TopGeek

It would be great if we could put together a list of cameras people have running that are working perfectly (ie full motion detection functionality). This would make it easier for folks looking to add cameras! If you have cameras that work great please consider posting up the brand/model? Cheers and thanks

Its quiet feature rich and versatile for the price! I was using it in my office running 4 different cameras (one a USB cam, two swans, and one home made ) and had them all configured completely different and it worked fine. It was a BT generic capture card and the USB port - and I fed in a network camera from the IP and did motion detection on it. The motion detection is a little too flakey in IR/dark situations where scanning a large area - i.e. better card or splitting the cameras would be better than trying to rely on 1-2% motion variability.. I think you can download and try it for 15 or 30 days for free and then buy the key if you want it. give it a try and see if it does what you want! p.s. its running in the bkground on this machine right now.. I have my webcam pointed at my car trying to catch some repeat offender vandals cheers, Edward p.s I even caught a theif with it! It was a husband/wife team that cruise small business complexes, knock on the door a few times of a small business and when nobody answers they have a hand held leverage lock breaker. At the time I was injured from a dirt bike falll so I was really slow getting up. They knocked, knocked again.. and about a minute later JUST as I arrived at the door BOOM it flew open (it was locked). They took off running but I had both their mugs clear as day in JPG and movies from AWC

QUESTION 1: Requirements: Dedicated DVR's...16 channels.. POS overlay... 1+ TB... accessible online. MUST BE STABLE. Networkable for multiple locations with some remote HQ master software is a plus. STarting with a clean slate... what would you choose and why from today's current technology? QUESTION 2: Does anyone know if any particular codecs/compressions are better at night (dark) vs. day imaging - and/or rapidly changing light (as in a strobe light situation. I understand its mainly a functionality of the camera but just wondering if there is something to watch out for on the compression end...

Have a client that is considering a 16 channel speco 1.2 tb dedicated DVR. His environment is challenging (i.e. lots of light an dark areas 24/7 that need to be monitored). Anyone have any experience with the SPECO stuff? GOod? Bad? Ugly? Any "unforseen" problems like overheating or anything? tia, Edward

Funny you should mention that... I Have a new puppy that needs constant monitoring and I'm using a 4 channel DVR system with cameras in the rooms he has access to to monitor his activity and catch him being bad during his training time

Seagate owns Maxtor - they bought them for 1.9B Seagate is the world's largest HD manufacturer. 2nd is Western Digital 3rd was Maxtor http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/21/1311235&from=rss If you are looking for hard disk performance specs.. Toms hardware (as well as some other hardware sites) keep ongoing lists / graphs of their performance measurements under various tests. Here's Tom's: http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html keep in back of your mind that not everyone is subjective depending on advertiseing influence, but between Tom, Anandtech, etc you get the general idea of whats a dog and whats not the above storage link lets you select a drive or two and then a performance category such as average write time, random access time, etc and it ranks it against all other current drives. Keep in mind the chart usually only has current offerings so the turn over is pretty quick (i.e. some drives you may see in stores without high turnover may already be off the chart). cheers, Edward

Looking for input on best way to solve a problem... Need the ability to do a "bullet-time" shot - ala movies like the matrix or swordfish where multiple photos are taken simultaneously by multiple cameras at different angles. Just need to end up with 16 tifs/jpgs/whatever (digital stills) in a single directory on a hard disk after a single click of a button/mouse. the resolution requirement isn't huge 9 i.e. 720x480 would suffice (could *maybe* live with 640x480 - but the better the image the better solution (the images would be strictly stills) with an absolute perfect solution being a couple of megapixels per camera. I thought perhaps a cool way to do this would be a 16 port capture card with 16 cameras ... does anyone know of a way to trigger all 16 cameras at exactly the same moment for 16 simultaneous still photographs? (or in a very short time span - less than a second say). Again, the photos have to be still, clear (non-interlaced?) and then all dumped simultaneously into a single directory on a hard disk... video isn't a concern. Tips? Suggestions? ...and just out of curiosity - anyone know how the same thing could be done potentially with digital still cameras? - say 2 or 3 megapixels per image? I know there is a new generation of wi-fi still cameras coming out but I don't know how one would trigger them all simultaneously (not to mention a capture card with 16 1/3" ccd's would likely be less expensive). thanks in advance.. solid advice appreciated but also appreciate any brain-storming / thinking out loud.

