CollinR

You need to double your budget to get decent stuff, $100 per camera is pretty tight and basically limits you to bullets. I cannot see a DVR hardware and software package worth buying for less then $250 So IMHO for minium decent enough quality to be worthwhile having is going to be more like $1050. Now I fully know it is possible to get 8 cameras and 8 ports on a PCI card for less then $500. In the end it will be more expensive though... Thats how I stay in business, most of myt customers spent too little the first time and had to buy the stuff twice. At a minium get a decent DVR package and prepare to swap cameras as you can in the future.

Add in Video LAN and you can stream it in a variety of formats.

Part of the problem is nobody can properly demo a megapixel MJPEG camera, and to a point MPEG4 is tough if you have more then a few.

I am about to have a couple of badboys in on the cheap, 1/2" imagers and everything. Hopefully will be under $300 (retail, I know it doesn't sound like it) with a nice AI VF AS lens which is dirt cheap BTW.

I would be concerned with voltage drop over that distance, also run the video on the blue pair where possible.

Love the idea! Hope people buy a bunch and bring that cost down.

It's the bees knees man.

You should connect the IO box to zones on your Elk.

It has issues with gain but for sub $300 it's still good. (ICR functionality stops when you turn off automatic gain control.) As always IR seperate is better then IR on the cam and for you this is most important as your area is so small and so close to the camera.

Open software is open source so Zonemineder is the only open solution I know of. Good bad or whatever, it is very much and truely open. Making your DVR limited to your own cameras is IMHO economic suicide. Making DVR software that works with a variety of cameras and capture devices is the only way they can make any money. Those who choose otherwise better be both good and huge (Sony, Panasonic) with a large consumer base. Still I seriously doubt this will last too long. It's much better for all involved if a new standard were developed for IP cameras much like NTSC and PAL for analog cameras. Just a bare minimum required to be called an IP based surviellence camera. The other problems would die off quickly.

Fake day/night just removes the saturation from the picture making it BW then it turns up the gain. True day/night does same but also remove the light filter allowing most light energy to the imager. This can occur as a reaction to photocel or video driven like the iris. Any imager can do either or.

You guys are using the term "open" pretty loosly. Thus far none last listed a package that meets my defintition of open.

I use Seagate SV35s, like em, not too much $ either.

Charmed Quark windows automation software and touchscreen designer, I have done a couple few. Edit: With Geovision would will most likley need an IO controller. That or sniff the COM port connected to one. I just sold a Geo system to a CQCer last night as a matter of fact. lol

IR on the cam is bad but IR on a dome has been even worse.

Vista's new network stack is has not been so well recieved, if possible switch back to XP Pro. jpeg pull may be your only option as these day nights aren't claimed to be supported by Aver. Since the problem becomes more pronouced during the switch from day to night mode or night to day mode I have to think it may just not have native support for that model number.

Instead of a web petition start helping the zoneminder or other open source linux projects. Our DVRs have no need even for XP level of bloat. Maybe Avermedia will bring back thier linux offering. Exacq has cygwin.dll in it's directory.

Done many functions remotely over Wild Blue just change your ports up some. Basically everything I have tried worked, the BW cap is a PITA though.

I see they only have one IQ listed. You should try jpg pull, just bring up the cam in IE and get the jpg from the source. Add that as a generic IP cam and stick that in the URL.

You have version 7.3? If not look at the sticky atop this forum.

Sure if you got the ports go for it!

IR too close to cam, 48"-60" minimum IMHO, will also improve other aspects as the light won't have the bounce back effect from anything anymore. Also if you can try to bounce the light off something else on the edge or out of the frame. This will provide a more even lighting and reduce whiteouts. EDIT: 1/4" day/night is probably fake day/night, you should consider upgrade more seriously. Make sure you get a true day / night or bkack and white cam.

You can generally get a decent idea from the bandwidth it comsumes.

Also check out nLite, I use that it works well.

Those systems aren't compressing the video, it's coming in on their own h.264 format. Few do realtime transcoding, a bunch do no transcoding at all.