Rock Austin

Hello... great forum! I spent alot of time trying to search on DVR information, but could only find places to buy equipment, no reviews or anything. I am putting together a CCTV system for a golf shop and driving range. We will have a total of 16 cameras, 10 indoors and 6 outdoors, all color. My main question is concerning our choice of recording device. I'm trying to balance the advantages and disadvantages of a PC-Based system versus a standalone unit. I haven't had much luck finding info or reviews on DVR cards for the PC's... which brands are worth looking at? This system will be running 24/7... we already have a PC (that we bought for something else, but now is available to be a dedicated DVR system). P-4 2.4, 1GB Ram, 320MB 7200 RPM HD, Intel MB, etc. My primary requirements are quality, stability, and reliability. LAN and web-based access to the system is also a must. We can spend as much as $2000 for a DVR card, or $4000 for a standalone unit. Any ideas? (Many Thanks!)

Well, based on the price/features comparisons, I think I'm going to go with the Geovision system... 16 cameras on the 900 model (240 fps). Stability is important to me, but I am very comfortable with computers so that along with price, swayed me. The computer will be P4 2.8, Abit or Asus mainboard, 1GB Ram, RAID, 2 250GB S-ATA hard drives, DVD-RW, Win XP or 2K. We've already setup our internet service with static IP, so everything's falling into place. Once I get everything up and running, I'll let you know and put up a link to check it out. Thanks!

If it's pertaining to a PC, SATA is Serial-ATA, which is how many hard drive are coming these days (as opposed to IDE, SCSI, etc.). I think most of the new SATA drives are 150 MB/s.

When you say quality is better on standalone, are you referring to image quality or just the stability? It looks like the PC systems can have higher FPS, so wouldn't they have better image quality? And just how unstable is the PC system? If I have 16 cameras on a GV 900 or 1000 card in a fast, solid PC with no other applications, how often will I have problems?

I've checked out some of the standalone units now, and I have a couple questions. I notice most of them are 50-60 pps, whereas many of the PC-based units are 120 fps or higher. First of all, are PPS (I assume Pictures-Per-Second) and FPS the same thing? I know you divide the FPS by your total cameras to get the FPS per camera. Does this mean the recording quality will be better on a PC-based system with 7.5 FPS per camera or higher? Also, It is a huge upcharge on most of these units to go with a larger hard drive (+$1100 for 320 MB?). What type of HD's do they use and can they be upgraded by the user?

We will be recording 16 cameras 24/7... probably want storage capacity of at least a week. How big a gap would you say there is in stability between the standalone devices and a PC-based system? We would plan on only using the PC for the purpose of recording, nothing else. Since we're budgeting $5-7000 for the whole system (including cameras), I want to make sure we end up with something solid and high-quality.