Dee_Ann

Hi, Ok, this may sound paranoid and kooky but this is what I need. I need a CHEAP, SIMPLE little home IP camera that will work stand alone within my own home WIFI, BUT does not require an account of any kind nor requires a connection to the outside world of any kind. I just want to be able to view it on my iPhone over my WIFI only when I'm within my own home and never outside of the home and as a bonus, if at all possible, be able to call it up on my Roku and view it, again only within my own home WIFI and it never, ever having any connection to the outside world in any way. Here's the reason. I wired a garage door opener to my coffee pot so that I can lay in bed and press a key fob remote that triggers a relay that electrically "presses the button" on my coffee pot to start it as if I was standing there pressing the button. Furthermore, I also wired a very, very loud alarm/siren on the same circuit to give me audio feedback so that I can "supposedly know" that the coffee pot was triggered and has started. The coffee pot is downstairs and it's pretty hard to hear the siren if the air conditioner is running. Now this in theory should work 100% fine and probably about 90% of the time it does work perfectly. But sometimes depending on how I am holding the button or the humidity level or my mood, or who knows, sometimes the signal is not good and the relay downstairs will toggle on and off rapidly, I'll hear the siren go on and off rapidly several times but then I have no way of knowing if it was toggled on or off and I just have to HOPE that it actually stayed on and is brewing. When this happens it's almost certain that it's not. I can try to second guess it and press the button again but it may cycle a few more times or maybe just once but after the first malfunction it's purely a throw of the dice as to if it started or not. This to me is extremely annoying so I want to get a really cheap little IP camera that I can put in my kitchen facing the coffee pot, when I wake up I can bring up the camera on my iPhone or my Roku (which is connected to the TV in my bedroom) then while watching the coffee pot I can press the button and see if the blue light goes on and stays on so that I can press the button a second or third time or how ever many times I need to to make sure the coffee pot started. Of course the first thing everyone will say is "Why don't you just use the built in timer on your coffee pot you goofy woman?" Well, I can't. I'm afflicted by non-24 which means my internal clock is like 32 hours or so. Every single day of my life I go to bed at a different time and wake up at a different time. EVERY TIME. Your wall clock, 12 noon is always at the top and the hands always rotate at the same speed. So for you 10pm and 7am are always at the same time for you. For me not only are the hands of my clock rotating at a different speed, the face of the clock is also rotating as well so that my "noon" is 2:30pm today but tomorrow it might be at 4:45pm and so on. I stay up 20 to 22 hours and sleep 5 hours at a time to further complicate my life. I can't change that, it's how my body works. So I can't use daily timers or alarms or even calendars for that matter. So for me the only thing that really works is to have a way to trigger my coffee pot from remote when I wake up so that by the time I get dressed and get downstairs my coffee is ready. I've got that part made and working and it's usually OK but not always and then I get raging furious and curse a lot when I go downstairs and find the coffee didn't start. As for the camera, I do not want one that requires you to create an account of any kind, anywhere. I don't want one that requires a connection to the outside world. I don't want one that uses ANY outside service, cloud, server, etc.. I need it to operate as a stand alone IP camera that functions only within my own private WIFI at home, that I can view with a generic IP camera viewing app on my iPhone and even better via a generic IP camera viewing app on my Roku. I've tried to dig through Amazon for one but it seems that no such thing exists but if there is one, there is no way to search for an IP camera that meets the criteria I require. I do not trust the internet, I do not trust "the cloud" or external servers, I will not, under any circumstances put any type of camera system online an in any way or form. It seems that almost every camera and DVR system ever made comes with Chinese backdoors preinstalled and they can't be blocked or removed. To me that is 100% unacceptable and is a NO SALE issue as far as I am concerned. Simple and cheap is better. I don't need alerts or motion detection or night vision and absolutely will not consider any camera that requires me to create an account of any kind at all or requires a connection to the outside world. Please tell me such a thing exists!! Oh yeah, and my budget for this very simple camera, $50 max. Thanks! Signed, The Crazy Lady...

Oh yeah, as for signs, I put up several so that everyone knows that there are cameras and that I am recording audio. Besides, bad neighbor knows it and the cops know it. They had stood on my porch and I told them about the cameras and audio recording and they told me "People that are doing things they shouldn't be doing are the ones that complain the loudest about cameras." Oh and I also put purple paint on all my gate posts and door frames. In Texas we have the "Purple paint law". I've also studied up on our "Castle Doctrine" laws.

