CollinR

Abit and Asus are both excellent motherboard makers, so is Intel no doubt. We need more to go on, which capture card? Abit and Asus are performance boards, Intel is a reliable often base tested boards. Abit and Asus will let you tweak your hardware beyond what Intel will, Intel is almost always a baseline tested solution for reliablity. If your caputure card doesn't support Intel northbrigdes you are about up a creek for more then a couple few cameras. Every capture card I have seen is if not approved for Intel then required.

Yeah it's obvious a digital solution is coming, but will it be IP?

Another vote for considering a PC based system. Max your requirements are a walk in the park for a PC based system that fits into your budget. Plus you would have access to a world of addition goodness. Some of your parameters that get me with "stand alone" DVRs. Those are basic PC DVR features but are a tall order all in the same standalone. Also keep in mind you wouldn't be in this situation if you had a PC DVR as you could simply swap cards or upgrade CPU/memory. If you go standalone you are setting yourself up for going through this again in the future. I'm biased, but I don't think some extra education hurts ya any. Welcome to the board.

No problem, I really wish I could say that all timelapses recorded at the same speed and all multiplexors use the same protocols but I can't. It would make both of our lives easier if I could though.

Yup I work with slow PCs all the time, both of my machines here at my desk are slower then 2Ghz. Sucks but the still is antiquated before it ships anymore so I quit tring to stay up with technology. I think I'm on something like a 2-5 year cycle as well. Good thing is though most of my old old old junk still works, I have a pile of ~P 133s that are all still fully functional and make great routers, firewalls and paperweights.

Why do you need the 4 cameras syncronized? I assume a Geo card would suffice, send your serial data as an input overlay. I have never tried to syncronize across multiple inputs, I'm not sure how well it would work. Possibly add a heartbeat to your serial data, might be able to syncronize from that. If you don't care that cam 1 and cam 2 are 200ms off from each other it'll work depending on your data, geo was designed for interfacing serial reciept printers, it doesn't care though. EDIT: Scratch below, I see what you want. What does syncronize mean to you? +/- 1 second? +/- 1ms ? I think it will be pretty easy to an accuracy point but after that I dunno. I would think specific hardware controls would be required to get really precise.

Naw you'll be okay, you are all Intel. It's the Nforce>ATI thing that I would be concerned about most in that system's design. ATI gets plenty of good ratings so I know they can't be complete trash but I will never consider purchasing another unless they monopolize display adapters.

Another issue is your quality of service for the justice system. How good are you with video editing and manipulating? Often details are in the video a good technician will be able to find using somewhat specialized tools and knowledge. Even if it's not the evidence copy it can still skew you. I would at least call a few places and see what they want to have a tech extract a copy and enhance it as best they can. That way your ADAs will have a good idea of what can come from the evidence copy if it goes to court.

These are what I like. http://www.conexant.com/products/entry.jsp?id=10

I would outsource it if I were you. Well that is if you ever wanted to use it for evidence, if you just want to look take a PVR and hook it up to any old system's monitor output and manually record what it spits out I don't deal with junk, so I don't kow much about the older stuff. I guess what it comes down to is how crappy of equipment you have to deal with, if it is recording a quad view or only capable of displaying a quad view it's gunna suck no matter what. If it's a quality cam behind a quality switcher you'll have as high quality of a recording as most of the PC based DVRs but you will loose tons of frames due to the switching. Might be able to get by with a laptop and a Hauppage WinTVUSB http://www.hauppage.com/pages/products/data_pvrusb2.html Thier other stuff (PCI PVR models) dominates the best CCTV hardware I have seen. If you do it that way you never touched the evidence, there is still no way it could have been manipulated.

The trend I have been seeing is they hire a dotcomie, get hacked, hire an old school unix grand master and pay em for 2-5 years. Once their structure is up and running killer they ax him and hire somebody with no experience for half the money. I'm waiting to see what happens after the guru has been out for 5, 10, 15 years. They seem to have an unbelievable ablilty to hold grudges only paralleled by their ability to annoy undetected.

Heck I rejoice if they have a decent IT guy at all! Then I go to check out Dedicated Micros and they claim all of their tech support are MSCEs. Maybe thats why their standalone is ~$3500. I especially find it odd when their system isn't running windows... I haven't been too overly impressed with the MSCEs I have delt with in the past but take way their OS and what should I expect?

