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Just to say I gave RealVNC a go in 256 colour mode and found it much more usable in Geovision than Remote Desktop. Interacting with Windows generally was slower than Remote Desktop (scrolling and any large window movement was sluggish), however Geovision didn't just kill the sesssion like it did with Remote Desktop, so I've definitely now got a way that I can do remote administration on the CCTV machine. I'll probably stick to Remote Desktop for all other stuff other than Geovision admin though. Thanks for all your help. James

CCTV machine is an Athlon64 3200 wihth 512MB RAM on nForce4 and integrated 100MBit/s LAN interface. The machine runs at 75% CPU utilisation with 4 cameras motion activated monitoring and recording. It's been up for 12 months and has never given me any stability or performance issues. I've only ever needed to reboot it to install security updates for XP. Graphics card in the machine is an ATi Radeon X300, but I can't see how that's relevant because we're talking Remote Desktop here which is a network protocol that bypasses the graphics card entirely. I did read on one thread that someone suggested using VNC for remote administration instead of Remote Desktop. Does anyone have any recommendations for the best VNC graphics compression settings to use with Geovision? I'm also considering that this might be to do with the ADSL router I'm using. Possibly something to do with its management of the Remote Desktop Protocol packet traffic. If someone is reading this and is using Remote Desktop over a similar <0.5Mbit/s WAN connection to administer a Geovision machine, then please post. Cheers, James

I'm trying to administer a Geovision system via Remote Desktop over two ADSL connections (one line at the site being monitored and one locally). Both ADSL connections are 1.5Mbit/s down and 256kbit/s up, so that effectively means that the bi-directional bandwidth is 256kbit/s. Port forwarding has been enabled fine on the router at the monitoring site end and I can connect to the machine on port 3389. The problem starts when I load Geovision's main interface. Essentially it kills the session because nothing can re-draw. The Remote Desktop connection is saturated trying to update the 4 (in my case) camera views and doesn't paint the rest of the interface or give me any chance of interacting with the controls. I've tried turning on the Remote Desktop friendly small views for the cameras in the Geovision settings, but this hasn't helped. I feel that if only there were a setting to say paint each camera view every n seconds when connected via terminal services then things would be fine. Remote Desktop administration of Geovision is fine if you're hard connected to the same router as the CCTV machine at 100mbit/s, but is actually noticably worse even using 54Mbit WLAN. So it makes sense that at 256kbit/s things are unusable. Can anyone help? James

thanks for the replies - particularly Rory - a real wealth of info there. the video camera is unbranded - cost £90. All I know is that it's apparently got a sony 1/3" CCD. I have a picture of it.

I'm currently investigating the use of IP-based cameras for a project. I'm also venturing into night time surveillance for the first time. I have an Axis 221 day & night camera on evaluation. I wanted to compare it with some other camera in the same conditions. So as a reference I also tested a very generic budget analogue 1/3" sony CCD external day/night camera. This camera doesn't have the mechanical IR cut filter that the Axis 221 has and presumably achieves its night mode completely through electronic processing. The generic camera has a ring of 20 or so IR leds around its lens although these didn't really reach even a third of the way down the driveway test site. I fed the video out of this camera into a composite input on an ATi graphics card and grabbed at 720x576. I used a Derwent covert IR MFLED with 20 degree beam to illuminate the driveway. There was some overspill visible light on the scene from nearby windows, but other than that, the scene was in darkness. Here are some test grabs from captured video... Axis close subject Video close subject Axis distant subject Video distant subject I might be wrong here, but from my limited testing I feel that there are issues with doing night time surveillance using a night time IR sensitive camera... - hyper sensitivity to IR light levels (camera easily bleaches subjects if too much IR light is reflected back at the camera) - any visibile light source (headlight, torch, security light) tends to have a dramatic bleaching effect on the picture. - lots of grain on the picture - long exposure times reduce frame rate to <10 FPS so blur makes face ID difficult I tried tweaking all of the settings on the Axis' web interface but just didn't really get away from the above issues. I'm just left with the feeling that if I'm to do this installation with covert IR and the camera in night mode then I'm going to need a lot of low intensity IR light sources bathing the area rather than relying on a spot. Maybe the other option is to push the client into visible light illumination and ditch the IR altogether. I actually felt like the cheap analogue camera (which is completely automatic) adapted to varying lighting conditions a little better than the Axis. Sure, it wasn't as sensitive to the IR flood light as the Axis was in night mode, but it still made a difference and the bleaching problem wasn't there at all. Plus the cheap camera 'made the best' of any additional available visible light sources rather than the more 'precious' Axis that would just bleach out. The axis camera station software gives you the option of doing motion detection on the camera or in the camera station application that runs on the PC. Doing motion detection on the PC is just like Geovision, wastes network bandwidth and feels like a step backwards. For this reason I tested using the camera's motion detection facility. I found that the recordings I made using camera station usually had missing frames (particularly at the beginning) and I felt that the the pre-motion-buffer function didn't work as well as I've seen with Geovision. I suspect though that this might be to do with the amount of buffer RAM the camera has on-board. To be honest I was expecting better from the Axis, but I don't know how fair that expectation is. My client was excited about the Axis' progressive scan CCD feature. At night though, progressive scan doesn't really seem to make much difference because the long exposure blurring problem dominates. In the day though it's definitely a nice feature. The 640x480 0.3 megapixel CCD in the Axis feels a bit low too, particularly with those IQinvision >1MP cameras surfacing now. The Axis build quality is very impressive though and the convenience of IP-based video is super attractive. Manual zoom control also makes setting up each camera location much more flexible. I'm fairly sure the Axis 225FD (fixed dome) is almost a 221 in weatherproof dome clothing which could be a good option for where a 221 in weatherproof housing would be too big and chunky. I'm not entirely convinced by the camera station software though, particularly considering it's licensing model and cost. I know Geovision looks like they had the crack pipe on the go when it was being written but it does actually do quite a bit, so I've got that in the back of mind when I'm playing with camera station. So based upon the above, I'm looking for some guidance, either in terms of things I could try to improve the results with the 221 or to fix some element of my knowledge about night time surveillance. I'd be grateful to hear anyone's opinions. James