Wow! Good stuff! Thank you! Linux will be the route for me since I don't do windows at all. I see Ubuntu has ZFS integrated into it now. Not a huge Ubuntu fan but if it works, well... As for making it available outside of my home, I really would rather not do that at all in the first place. I simply do not trust the world. Waaaaay too many bad actors out there. I've read some pretty frightening things people can do if they want to. And not much you can do to stop them. Even disconnected systems are at risk if someone wants in. The varios HD type cameras you mentioned are unfamiliar to me so I have some homework to do. I've been using old analog stuff for about 7-8 years now. After the economy went to pot during the previous administration I scooped up oodles of old analog cameras and gear for pennies on the dollar. But It's time to move on now and get with the new century. As for audio recording I'm doing it already and I don't care what the consequences are. All the neighbors know I do it and the police know I do it. The psychotic barbarian living straight across the street from me makes death threats against me, frequently harasses me (daily), curses and calls me many vulgar things, sits on his porch with a gun, drinking beer and shooting the finger at me and yells "F**KING BULL D*KE WH*** B***H!" and "F*** YOU B***H!" constantly. He tries to taunt me into coming outside by yelling "COME OUTSIDE B***H !!", rips his shirt off and stomps around at the edge of my yard, daring me to come outside of my own house. He and his wife and his kids shine Q-beam lights into my windows and cameras at night and try to damage my cameras with lasers. The Q-beams are them trying to disrupt me from sleeping and to try to damage the cameras. He stood in the street and was talking loudly on speakerphone with a friend and told him "That b***h had me thrown in jail, she don't know who she's f***ing with, I'll straight up get a sniper rifle". And the other night him and his wife stood in the front facing my house, he handed her his beer then dropped his pants to the ground and stood there naked from the waist down for at least 30 seconds, then he pulled his pants part way up and stood there some more and yelled "F***ING BULL D*KE C*** WH*** !".. I had to have a gate opener installed so I can come and go without having to get out of my car to open/close/lock the gate by hand like I had been doing because I was vulnerable then. Now I can open the gate by remote, back out, close the gate and drive off without getting out of the car and the same when I come back. I had to put some faux ivy privacy panels over my gate because he would stand at the street and look through my gate and curse at me and make threats. Once I put the privacy stuff up and they couldn't see into my yard anymore him and his wife were FURIOUS and were cursing and telling their visiting friends that I put up "ghetto camouflage to hide behind". After that they would back a pickup truck right to the edge of the street and stand on the tailgate to try and see over my gate into my yard. Just about 20 minutes ago he blasted my cameras with his Q-beam then stood on his porch with his arms raised and yelled "Come on. Do something about it b***h"... I've got several DVD's full of all the harassment and threats he's made towards me and after getting almost no help from the police I'm going to go see the District Attorney next week and let them see all this stuff. I'm thinking the part where he exposed himself, that should get him a felony sex offender conviction. Plus I have two different recordings of him beating his wife and threatening her with a gun. That should get him some prison time. Thing is, when the police finally goes after him for all this stuff he's going to go full tilt insane and I'm really going to be at extreme high risk. He'll kill me if he gets the chance, I have no doubt of it at all. I hope the police will take his guns from him when they arrest him for all this. Even if they do I'm sure he'll get another one or he'll find some other weapon to attack me with. In a million years I never would have thought something like this could ever happen to me, I have never had a problem with a neighbor in all my life until this white trash barbarian RENTED the house across from me. ALL the neighbors are terrified of him and now no one walks their dogs down the street anymore. This used to be a very nice neighborhood and everyone always was very safe here. Now everyone is terrified to leave their homes. Every time this scumbag threatens me I put up another camera or two. And when he sees my cameras it infuriates him and he flies off into a rage. More rage? More cameras. Anyway, so my goal is to begin replacing the old cameras and gear with new, high tech, high def cameras. I want my house and yard to be completely covered so that there is no way anyone can approach my house day or night without being recorded and me being alerted. One limitation I have to work with is that because of the style of my house, there are no eaves that I can put cameras under. My house is a French Provincial with a Mansard roof so in other words, it's a big square box. There's almost no way to mount cameras in a way that they would be discreet. I can't have a bunch of cameras bristling off of the house like a prison or Fort Knox because it would look awkward, odd and tacky. I have to get new siding on the second story soon so I think what I will do is have them install planter boxes under the windows then I can mount dome cameras (of the same color) under the planters so they won't be so obvious. I can see myself ending up with anywhere from 24-30 cameras outdoors and at least 8 cameras indoors for the downstairs. No need for cameras upstairs because it's unlikely he or anyone else would try to come through the windows up there. But downstairs, that could be a problem. I need to replace my doors with ones that can't be broken down and put cameras where I can see in all the rooms with windows downstairs. I've got three dogs (two German Shepherds and a barky brown dog) and I sleep with a display on at the foot of my bed and two handguns on the night stand. If he tries to break in my dogs will wake me and everything will be over once and for all shortly thereafter. I'm really tired of this guy and I'm trying to get the videos all sorted out so I can show the DA what this guy has been doing. But even if they arrest him (again) and put him away for any length of time I KNOW he'll come after me. I can not and will not just sit blindly inside my house, unaware of the outside world, hoping that he doesn't come after me. I'm preparing for the inevitable. I'm not going to be a victim, I'm going to be the victor. You ever see one of those movies where some woman is terrorized and victimized by some low life then she has enough of the BS and she goes into kick a** mode? Yeah, that's where I am at now. I've had enough and I'm switching gears into kick a** mode. Thanks again and I'll probably get back with more questions about cameras and stuff as I try to educate myself about the new tech...