Are you tring to connect remotely via DDNS? If so I too have had issues with it dropping the specified port when forwarding to the dynamic address. I'm pretty sure the DVR interfaces all lookup your DDNS and use the current IP rather then reling on DNS.

If it were my site... I would have a staff forum for mods, you might I'm not a mod so I don't know. I would make the dealer area invisable to those who aren't authorized to read it. This will kill 2 birds with one stone. Reduce your PMs as dealer access would become via invite (which I think is whats happening anyway, the minimum post count isn't always enforced). I don't have to see the red dot on the index page for new posts in a forum I can't read. EDIT: Oh yeah, use the staff forum for polls so the staff can vote people into/out of restricted forums. This is not on the code of conduct though.

No doubt there. Here is a log viewer for you guys who use the windows firewall. http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=3307

I'm not up on the FAT32 thing, explain where this started for you. Okay the stuff I'll add into discussion. Mobo *** Change boot sequence to HD>CD>floppy If floppy is first it will check on every boot, that adds 5-10 seconds to the boot, nobody boots from floppys anymore. Same goes for CD, if there is one in the drive it will read the thing before booting, not needed! *** Open the AGP bus apature size to 50% of your system memory. Alot of BIOSs default to something like 64MB, few have 128MB RAM anymore. I don't know if this helps in a DVR but I do it anyway. *** Enable PCI Bus Mastering, this can help with correctly configuring connections. XP *** Shut off all the graphical display stuff nobody cares about (not only for DVRS). Right click "My Computer" choose "properties". Choose the tab labeled "advanced". Under performance choose "settings" Choose the tab labeled "Visual Effects" Check the box next to "Adjust for best performance" *** Fixed Swap File (Virtual Memory) While you are in the system properties choose the "Advanced" tab. In there it is possible to customise the Virtual Memory. For custom size, this is often recommended to be 1.5 to 2 times the amount of your total RAM for both initial and maximum size. If you have more then 1GB of operating memory use registered memory, shameless plug for Crucial.com, because memory is crucial. *** Kill all unneeded apps. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Start>Programs>Startup You can also do it with msconfig, once you have built a few machines thats probably how you will. Never use msconfig to modify services, run services.msc instead. *** Kill the new start menu. Right click on your taskbar and choose "Properties" Choose the "Start Menu" Tab and then click on "Customize" Choose "Classic Start Menu" Scroll Down the "Advanced Start Menu Options" list and uncheck the "Use Personalized Menus" option, click "OK", then "Apply" and "OK" to finish. *** Use F6 to install your Raid or SATA drivers, thats right once you have installed XP the SATA drivers will work but you won't get the speed. Go ahead test away. *** Make sure XP has correctly set your HD's transfer mode. Right click on "My Computer", select the Hardware tab, and Select Device Manager. Expand "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" and double-click on "Primary IDE Channel" Under the "Advanced Settings" tab, check the "Device 1" setting. More than likely, your current transfer mode is set to PIO. Set it to "DMA if available" Repeat the step for the "Secondary IDE Channel" if you have one. *** Always give your DVR a static IP address! Even if you have to buy a 1 port firewall/router. This fixes DHCP startup lag and hell it's just obviously good all around. (Okay basically if this doesn't work for you, you don't need to be reading articles like this. I am aware that there are more then one way to skin a cat and DHCP isn't required nor does the router need to act like the DHCP server. SBHO and residential will work like this 99.9% of the time.) Log into your router>Check it's status, you should write down the DHCP pool range, subnet mask, gateway address and DNS server addresses. Limit the pool to the same size as the number of PCs you have and change the values from 192.168.1.1-100, maybe something like 192.168.69.69-74 (5 slots). ^ Router config and security really deserves a seperate article, but XP is effected by it's DHCP client so I'm posting it here. Right click My Network Places and select Properties from the drop down menu. This will open up the Network Connections window. Locate your Local Area Network connection and right click it, select Properties. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click Properties at the bottom. In the next window, click 'Use the following IP Address' Change the IP address to one that is inside the pool and hopefully not currently in use by another PC on the network Change the subnet mask and gateway to the values from your router Choose "Use the following DNS server addresses" Fill in the DNS server addresses from your router or add your own DNS server addresses if you don't use those provided by your ISP or you have internal DNS running. *** Disable boot logo Edit boot.ini add " /noguiboot" right after "/fastdetect". Speeds your boot time slightly. *** Prevent useless fonts from loading on startup. Make a folder in My Documents called fonts2 and move unneeded fonts there, now they won't be loaded at startup and if you really need them you still have them. Maybe we should convert the whole article to wingdings I think not, you will find useless fonts that you can't seem to get rid of. *** Disable Offline Files Start > Settings > Control Panel > Folder Options > Offline Files > Uncheck "Enable Offline Files" *** Disable Hide Inactive Icons Start > Settings > Taskbar and Start Menu > Taskbar TAB > Uncheck "Hide Inactive Icons" *** Disable Automatic Desktop Cleanup Wizard Start > Settings > Control Panel > Display > Desktop > Customise Desktop > Untick "Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days" *** Disable Notification Area Balloon Tips HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced Right-click the right pane, create a new DWORD value, and then name it EnableBalloonTips . Double-click this new entry, and then give it a hexadecimal value of 0 . Quit Registry Editor. Log off Windows, and then log back on. *** Disable CDROM Autoplay HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom Set autorun to 0 This prevents you from getting Sony's newest rootkit when your braindead customer desides to play music on their new DVR. *** Disable System Sounds Start > Settings > Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices > Sounds Tab > Sound Scheme to None. ~~~ Processor scheduling should be set to background services and not Programs. Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance Settings > Advanced Tab > Background Services I think we need to test this some, I don't do it but I can see why it might help a DVR. *** Qos packet scheduler mod Run gpedit.msc, Expand the "Local Computer Policy" branch Expand the "Administrative Templates" under computer Expand the "Network" branch Highlight the "QoS Packet Scheduler" in left pane. In the right window pane double-click the "Limit Reservable Bandwidth" setting On the settings tab check the "Enabled" item Change "Bandwidth limit %" to read 0 Go to your Network connections Start=>Connect to=>Show All Connections and right-click on your connection. Then under the General or the Networking tab, (where it lists your protocols) make sure QoS packet scheduler is enabled. *** Disable disk performace counters Open the command prompt diskperf -n If you use the disk usage counters you don't want to do this, I personally don't want the badnwidth on the bus. *** No need for more then 32 bit color depth or more then 16 bit audio, both of these you can hardly tell a difference until you start graphing. More coming...

