enidone

Has anyone taken the plunge on Verizon home video monitoring? Anyone heard anything otherwise? I called Verizon and they said that their cameras were made by Sercomm. Never heard of them, which is a bit of a concern... thanks.

Hi all, brand new to these forums. Due to some miscreants in the neighborhood, I need to monitor the outside of my property, preferably day and night. I need this to be able to lead to a conviction. I have sought proposals for outdoor cameras from electricians, etc. but they tend to be rather pricey (>$2000). I am wondering whether I can DIY. I am thinking of doing some monitoring through the windows to avoid vandalism. I know this will reduce the image quality but given that I think I know the person who's causing the problem I can probably do an ID with a fairly decent image (and so could the police). I have a D-Link DCS-920 and a tower with 1 GHz of RAM and a 2 GHz processor running Vista. (Here's where my troubles begin.) I tried monitoring the D-Link image with Vitamin D software, but a lot of critical motion was getting missed (like my car leaving the carport!!) and the camera image through Vitamin D would inexplicably go black or red a lot of times. For a system that has to be on all the time, this doesn't work. My feeling is that my tower is woefully inadequate to this task in terms of computing horsepower. Also, the D-Link's native interface is, well, painful (does not support GMail and you should see me trying to set up FTP!!), and Vitamin D stops being freeware the minute you add a third camera. I'm not terribly happy with Vitamin D anyway. So, here's what I'm thinking of doing: 1) Buy a barebones system with enough oomph (and cooling!) adequate to be an HTPC and put Ubuntu on it. I've run Linux before and am somewhat comfortable with it. 2) For maximum image quality, buy at least two two Panasonic IP cameras. I'm hoping I have a wireless option here since they will not be able to plug directly into my router. Otherwise I think I'll need a visit from Verizon or from an electrician to get cat5 run. 3) Aim the IP cameras out the windows of my choice. 4) Using the Panny's native interface, configure the cameras to save or FTP the images on motion to the barebones system or to an external drive or NAS. I am trying to avoid remote subscription-based storage. 5) Set up motion detector lights outside. Budget: $1000 or less, not including item (5) which will go up anyway. Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated.

Thanks to everyone who responded. Dedicated, robust box looks like the way to go.

Alpine, Thanks for your response. You're right, those Panasonics are really expensive for my budget. After looking through this forum a bit I see that Vivotek is a respected brand. They have a $125 camera that probably would fit my needs. Newbie question: what is a VMS? I'm guessing that it's "video monitoring system." I believe that saving image snapshots will be OK for me as long as I have a decent frame rate set up. On the indoor-light issue, I've seen it on the D-Link when I get up in the morning & it's still dark out: the camera facing out the window records the activity inside and not outside! Fortunately for me, the activity that I want to monitor seems to be taking place during the day when I'm not around (hence no lights on). If it takes place at night when I'm asleep - no lights inside, motion detector floods outside - I may be OK there too. I'm probably looking at a max of 4 cameras. I see recommendations on these forums for Blue Isis and I will certainly check it out. However, I think my tortoise of a desktop is going to hobble me no matter what if I use monitoring software and don't upgrade my hardware. I think the element that is the grayest to me is the heart of the system - the desktop, server, or NAS that I should use. Would you agree with me that my current desktop is underpowered for my purposes? It's a 2009 Acer Veriton M260. This unit is a slightly later lot but is not too far from what I have: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&client=firefox-a&q=acer+veriton+m460&sqi=2&cid=6914657030736248967&os=tech-specs Any way of "cheaply" and adequately beefing up the current desktop as opposed to getting something new? I thought about putting in another 1GB of RAM and either upgrading to Windows 7 or getting rid of some current partitions & putting Ubuntu on instead. I do like the idea of a monitor-free dedicated machine, particularly one that I can squirrel away in a room separate from my main desktop. I can always RDP into the dedicated box. Any hardware recommendations/user experience?