Hi, I need some advice to build up a DVR system. I have put up multiple cameras around my place because of harassment and death threats from psychotic neighbor. I have three really old DVR recorders. One is a 4 channel clunker with very poor capabilities, it's an "ICatch US411ZS" (I'm not using this one) Another is an old "Eyemax HX08" (8 channel) that was given to me, it too has really poor capabilities. (in use) And a slightly better "Q-See QS558-1" (8 channel) (also in use) The problem with these are many. For one, the HX08 saves videos as EXE files. Um, NO. I'm not going to go to the police station with a DVD full of EXE files and tell them "trust me, run these EXE files on your computers, it's OK, really." I don't trust the EXE files it creates and I don't expect the police to trust them either. I doubt they would even open them at all and well they shouldn't. On all the machines the recording quality is pretty bad. I've tried to set them up for the highest quality possible but it seems that they have a maximum capability that has to be divided between however many channels you are recording and in this case, it's all 8 channels. I guess it's 240 FPS. The Q-See will record all 8 channels in D1 but the Eyemax won't, it records in CIF which is bloody awful. And the motion sensing feature is completely broken, it's never worked right and Q-See never issued a fix for it. On both machines I've added after market microphones so I can record audio because the harassment, threats and intimidation from my BAD neighbor is mostly verbal and is usually accompanied by middle finger gestures, crotch grabbing, mooning and displays of guns, all while he hurls vulgarities and threats at me. Another thing I hate about these machines is that they are slug slow and navigating them is a painful, miserable experience. The PTZ interface is dreadful and you can't program them to execute PTZ commands according to time schedules. You can have it do stuff like tilt & pan on events but I can't program the iris and focus to adjust per a time schedule such as open iris (N2) steps and adjust focus to (N2) at 9pm and at 6am revert iris and focus to (N1). That's extremely annoying. The Eyemax won't allow me to change the screen layout and won't let me move the time/date stamps to different spots where they won't cover over what the camera sees. So I end up having to disable the time date stamp. But then it won't let me remove or move it from the main display even though I remove it from the recordings. Blah blah blah... These machines are horrible and I need something much better. But after shopping around it seems that ALL the machines out there have the same 240fps limitations and the usual HORRIBLE Engrish interface and very probably can't be trusted after it was found that almost all DVR systems are infected with malware and or backdoors and or phone home to servers in China which I am NOT OK with. http://news.softpedia.com/news/remote-code-execution-flaw-found-in-firmware-of-70-different-cctv-dvr-vendors-502096.shtml I don't see that buying another Chinese DVR is going to help me at all. It'll just be more of the same problems and complaints I have now. So what I would like to do is build my own system from scratch. It can not be microsoft based. I do not and will not use windows. I don't own a copy of windows and I never will. I only use OS X, BSD and Linux. I have three Macs, one is an actual iMac and two are hackintoshes I built from scratch. I have another machine with an older motherboard in it running PC-BSD w/ZFS (32tb) as a NAS for my Macs. I doubt that there is really any way I can use the hackintosh macs as DVR's since real Macs don't really allow you to put random 3rd party PC cards in them so I would expect there's not even any DVR security apps for OS X. I have heard that there is software for Linux to run a DVR system so I'm thinking it might be available on BSD? But, I don't know if the old motherboard I'm using in the BSD machine is powerful enough to handle 20-30+ incoming videos. I want to have the capability to record up to 32 video channels, possibly more. I have quite a few outdoor cameras and I would like to put cameras indoors as well. I don't have indoors cameras now because I don't trust the Chinese DVR's I'm using now plus they are already maxed out, I can't add any more cameras to the two 8 channel DVRs. As of now I'm using old analog type (eyemax) dome cameras and a few OLD AD/Computar camera/lens with rs485 decoders to let me Z/I/F them. The AD cameras don't work worth a flip at night. I removed the IR filters and put up IR lights but that still doesn't help much and in the daytime everything has a horrible reddish hue. And one of the lenses broke and won't focus anymore. You can't buy parts to fix it so I would have to spend $100 to buy another OLD lens with the same drawbacks. Another problem with the analog cameras is the very poor quality Chinese video cables typical Amazon junk, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZDXC9Z8/r The wires are extremely inferior and substandard. On a 100 foot run the voltage drops so much due to the very thin wires that it's down to just a little over 8 volts which is not enough to run a camera and it's IR lights. The resolution of the cameras is VHS quality. It's awful. People, look like pixels moving around on a 1991 Nintendo games. You can see them, you can tell they are people and ~ I ~ know who they are usually but they aren't readily identifiable enough to use in court for prosecution purposes. But for now I have to stick with the analog cameras because I have a lot of them and I can't afford to replace them all at once. I'll have to do it a few at a time over a year or two as my budget allows. I want to end up replacing them with HD megapixel cameras so I suppose that will mean I'll need POE/IP cameras and I need them to have audio. Excellent HD night vision is a must. I need to see at might like it's daytime. (BW night vision is fine). Also I need them to be hard wired, I won't even consider WIFI at all. My house is about to be clad in new aluminum siding with foil backed foam board which will kill my WIFI (which is already awful as it is). I don't know anything about POE/IP cameras and it's wiring but I'm assuming CAT6 or CAT7 wiring? I'll dedicate a switch just to the cameras so that they won't interfere with my LAN. I can feed them into a 48 port gigabit switch and connect that directly the DVR machine which I plan to put four gigabit ports into. I put four gigabit ports in all my machines anyway. But I will want the cameras to operate on a physically separate LAN from everything else. Does the Linux (or BSD) software allow a mixture of analog and IP cameras? And as for the analog cameras that I have to continue to use until I can eventually replace them, I need to find some sort of capture cards. I've looked at all the assorted capture cards and they all seem to have the 240fps limitation of the ready built DVRs. An 8 or 16 port card will still have to divide it's 240fps between however many cameras are connected to it. So I'm thinking that I would be better off just using a bunch of 4 channel cards instead? Would that be a feasible option? OR, my math tells me that I could get 30fps on 8 channels but would I be able to record 8 channels of D1 at 30fps? I don't even want to waste my time on it if it will be CIF. If I could get 4 or 5, 8 channel cards to record 30fps D1 that would be acceptable, but is it feasible? And of course I have to have the ability to record audio as well, from multiple sources. I've put up several microphones but they pick up too much background noise to be very helpful unless the guy is yelling at me. He's somehow figured out at what level he can talk where his voice becomes muddied from auto traffic noise, lawn mowers, birds chirping, etc.. He'll often times make his verbal assaults on me with his voice low enough that I can hear him but the microphones have trouble. So I need to somehow make the microphones work like shotgun mics do. I have a shotgun mic for my DSLR but there's no way I can put it outside, it's not even remotely weather resistant in any manner. So, homemade shotgun mics? Or does anyone make such a thing already for surveillance systems? I'm kind of hoping that when I switch to IP cameras that with them each having a microphone that they can somehow work together to do noise canceling. Isn't that why an iPhone has several microphones, so it can do noise canceling ? Even if it can't do it in real time maybe it could be done in Adobe Premiere or some third party app? On my Mac, in iMovie there is an option to enhance voice and it does a decent job of it but it's pretty lame for processing DVR recordings, that's not what it was really designed to do. Surely there must be a way to build a good HD, non-windows DVR system that's better than the crummy, un-trustable, Chinese junk that Amazon & Ebay is flooded with. It would be nice to be able to record HD video and keep it indefinitely plus have the ability to easily dump clips to DVD in high quality x264 or x265 mkv files that I can hand over to the police when need be. The CIF quality avi and exe (WTF?!) files that I have a miserable time extracting by thumb drives are really not acceptable. It's slow and cumbersome and just really poor quality. I don't have an endless supply of cash I can dump into a whole new system so I have to do it a little bit here and a little bit there over a long time, the ability to deal with analog and IP cameras at the same time would be extremely helpful. In my house I have several monitors setup so I can watch the cameras including one at the foot of my bed that I leave on while I sleep so I can wake up and everything going on around my house then go back to sleep without having to get up. But I can only view 8 cameras this way so it's not very practical. I would like to be able to see all of them at once and it would be nice if it could do PIP for spot when there are events such as motion detection. 32" HDTVs are cheap now and I've already got a few 50 foot HDMI cables to carry DVR output from the Q-See DVR to my desk and to my bedroom. I need to add a third monitor in my kitchen where I spend a LOT of time, that's fairly trivial to do. I guess that the machine I build just needs to have HDMI output as well as DVI, there should be plenty of video cards like that on Amazon or Newegg still, as far as I know they haven't totally phased out DVI and HDMI on pc cards just yet. A $100 or so should get me a really decent Nvidia card that will run in Linux or BSD. I don't really know where to start because the Amazon reviews are, well, I just don't really think they are accurate or truthful in many cases. And Amazon tends to blend reviews from many similar items together so you don't know if you're really reading a review about the exact items you are considering for purchase. If this can't be done in PC-BSD I would have no problem building a dedicated Linux machine for the DVR. I haven't used Linux much in a few years but I think they have a fairly decent integration of ZFS for it now if you're willing to overlook the licensing issues (which I am). I'm not a huge fan of Ubuntu after some of the shenanigans they pulled (which is a big part of why I switched to BSD). When my photography hobby became more and more of a profession I ended up switching to OS X and when I outgrew my iMac I had to build much bigger, much faster hackontoshes. I would love to have an OS X native DVR system but I just don't believe there is such a thing since a hackintosh isn't officially supported by anyone and factory made Apple Macs don't play well with hardware built for the PC world. So, DVR software for PC-BSD ~ OR ~ if not then for Linux. If it can handle analog AND IP cameras at the same time that would be very awesome. HD cameras with audio that have very good night vision and are megapixel and POE/IP but NOT WIFI. No WIFI. Hardwired only. Analog capture cards that will work in a PC-BSD / Linux machine to give me the very best recordings possible for the analog cameras. A bunch of 4 channel cards? Or 8 channel? I found some OLD capture cards in a box of junk but they are really old and I don't if they even work or not and the motherboard I have might not even have slots these will fit into. So I'm guessing I should plan on buying new PCIe cards anyway, yes? I'm really unsure about spending hundred of dollars on video cards that *may not even work* on non-windows systems. And I'm having trouble sorting through the specs on most of them, the Engrish is always lacking in accuracy and detail and often times seems to be circular and misleading if not flat out dishonest. I see lots of capture cards on Ebay but they ALL say they are for windows. None of them say if they will work under *nix systems. I know their software won't and I don't care about their software at all, it would go straight to the circular file anyway. As long as the *nix apps can use the hardware, that's all I care about. I think Zoneminder is the software for *nix but maybe there is something else? Something newer or better? I don't know. I need a surveillance system for 2017, not this clunky junk that's all based on 1990's technology and cameras based on 1950's technology. But until I get everything completely updated I'll have to suffer through a mix of old and new tech. I know what I want this to end up doing but I'm not really sure how to get there. I can put all the stuff together and make it work but my concern is getting the right stuff to begin with. I can't afford to spend money on stuff just to find out it won't work or it is woefully inadequate. Many times in the past I have been tricked into buying substandard stuff because of false / misleading / misrepresented specifications. If you guys could point me towards the right stuff I would really appreciate it a lot. I really need a much better surveillance system because things are getting out of hand with this psycho neighbor. I need to be able to not only monitor my premises inside and out 24/7 but I need to be able to pull high quality recordings from it quickly when it's time to call the police. Thanks much!