This has always been my experience with ATI trash... For me it's like this... Osama . . . . ATI Satan himself I hate ATI, I think they push products to market and I think they will use marketing hype for features that aren't funtional. I would assume hooking it to an Nforce mobo is asking for a problem. I mean the N in Nforce is Nvdia, ATI's arc enemy. So if it were my system I would put in a basic nvidia card. Did I say I HATE ATI enough? Well I do! This stems from the early 90s, ATI - "All in Wonder" issue I had with a customer. I hope they become infested with the fleas of a thousand camels.

You can also try out a Hauppage PVR 150, about $65 and the quality blows the CCTV hardware out of the water. It only does 1 channel of video and 2 of audio though (DD passes through ). They aren't a valid option fo a normal DVR as $65/channel with PCI socket limit.

Which apache enabled DVR is this? I would put apache back on port 80, then internally you can connect to it without specifing a port. Do your port forwarding on the router 80 coming in gets blocked and 81 or whatever gets forwarded to the DVR's IP on port 80.

Its a huge array, there are some really crappy PC systems (1 bt878 for 16 cams) and there are really good ones. Same I assume for standalones. Alot of them use the same encoders (or knockoffs) if thats what you mean by hardware. The encoder is what is converting the analog cameras signal into a MPEG stream.

$10 says that car is stolen too. Sux man but it looks like you didn't get taken too bad.

I had it happen to me the other day.

Big factor, especially if your online identity is in any way linked to your reality identity.

I like this guy already. (Barrel connectors didn't make the list. )

Why are you running 2 webservers? Or are you not using Geo's? EDIT: I can't find jack on this Kool Aide distro, somebody wanna link me? Of course the hardware is really a bigger concern.