I agree with your contracter. The reason being, is because you will regret it if you dont. There will be a day where you will want to jump on the IP bandwagon and once you jump on it and you dont have CAT5 running through your house, you are going to kick yourself. I definetely agree with the other posters about running seperate 18/2 alongside the CAT5 too. And normally like you said adding more connections to a cable run usually is not a good thing but this is an exception if its done correctly. I installed a camera today at my house and I kept saying to myself how I wish I knew about CCTV stuff when I built my house because if I did, I would have wired that baby up. My recommendation would be to run wires to every possible place where you "think" you may want a camera, even if you might not put a camera there, its better to be safe than sorry, now is an oppurtune time and you want to take advantage of it.

Is that a solar panel powering the camera or motion light?

Sweet 4 cam car system. Do you have a post or a tutorial of how you set that up? I always wanted to do something like that but have no experience running wire through a vehicle.

Awesome Thanks!

All of those companies named carry high quality surveillance equipment. Most of these companies re-brand alot their equipment and I was under the impression that you were looking to buy from the manufacturers that make their equipment. Most of them are in Korea. Those manufacturers will not sell one or 2 pieces to you, you have to have a minimum order, and usually the best manufacturers have a very large minimum order. Now there are some manufacturers that will sell one or 2 pieces to you but they are alot lesser known and do not have major name brand customers like the ones that I stated. I have dealt with alot of chinese manufacturers who will let us order one piece samples and then follow it up with a small 10-20 piece order, and yeah, the equipment that we get from them is pretty good too. And I am sure there are a few lesser known Korean Manufacturers that will do the same. I love to work with those types of companies. But to find a manufacturer who manufacturers for well known name brand equipment such as the ones that I stated and to get them to sell direct to you for just a few pieces, just aint gonna happen. You will always need a minimum order of some sort. I would be curious to know which brand name product that you found the manufacturer for that sold directly to you for just a few pieces. That is normally unheard of. You normally atleast have to go through a Wholesaler for the least, and that is even hard to do unless your a retailer or supplier or a very high volume installer that orders in Bulk.

I personnaly dont think a 50mm would be able to fit in the VBM-24VF but I could be wrong.

I assume you are wanting tight shots of the entrance and exit in order to capture license plates? The problem with covert and small hidden cameras is that you are limited to the small lens sizes that are associated with them. Depending on how far away the cam is away from the entrance or exit, you will need a fairly good sized lens to view in on that particular area. More often than not, the typical smaller lens "general purpose" (ie 3.5-8mm, 2.8-12mm, etc) are not sufficient enough to cover this scenario as you will just pretty much get a wider view. Basically the lens size becomes very important in this scenario and should be one of your main focuses. The least covert of the options that you have are to use a box camera and put it inside a housing, but there are alot more quality cameras to choose from if you go this route in my opinion. Your other, more covert option is to use a bullet cam. And again, it depends on far away your camera is from the exit but more than likely you will atleast need something with 50mm from my experience. Another thing you want to keep in mind is your nighttime situation. A big problem your going to run into is the reflection you are going to have on the license plates at night, this is a hard problem to combat even with the best cameras, but WDR cameras greatly reduce this problem and its something that you might want to look into. The more lit up your parking lot is at night will also help this problem but will not totally get rid of it.

Why do you keep replying with that answer and other short quotes?

It is nearly impossible for a regular consumer to purchase a few pieces of equipment from a well known large manufacturer of quality products from Korea. Even with us being a retailer, we looked into purchasing equipment from some Korean Manufacturers, the problem is they wanted atleast $50,000-100,000 worth of products per order, or 300-1000 units of a certain product at a time. Even some of the large Chinese Manufacturers are doing this too. Its not worth their time to fiddle around with onesy and twosey orders when they have these massive orders from Samsung, Pelco, Panasonic, Dedicated Micros, etc of whom the manufacturers really dont want to tick off by selling to the end consumer in the first place.

The BLC looks beautiful on that Rory. This may not be an option but move the cameras out from under the porch in full sun and you wont have that problem anymore. We always tell people to avoid that scenario if possible to avoid the contrast in lighting that you are going to have. Of course, this is not always an option, in that case, you would need WDR or install a cam under the porch and outside the porch.

There is unfortunately not much you can do if it was really washed out. I dont know of any software that will take care of that problem.

Well, here I am again trying to figure a basic networking skill. I am sure this has something to do with my funky ATT internet network connection but I cant get email notifications to work on my DVR. I know I have everything setup correctly. I am using the same email configuration that my regular email uses which is working fine: outgoing mail Server: smtp.att.yahoo.com Port: 465 Uses SSL and requires authentication From: nellyssurplus5762@att.net To: snelson@nellyssurplus.com I cant get it to send me an email. Is there anything else that I can check to see what the problem is? Do I have to forward port 465? If so, I did and it still didnt work. But I did check at canyouseemee.org and port 465 says its closed. Which is odd because that is the same port I use to send emails out everyday. What on earth could it be? Is there anything else I can check and where do I need to look?

I wonder why it wouldnt work on the port 465 SSL version? Because that is the same settings my regular email use.

You da man Tom! Thanks! That worked! Aint nothing better than finding out the solution you have been working 2 hours straight on to find out.

Try pressing the camera right up to the window of the housing. If you have it set back you will surely have reflection.

be sure read the warning at the bottom