Since I last posted my psychopathic neighbor has ramped up his harassment to the level of terroristic death threats which I have recorded. The narcotics police raided his house, unfortunately they didn't find anything and didn't arrest him. Naturally he blamed this raid on me. After the cops left and as soon as they had turned the corner he came back out on his porch and went into a rage of cursing and theatrics that include him standing on his porch, clasping his hands as if he is holding a handgun then aiming (his pretend gun) at my house, acting as if he is shooting while saying "BLAM BLAM BLAM". The intent of that action being to intimidate and terrorize me, to send me the message "I'm going to shoot you b*tch". Here is a short clip of him doing that, with audio so be warned this video clip is NSFW !! https://youtu.be/Vs-7bNsuGZo He did that right after the police left, literally, just less than one minute after they were out of view. When I saw him doing this I panicked and I called 911 on him. The regular beat police then came in two cars. Some cops went over to talk to him and his wife (who also is an active participant in the harassment) and a few cops came over to talk to me to take my complaint. I told the police I am tired of him terrorizing me and that I want to press charges against him. So they had me fill out a report to file and he told me he would turn it over to detectives. THEY DID NOT ARREST HIM. They told me to get my videos compiled onto DVD and take them to the detectives. (I am working on that now). And after the police left for the second time he sat outside in front drinking beer cursing loudly and shining a Q-beam into my windows until 3am. A few days later a detective called me to get more details. He told me that they won't charge him with terroristic threats but instead a trivial misdemeanor charge of something like public cursing. Now at this point none of the police have seen the videos of what this guy has been doing to me. All they know is that when they get here they find a distraught woman that's having panic attack and having trouble making sense. So they just roll their eyes at me like "B**** please....." and seem to be annoyed that I've taken then away from coffee and donuts. Another thing this guy is doing it using a Q-beam light that he shines into my windows and cameras on a nightly basis. Here is a video of him using his light to harass me. https://youtu.be/ulgL6EsM4XY This stuff goes on DAILY and NIGHTLY. Around the clock this guy harasses me and does every thing he can think of to scare me. The day he did his "BLAM BLAM BLAM" thing on the porch then harassed me all night, my Fitbit showed that my heart rate ran at more than TRIPLE it normal rate of 52bpm. For almost 8 hours that night my heart rate went from it's usual 52bpm to 168bpm for EIGHT HOURS! I lost 5 pounds that night just from the sustained heart racing. That's extremely dangerous as I have bradycardia (abnormally slow heart rate). My dad told me this guy is going to kill me just by making me have a heart attack. So now that I've compiled the videos onto DVD I'm taking them to the police and I don't care if I'm not allowed to record audio, I did and I did it because this guy is terrorizing me and this is my proof of it. I want him arrested and prosecuted and I want his life ruined forever. I want him to get his fair serving of karma. NOW. I am preparing for the coming storm. This guy IS going to retaliate against me. I found his name, where he used to live, all his social media accounts, photos of him passed out drunk on the floor, where he works, what he does, his phone number, his work number, names of all his family members, etc... On his faceborg account I found that he has "liked" numerous faceborg pages for firearms and ammunition makers so I am ASSUMING that he owns one or more handguns and maybe long guns. That's fine because I now openly wear two pistols at all times and I'm using SERPA CQC holsters and some very nasty hollow point hydra shock ammo. I've told the police that if he attacks me I will kill him. The local district attorney was on TV yesterday telling the whole world that NOTHING WILL HAPPEN to anyone that kills an intruder into their home. I have no intentions of wounding an attacker, I will shoot to kill. https://youtu.be/MelCmm4NRtE And under the Texas "Castle Doctrine" that extends into my yard as well. Anyway, so now I'm needing to upgrade my camera system. I'm using old analog cameras. Several years ago I bought a bunch of used cameras cheap and they served me well for the money I spent on them. Then earlier this year my dad's friend gave him 6 old eyemax cameras and an 8 channel eyemax DVR to match it. I have an OLD 8 channel Q-See DVR. The Eyemax DVR only records in CIF but the Q-See records in D1. I use the Q-See as my primary DVR but I've got more than eight cameras so I've moved lower priority cameras over to the Eyemax and I have to run two screen to watch them. I also DO NOT TRUST these DVRs because they are, like all of them are, from China. I want to put cameras in my house but there is no way in the world I will do that using off the shelf Chinese made DVRs. Not gonna happen. I want to replace my analog cameras with HD cameras and I want some method of recording and managing them without using a Chinese made DVR. It seems that most DVRs have problems recording above D1 at normal frame rates. From what I understand the BT chips only handle about 4 video streams per chip so you have to have one BT chip per four cameras but then you need a powerful CPU to process all that. Blah blah blah.. Ok, so analog has major bottleneck problems. IP cameras are where it's at, I believe. I want HD cameras. And I need some way to overcome or work around the problem of bug swarms, fog and idiots with Q-beams and lasers. I don't like the Eyemax cameras having the IR lights inside of them, bugs and fog render them almost useless. So I need something else but I need to see at night. I have to see at night because this guy is going to come back to retaliate against me in the future. He will, I know he will. The other problem I have with the current cameras is the motion detection in them is GARBAGE. Absolutely and utterly worthless. Bugs set it off. Fog sets it off. Dancing pixels in the dark sets it off. The rings of Saturn sets it off. It's such complete and absolute garbage that I can not use it at all, period. Even set to the lowest possible sensitivity it still goes off. And that's on both the Eyemax and the Q-See. So what I would like to do is build my own system to monitor and record my cameras. I need to be able to add as many cameras as I want. I plan to have 16 cameras right off the bat and will probably double that over the next year with cameras inside. I have a server that basically sits and does nothing, it's a PC-BSD server running as a NAS server by my desk. Is there video DVR software for PC-BSD? I can't covert that machine to Linux because it's running ZFS and it backs up my three Macs and acts as additional storage for them. So it has to stay as is. I don't want to spend more money to build another machine if I can avoid it. The only operating systems I use are OS X, BSD and Linux. I will not use microsoft, not under any circumstances, period. So what would be good affordable HD IP cameras to use? And can I run DVR software on my PC-BSD machine? Thanks.