I didn't think this would be so hard?? Most DVRs will record a 720 x 480 still correct? Most DVRs will allow you to click a button and capture a still correct? (the three generic ones I've played with will...) all I need to do is make that button capture that 720x480 still from all cameras at once instead of having to select the camera and then click still image over and over again for each camera... Kind of like triggering an alarm event where all cameras start recording - only they are going to take a still instead of video? 720x480 is fine - just needs to be clear. Will your script do that rory?

performance. when comparing drives within the same product line, the 7200 rpm versions are a bit quicker in each catgeory of performance (and a little more expensive because of that). every brand is different (i.e. a 7200 rpm drive from one company may be quieter than a 5400rpm drive from another) but, when comparing two drives from the same product line ... the two big things **other** than performance are: 1) temperature (7200's tend to run a bit hotter) and 2) noise (7200's tend to run a bit louder). I'm running 4, 10,000 rpm Raptor drives in a raid 5 array on my main box and the things are wicked fast but the machine makes the room sounds like you are flying in the starship enterprise when its crankin and the 13 fans are cranked to keep it cool inside. So if you are working on a system where temperature could be an issue (miniatx for example) you are going to need to up the airflow through the machine and the noise penality could be dramatic. ...time for some liquid coolin

in fact the 16 images could be captured for up to say 1 full second of time. but they'd definitely have to be all captured in under 1.5 seconds. Is there a way with a Geo system to capture still images - and to trigger more than 8 cameras to capture a still simultaneous? (less than one full second)... i.e. one click makes all the cameras record a still instead of having to click camera 1 - capture. camera 2 - capture. camera 3 - capture. etc. I guess if most DVRs would do this (should be fairly simple?) then a secondary question would be WHICH DVR systems take the BEST quality still images? (i know... i know.. Kinda like asking "synthetic or mineral based" oil question on a motorcycle forum - the age old question LOL.) So let me start over: What DVR cards allow you to click ONE button and have ALL CAMERAS capture a single still image (one from each - all 16 in under a second which is only 16fps total... so most should - but the software being able to trigger said event is the real question)) and... of the cards that allow this .. which ones have the CLEAREST / BEST **still image** quality (i.e. less compression, higher resolutions) cheers, Edward p.s. sorry for not communicating well.. I gues I should have better explained myself to begin with instead of "thinking out loud". lol

Ratio's aside... in theory wouldn't 720x480 have "more detail" in given identical shots? 720x480 = 345600 pixels of data 640x480 = 307200 pixels of data as for how it "appears" - just used non-fixed aspect ratio and you can resize it to whatever shape tickles your fancy

I guess an easier question would be... do any of the current popular dvr systems like geo or avermedia have a configuration option where you can group a bunch of cameras and set it so that you can click "still capture" and have it take a still from all selected cameras instead of just a single camera?

3000 fps?? holy heck! but that;'s kind of the opposite of what I need I need ONE fps - from 16 different cameras (because they are all in different locatsions) - but that one fps has to be simultaneous from all cameras. I'm not trying to get 16 frames from one position at the exact same moment. I'm trying to get 1 frame from 16 positions at the exact same instant.

Don't know if this helps or not.. I'm running 3 screens on each of my PCs.. AND I've run them in combo seamlesssly as 6 screens... Machine 1 is using a single Nvidia 6800 GT/OC card. it has dual monitor output (one is 15 pin vga, one is digital (to which I hookedup up an adapter) so each is running a 21" crt at 2048... then the 3rd is a 61" LCD television hooked up through the SVIDEO output running in 1024 resolution.. Machine 2 has an ATI Radeon 9700XT Pro All in Wonder and an Rage TNT card in it. One 21" CRT on each of the vga outputs and then the svideo of the All in Wonder out to the second tuner in the 61" LCD for 1024x768 display. Then.. to make a virtual machine which allows me to seamlessly take the mouse and keyboard all the way across all screens I run a program called Multiplicity by stardock. GREAT little program.. it is completely seamless except that I sometimes forget I'm leaving one PC and entering the other and try and drag the window across the three screens and onto the forth and its left stranded as the mouse continues along without it As for using software across multiple screens.. it will depend on the software. Icatcher I've found works great with mutliscreen because each camera view in in fact an idependent movable window. Other applications that have very strict control over where their video output can go (like not being able to use reolsutions other than 1024) don't have any advantage to the other monitors other than being able to do other work in those windows like webbrowsing. For some reason my girlfriend just didn't understand all the fuss when I started giggling like a little school girl as I scrolled my mouse from the right monitor to the second one to the LCD to the other side of the LCD (jumping computers) to the left monitor and on to the left most monitor all in one swoop of my wrist. I was high on technology for a week after accomplishing that hope this helps in some way?? cheers.

XP, by default, saves several recovery points / restore points (depending on how much space is allocated to it.. I have like 4 gigs allocated and it has something like 13 days of recovery). What this means is that you can restore the OS/registry to one of those previous configurations if you FUBAR it. Its kind of scarey that the most popular operating system in the world NEEDS this kind of function.. but at least its there for when we do... To solve your problem, all you need to do is restore your registry to a point before the installation of the DVR server.. and then you can pretend none of this ever happened If you can't get into the OS to do a restore point, you can still do it with the XP cd from the command prompt. You basically drop to a dos prompt (text based recovery console) and then copy the rrecovery files over from the restore point directory to the system32 directory. I haven't had to do it in a while but as I recall it is not too difficult but you have to pay atention as it is a multi-part procedure as you end up having to reboot 3 or 4 times depending ont the level you want to do it to.. but do a search on microsoft's knowledge base and you'll find step by step procedure. you can start here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654#XSLTH3120121125120121120120

not familiar with the software.. but you could do the following: 1) pause the footage on the best image of his face. 2) hit SHIFT + PRINT SCREEN to copy the current desktop to the clipboard. 3) ctrl-V the image into some photoedit program like photoshop - you now have a digital picture of the guys face to print, save as jpeg, whatever... hope this helps.

run a common ground wire between the bnc's negative and the power supply for that camera's negative. no more shocking right?