Ok, I am not a legal-beagel as they say, so this is a bit hard for me to comprehend as I am unsure how it would apply to my situation. Being that I wasn't actually a party to the conversation BUT, it was essentially a public performance, considering that he chose to conduct his phone call while pacing back and forth in the street in front of my house AND he was full and very aware that he was being recorded by multiple security cameras AND he chose to conduct his phone conversation in a very loud voice, loud enough that I could hear him from inside my house. That the camera was able to record his conversation was no miracle considering how loud he was about it. When he was arrested a few weekends before he was told by the police that he has no expectation of privacy when he is outside in his front yard and that my cameras were absolutely legal and that he had no possible complaint. My cameras record audio for the purpose of protecting me from him, so that I will have a legal leg to stand on when he harasses me and or assaults me. And of course they are there to prove just cause in the event he attacks me and I have to shoot and kill him. There are there to CMA. In the course of passively protecting me they happened to record his very public performance in the public street. Now in the course of reviewing the video I discover that he has made death threats against a teenage girl that he's in big trouble over, possibly he raped her. He has intentions of either murdering her or witness intimidation to scare her into changing her testimony against him. He also made a death threat against me and I have done nothing to him. I WANT to turn this over to the police because this person is dangerous and he's terrorizing me and the rest of the neighbors. My friends and family are afraid to come visit me and they are who I have been depending on for transportation. My friends and family drive me to the store to but food, pay bills, etc.. If they are afraid to come over anymore I'll run out of food and my utilities will be shut off. He has no right to terrorize me or anyone else and he certainly has no right to make death threats against anyone. That's illegal and that alone can get him some prison time. I want to give this to the police but I'm afraid to because I am unsure if I legally can or not. I don't know what to do.

Hi ! Guys, I have a HUGE problem. About 15 months ago I moved from my old place to the home my folks built 45 years ago (Mom passed away, Dad remarried and moved away, left this house to me). This is a very nice upper-middle class neighborhood that's ALWAYS been crime free, there has never, ever been problems here. Until recently. The house across the street from me was bought up some years ago by a slimy doctor that invests in rental property all over. Lots and lots of rental property. Much to my dismay I learned this after I had moved into my parent's home (now my home). The owner of the home lets a rental management company handle it 100% so all they have to do is collect a check for owning it. So about 6 months ago the people in there (a bit shady but not too horrible) moved out. Just a week later a new family moved in. No problems for a few months until xmas eve. I had ONE camera at the time looking out through a window. It was a pretty awful setup but I didn't want to put up my old cameras that were in traditional Pelco weather cases such as you see outdoors at gas stations. They are large and would look very odd on this very nice house. At my old house I hide them under the eaves of the house but this house has no eaves. So I had just the one camera looking through a window. I was sitting at my desk and I saw people out front riding a go cart in the street. No problem. But then I saw the guy ride it through my yard. Problem. So I go outside and there are two grown men in the street, one standing, one in the cart. I ask him to turn the engine off so I can talk, he does and I ask him to please do not ride his cart in my yard anymore. He instantly flew into a rage and started cursing at me and denying it. I told him "I saw you on camera, I have a recording of you riding in my yard." This made him even more angry and he said even worse curse words and was yelling at me now. So I went back in the house. Next thing I know I hear him outside yelling at the top of his lungs "You F-ing B*****!" and "F YOU B****" and every bad thing you can imagine. I walked outside in my driveway to the inside of my gate and he was running around screaming and cursing, I thought he was going to run at me, jump the fence and attack me so I held my phone up in the air and told him I was going to call the police on him. He taunted me and dared me to. I got too scared to even call 911, I thought he might kill me if I did. After 10 minutes of verbal abuse I went inside and called my dad and told him what happened. I was shaking and throwing up. By the way, this guy, he's a big gorilla looking dude, like he takes steroids and has road rage. That's what I call him, Mr. Roid Rage. My dad told him to stay inside and don't do anything unless he tries to break in the house. So I left it at that. I thought that was the end of it, I didn't hear anything from him for about 6 weeks. About a month ago my dad has a friend that owns a small store and the guy upgraded his cameras to all new HD stuff so he took out all the old gear, handed it to my dad and told my dad to give the stuff to me. Woot woot! So I was gifted eight iMax cameras and an 8 channel DVR. I already have an 8 channel DVR from my old house so now I have two. The one I already had is way better anyway. So about three weeks ago I put two of the iMax cameras on the front of my house. One was working, one was not connected yet. Both were pointed down at my yard so I can see when someone pulls into the driveway or when UPS pulls up to deliver. It also could see about half way into the street. So a few days pass then I'm sitting here and I hear cursing and I look up and see Mr. Roid Rage standing right on the edge of my yard, on the curb but not in my grass. And he was just standing there, pointing, staring at my cameras and cursing loudly. He kept walking back and forth cursing and pointing, this went on for an HOUR. And it got more and more intense. He was yelling for me to come outside because he wanted to talk to me, so he said. And I did not. I stayed inside and did not say a word or show my face at all. Then he took his shirt off like guys do when they want to fight and his anger was so intense that I was in fear for my life even behind locked doors. So I called 911 and I told them I was in fear for my life. The police pulled up in a few minutes and turns out the guy had an open beer in his hand. They handcuffed him and arrested him within seconds of arriving and he was charged with public intoxication. After they took him to jail his wife came outside and she started cursing at the police, I had the door cracked so I could listen and I hear her say "It's her fault! She started the whole thing when she put cameras up to spy on us!" The cop told her "She can put up as many cameras as she wants and she can aim them right at your front door if she wants, it's totally legal and within her right because you have no expectation of privacy in the front of your house. If the mailman or UPS man can see something without peeking over a fence then she can point a camera at it and record it." So Mrs. Roid Rage went back inside and the cops came to talk to me about it and I told them what all had happened. He told me the same thing about my cameras, that if it's out front they have no expectation of privacy and I can aim as many cameras as I want at their house. While we were talking he pointed to a box on his chest and said "See this? This is a body camera, it's recording you and everything you say, you're in public and have no expectation of privacy. " I replied "That's fine, that doesn't bother me at all." After a little chat about the whole mess the cops went on about their business and I went back inside. Mr. Roid Rage was able to bond out of jail about 6 hours later that evening. Since then I have been totally afraid to go outside. I'm afraid to take the trash to the curb, I'm afraid to mow my yard or do yard work, I wasn't able to go outside and enjoy my azaleas when they bloomed, I can't do my gardening and most of all, I can't ride my bike anymore because I'm scared to death of this guy. So after that happened I went on Amazon and I bought a microphone kit for my cameras and now it can and does record audio of everything going on in front of my house because of all the threats and intimidation. I need to have video and audio proof of the harassment and terrorism he is inflicting upon me. I talked to some of the other ladies around here and they too are afraid to go outside anymore because of him and two of them now keep shotguns at hand and their curtains drawn all the time. We've become prisoners in our own homes because of him. My dad gave me two pistols because of this and I now wear two freaking pistols on my belt all the time. I also have three large dogs that will eat him alive if he comes in here. Since then I have also added the rest of the cameras and have eight cameras watching my house and yard in addition to recording audio out front 24/7. But now I am wondering about the audio recording because this past Sunday he was standing out IN THE STREET talking on a cell phone very loudly and part of the time he put the other party on speakerphone! This was a quiet Sunday morning and he could have made his phone call inside his house but instead he came out into the street, where he KNOWS I have cameras. So as he paced back and forth, in the street, talking loudly I heard him telling the other person he is worried that his life is going to be ruined forever because he is going to have to put a sex offender sign in his yard. He was asking the other person advice on how to convince a jury that he didn't do it. Then there was a lot of talk about a teenage girl. So apparently he has recently been arrested for sex crimes against an underage girl and he's in a panic about his future. Then he said "I'm gonna make that little b**** get on her knees and I'm gonna put a f***** gun to her head". I could only get about 80% of what he was saying because he was pacing around and sometime he would turn away from my house while talking. So he was either telling the other person on the phone that he intends to murder his accuser or he plans to terrorize her into changing her testimony against him. Then he walked over to a truck parked in the street in front, flipped down the tailgate and sat on it and continued to talk. "You should see all the f***** cameras this b***** has over here! Yeah man, that b**** has three cameras on the front, one on each side and three on her garage. I want to know what the f*** that b**** is protecting in there. Yeah, I'll bet she's got a meth house in there." (Sure. Right.. I'm a 55 year old woman with social anxiety disorder that never leaves the house, ever. No visitor, ever.. It's like a ghost house, no one would ever know anyone lives here except that it's kept up.) So he goes on, "Yeah man, a few weeks ago I was f***** with that f***** BULL DYKE (and as he says this he turns and looks right at my house and says this extra loud) and the cops show up and arrest me for P.I. (public intoxication) and I went to jail for awhile. Then he mumbled something else I couldn't make out then he says very loudly "Yeah, well that f***** b**** put me in jail. She don't know who she's f****** with. I'll straight up get a f****** sniper rifle!"... As he said that he jumped off the tailgate and began to walk back into his house and as he got to the porch he ended his call and went inside. So the entire 28 minute call was conducted while he was standing in the street in front of my house and he did it in a loud voice as if he wanted everyone to hear him. On an early Sunday morning. Later the same day he had guests over and he walked them around in the street, walking up to the edge of my yard, pointing out my cameras to them, more cursing and then they retired to the front porch where they discussed different ideas to blind my cameras. I heard him say "I'll get a 1,000 watt light from my brother in law and I'll aim it right at that b****'s house, I'll blind her and her f****** cameras then she can't see anything I'm doing. I'll make it so bright she'll have to put tin foil on all her windows, she'll never sleep again." A few other ideas were thrown up such as paintballs and BB guns to put out my cameras but they pretty much agreed that the extreme lights were the safe way to go. As for that, I would imagine that shining an extreme light on my house to annoy me and blind my cameras would be illegal. My cameras are passive, his light would be an actor aggression and harassment and an invasion into my space. And by blinding my cameras he could sneak into my yard to murder when when I'm unable to see and record him. Then there was the discussion of either murdering or intimidating a witness against him in a rape case that he is the perpetrator of. And there is the discussion of him getting a sniper rifle in response to me having called 911 on him a few weeks ago and him going to jail for it. Being that he had that conversation in the street in front of my house and he did it loudly as if he wanted me to hear it, am I OK to contact the police and give them a copy of this video and audio recording in which he discusses criminal activities that concern a rape and maybe even two murders that he is considering committing? Can I get in trouble for this recording? I did not put the cameras and microphone up to record him specifically but to protect me from him and people like him. I believe that it's his own stupidity that he was running his mouth in the street, just like when he was drinking on a public street and terrorizing me. By the way, he was never charged with terrorizing me that day, only with public intoxication. But now this is more than just some beer swilling moron talking smack in the street, he openly discussed rape, murder and tampering with witnesses, ON A PUBLIC STREET! Should I call the police and tell them all of this? Or should I just keep quite about it and hope he doesn't actually try to murder me? My dad gave me two pistols (I do know how to use them) and he told me "If he physically attacks you you shoot him in the chest and once you pull that trigger don't you stop pulling the trigger until the gun is empty or he's down and dead. And if he's still alive you take out the other pistol and empty that one into his chest too." I don't want to kill anyone, I just want this white trash evicted from my neighborhood. I don't know what to do with this video/audio because I can't understand the 20 dozen different things I've read online about survelliance camera audio recording. It varies from state to state and it's all in legalease that I just do not understand. Thank you for any legitimate advice you can give me, I'm truly in fear for my life, this guy has been terrorizing me and the other neighbors and this recording may be the one and only chance we have to get him out of here forever. I just don't know how (or if) to proceed. Thanks!