I know I should let it go.. but its is still bugging me that I can't get this card to work with anything but the software included. Trying to find the real manufacturer.. a clue now lead me to beleive it may be: ShenZhen KOCODA Science&Technology Development Co. Ltd. Does this mean anything to anyone? The goal eventually is I wanna end up with a WDM driver/crossbar for this card so it'll run with other software. The original driver it uses is the "windriver.sys" which is a Jungo control driver. there is tons of info about jungo on the web.. basically a highlevel device driver language. So I read somewhere there are only like 7 manufacturers in the world of DVR cards (is this still correct?) in which case sooner or later I should come across SOME VFW (wdm) drivers that are compatible ... right? (ha ha).

Yes, thanks Rory, I tried the sourcegorge, the iulabs, the russian bt's and some austrailian ones I found on the digivue card and the conexiant cards both the sourceforge made the conexiant card work sometimes (as per the pm I sent you) - none have worked with the digivue. I have been havin' more fun than shooting fish in a barrell! cheers, Edward

Actually.. following that clue further, I don't think that is what the card is - that's who makes the "alarm board" you can in theory hook up to (if you can find one in this hemisphere). The board I now beleive is an AST-203 made by AOST in China. Looking through these trade catelogues it appears there are DOZENS of manufacturers. So does the statement that there are "seven dvr companies" mean "original designers" and these are all clones of some sort?

I have a very generic card/software combo I'm trying to get functional. The CD has a fancy color silkscreaning and simply says "DMRS V2.0". Card installs ok - looking at it with Btspy it appears it be an bt878 - it has four composite inputs which I was able to write my own driver for and get it to work at least somewhat. As for the original software... When you install it it says "Bodyguard for your self" ??? Guess the translation loses something From then on it refers to itself as "Digital Monitoring & Recording System". After more investigation (is it just me or has Google become pretty much freaking useless accept in finding those who've figured out how to put themselves and their paid search links into google's priority system) I think I've figured out what I have is: MEC Digial Monitoring & Recording System manufactured by Maxnav Electronics in Taiwan. So I'm deducing the drivers on the original CD aren't compatible with Windows XP - I'm guessing they were Windows 95 from the poking around I've done, but trying to get the program to run in "Windows 95 compatability mode" isn't successful. I tried clean installing the CD but the drivers never install. I tried running it on the bt dirvers I made with btspy/etc but no luck - MECmain.exe (DMRS MAIN) won't execute. MECclient.exe (DMRS CLIENT) will execute but won't let you configure any of the cameras to make them visible (i.e. looks like its waiting on the drivers?). I can get CATSPY to run on one camera at a time (but not more than one at a time) so I know at least the driver I set up does talk to the card and the four ports on the card work. Does anyone know where I can get an XP version of this software or where I can find some freeware replacement that would work with this bt card? I'm already upside down on the install (doing a favor for a friend) so I really don't want to throw any money at it. tia for any advice. cheers, Edward

Yeah, Coextant... A single driver "Conexant's BtPCI WDM Audio Capture" and a single "Conexant's BtPCI WDM Video Capture". Using a trial version of Pysoft I was able to view all 4 cameras at once (with pretty terrible fps.. I'm guessing it cycling really quick between?). So I'm guessing these guys are no longer around or no longer make this product? Know of any freeware out there that will see all four? They did buy this package as an original (not from me) and they just want it to work.. even as basic as possible (non computer type people) without putting more money into it. That's why I tried catspy - worked great on one cam but only one at a time

Yes - in detail - and followed those directions exactly but I only get ONE video and ONE audio conexant bt driver listed... any idea why ? I tried running find hardware over and over but it never found it after the one set was discovered.

Kinda related tip: If you are ever behind a firewall that is blocking a website you need to get to.. go to google and then go to translate.. from english to english the site you want to view and voila. ..has helped me a few times when some uptight admin has banned access to all sites with the word "video" on them

8 port capture card needed. Exisiting machine is 1.4 Ghz AMD with a gig of ram and an ati radeon 9700 all in wonder. Need suggestions on an 8 port card compatible with the via chipset? Doesn''t have to be very fast but hi-resolution (i.e. at least 640) is important because several cameras are IR in a dark location. Motion detection also required. tia, Edward