Hi again, I'm still having grief with this setup. I gave up on the Ultrak stuff controlling the ptz. For now. The icatch dvr SOMETIMES can almost control it but it's erratic and does as it pleases. Sometimes it just goes crazy and the motor will turn on and grind the camera into the wall or all the way down and I can't stop it but to kill the power to everything and pull the data wires then restart it all. I just can not use ptz. Could it be the decoder is cheap garbage? Or the dvr? I have a single twisted pair for the data wire over cat5, I set both units for Pelco-D, 2400, address 1. I don't know what to do, I tried three decoders (all identical) and they all behave the same, badly.. I have no other controller to test with. Should I buy a new, different decoder or a stand alone controller to test with? I need the dvr to control the ptz so I can do it over my iphone. I can now but there is a 90% chance it will freak out and the camera start grinding so I can't risk remote operation. Please help suggest a course of action ?! I'm really stuck. Thanks.

Never mind. I contacted the company and they gave me a master password that let me back in to do a factory reset. After that I could log in using the default admin/123456 again and I spent 1/2 an hour setting everything up again. This time it's much more secure. And I know the master reset password as well so it's impossible to be locked out again..

HELP!! I have an iCatch 4ch DVR, it's the 411L model, I assume it's been discontinued because I can find NOTHING on google for this thing. Somehow the stupid thing has changed the password and locked me out. I tried the default password of admin/123456 plus a dozen plus variations of the password I KNOW I set it to and have been using for almost 2 years. I can only conclude that someone has hacked it and taken control of it from remote. I've looked on the back of it and I can not find a reset button like most little devices have, IE a WIFI router. Most things have a button you can press and it resets it back to factory settings. I've tried to log into it through the web interface and through the local UI via the mouse. It simply will not let me in, period. I have to assume the worst and now I believe I have no other option than to do a hard reset back to factory defaults. Can someone PLEASE help me?? Thanks...

No help.. That's ok. I quit. I can't figure it out by myself so I just quit and it is all sitting here not working right. Fine.. Thanks anyways..

Hi! And thank you! Ok, I'm going to give this a try, I sometimes have trouble relating exactly what I'm trying to accomplish but here goes.. I made up a crude little diagram in a pain program to roughly illustrate my basic goal. I'm mostly there except for the PTZ control. All the non PTZ cameras are up in place but are of no real consequence since they are "dumb cameras" that only feed video to the matrix's. Everything is interconnected and video is shared between all devices so that I can route video to any place I want and mix video into any combination I want. The multiplexers will only allow for input and display of 16 cameras at once so I played tricks with the matrix units to feed the multiplexers with spot output sequences, if that makes any sense at all. In other words, I can have a screen that contains a mixture of static and dynamic video feeds from multiple sources. Gaaaaaah!! Confusing! But it works! So here's my crude and confusing diagram. (You can click it to zoom to a larger, easier to read version.) I hope that makes sense. Also, I have a page of all the PDF manuals and spec sheets for most of the devices I'm using here except for the cameras, I'm using numerous types and models of cameras and they are of no real consequence other than they are all 24vac 1/3" CS types. The three lenses are Computar brand and they are zoom/focus/iris controllable. There are six wires per lens and the negatives are tied to a common negative (by me) so essentially there are four DC control wires per lens. Here's the site with the manuals in pdf format for the relevant devices. REMOVED LINK.... The manual for the decoder board came to me on a mini-cd in microsoft word format from a Chinese company in China. I do NOT trust any thing like that so I converted it to PDF on my Linux machine so as to strip any potential bad stuff out of it however, it did alter the appearance of the document from what it's original author intended. But I'm sure you will still be more than able to read and understand it. I did this for the general safety of all. (Yes, I am overly cautious. ) And here is a photograph of the decoder board. (Click the thumbnail to see a huge image.) I've looked very closely and there is no FCC ID number on the board. I am familiar with what that is but there is no such thing on this board. No surprise there considering the country of origin. Here is the only thing printed on the board that identifies it. (Click the thumbnail to see a huge image.) This is the website where I purchased the decoders from. hxxp : // www DOT securitycamera2000 DOT com/products/Universal-Indoor-RS485-Decoder-for-CCTV-PTZ-Camera-Control.html Beware, it is a Chinese website so make sure you have ad & pop-up blockers and anti-virus active! Trust no one! You'll have to edit the link to get there.. OMG........ I just typed like 6 paragraphs and it just vanished. starting over, again... Ok, I'm so frustrated right now, I forgot all that stuff I typed and now I'm drawing a blank.. I don't even know where to try and pick that up, I lost my flow of thought and now all I see is red... Um.. I can't think now. I'm going to stop, step away and take a break for awhile. I was fully immersed in thought and had everything going really well, I typed in a LOT of stuff describing and detailing all this and where I want to go with it and just all of a sudden POOF! it was gone! I'm angry and upset by that and drawing a blank so I'm going to stop awhile. I'll try to calm down and finish this up later. Right now I'm having a red head moment..

I was unhappy with the zoom, focus and iris function. It was too fast and doesn't allow fine tuning. The voltage is a bit high so I put some resistors inline between the decoder and the lens to lower the voltage thus slowing the motors and giving me a much smoother and finer grained control over the lens functions. The P&T motors I'm leaving alone, they are AC anyway. I wish they were a little faster to be honest. Maybe I can get my dad to make new gears as it's a chain & gear drive. He has a machine shop in his garage.. Still haven't put the unit outdoors just yet, I'm still not satisfied that it's bug free enough to put into real life use. I guess that's what I get for buying the cheapest decoder I could find from China.

No no no.... Waaaaay before micro channel. I mean the very, very very first IBM PC's. 5150, 5160 and 5170. The PC, XT and AT. 8088 and 80286 systems. Like this for instance, the very first PC. I was working for them in 1982 onward when it was still a hot item. I joined Team IBM right after the introduction of the PC. Oh and back in the day, I got my feet wet with Unix, I worked at a place that had an Altos with an 80186 processor and ran AT&T Unix System V. Good thing because it stuck with me. Through the late 90's I began to experiment with Linux and in 2000 I abandoned M$ window$ and became a Linux Zealot. I've also built machines to run Open BSD, Solaris and have tried pretty much all the Linux flavors but am currently running Ubuntu. I abandoned SuSE when they became a pawn of M$ and M$ began to poison the Linux well with code contributions. I've built a few Hackntoshes too (I purchased the OS btw..).. Oh yeah, and extra geek points for me, I also put up a satellite tv system. Not Dish or Direct but free to air satellite. I get a whopping 20 something channels and half the time they aren't on the air. But hey, it's free and legal! I don't work on computers anymore except for myself, it's too stressful to have a customer breathing down my neck and the pay is not good. They would rather hire a teen age boy part time with no benefits than a middle age woman that wants full time & benefits and higher pay. I can do better working part time at Walmart than as a tech person. At least at Walmart the stress levels are much lower and I don't have to use my brain much. Thinking gives me migraines. I lost my power of concentration.. This camera stuff though, is fairly easy. It's just new to me. The big problem I'm having is that I'm using stuff that is antiquated and finding information on the stuff is not easy. I can find some manuals here and there on how to use Item A. Or Item B. But I can't find manuals that tell you how to get all the items to play nice together as one big happy family. I'm assuming that in the day, techs went to class for this stuff and picked up tips from their seniors. Being that I was never in that loop, I'm afraid that all that knowledge has fallen into the black hole. I need to take a break for a bit, I'm recovering from the worst 24 hours of my life thanks to a very bad case of food poisoning. I'm exhausted. I'll drop by later. Thanks guys...

Ok... Now I have a new problem. The decoder it trippin out. The PTZ will sometimes, at random, work correctly then without warning or cause, start going goofy. I click to pan left and it will pan AND tilt at the same time. And no matter what I click, it just pans and tilts away on it's own little private mission into LA-LA-Land. I pull the power thinking that would reset it. Nope. So I thought maybe the wire I used to connect the decoder to the PTZ might have some shorts or crossed wires. So I used my Fluke to check the wires and they are all good. Then I thought maybe errant data was being sent by the controller in the little cheap DVR so I pulled the data wires and it was then stand alone with only power going to it. As soon as I applied power it would start stuttering and jittering as if it's trying to go left and right at the same time and tilt too. So to verify the PTZ as fully correct in itself, I removed the decoder and put power to it's control wires and tested each motor for up/down & left/right. No problems, works 100% fine. Put the decoder back on and it's off to LA-LA-Land again with the stuttering and secret mission to view spots on the ceiling all on it's own. Grrrrrr!!! The funny thing is, the lens operates flawlessly. It never misbehaved, it was strictly the pan and tilt functions that were goofy. So after I verified the motors are good and all my wiring is correct, I reconnected everything and bingo, now it works. But, it's done this a few times, it will work fine then it goes nutty then work fine again later. I have no idea why but I've isolated the problem to the decoder. I thought maybe it could be stuck relays so I tapped on them but to no avail. I think it's just cheap, imported junk. So far my observation is is that it's very unreliable and I can't see anyone using one of these things in a serious setup. I think the technical term for this decoder is "Mickey Mouse".. And that's putting it nicely.. I hate to think I would have to buy a more expensive one, this one wasn't inexpensive and a search of google products and ebay and what not just brings up dozens of the same thing imported from the same place that's famous for making cheap junk. In this picture you can see the decoder hanging outside the case while I'm trying to figure out what the heck it going on with it. Everything is a grand mess the past few days while I've been working on this thing. Wires everywhere! Also, here is a video of the thing while I'm testing it. In this video the thing is working fine, no malfunctions. I didn't think to record it when it was messing up but I'm sure it will again and when it does I'll record it then. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJvs8bisTv4 I'm going to call it a night now, I'm not feeling well, I am pretty sure I got food poisoning so it's time for me to get some rest. Happy New Year all!