Soundy

You need it to hang down LOWER than the ceiling?

Just off the top of my head, probably 150'? Not a problem if you're using 24V to a camera that's designed for "12VDC/24VAC", as it handles any drop just fine. Actually, since we normally use station wire (22/4) for power runs, and just double that up, I have had occaision, where a client wanted another camera added to a remote location (actually, to a gas-pump canopy, where all the conduits are sealed before the station goes online) to "borrow" a pair off the station wire to run video with baluns, and then used the other pair to power BOTH cameras... WITH heated enclosures. It was a bit ghetto... but it worked (and is still working, over two years later). Distance there was probably 90-100'. I've done something similar... 500' total run from a server room to a camera tower, with a couple splice points along the way, I added a 10/100 switch at the splice point nearest halfway (which is also by a gate where network-based access controls are planned to be added at a future date), to act as a network repeater (since ethernet maxes out at about 300' per run). To give the switch its required 5VDC, I added a run of 18/2 from the camera power supply beside the tower, back to the switch, and then threw a small board regulator in the splice box, and dialed it down to a nice even 5.04V

Some setups would use it it trigger a VCR to a faster (and thus higher quality) record mode... ie. the VCR normally operates in 24, 48 or 96 hour mode, and switches to 2-hour recording when there's an input trigger.

Depends on the particular job, but usually I'll run one camera per Cat-5, using one pair for video and two pair for power. This is based on the standard practice of home-running all the power, though. Four cameras per wire is good in theory, but only really practical if you're not running power along with it... like you might in a really long run. One of the other big advantages to a single Cat-5 vs. coax-and-power, for me, is not having to pull two separate, different wires to each location - especially if you have to stage out a bunch of wire for multiple pulls, the different sizes and stiffnesses of coax vs. 18/2 or station wire can mean easy kinks and tangles, and layout of boxes for a number of simultaneous pulls can take up a lot of floor space, which is a problem if you're working, say, inside an active store. A single wire to each camera makes for less trouble and a cleaner job overall. GEM makes a balun that splits out an RJ45 jack to a BNC and a pair of power pigtails, and another that splits out a pigtail for data/serial as well, that makes this type of install very clean and straightforward.

...and I did try it. Worked like a champ, too! Little slow, since the router is only an 802.11b (11Mbps, half-duplex) but it worked great! In fact, I initially hooked the router up to the switch I'm running the DVR and five IP cameras into on this site - it was awesome being able to just wander around the store with the laptop and view and adjust all the cameras But just for testing, I plugged a camera directly into the router, and that worked great too. Now all I need to do is make this whole thing more portable. Router's a little on the big side and needs power... thinking I might strap it to my 12V gel-cel and stick a small board regulator to it to knock the voltage down to 5VDC. But that's for later - meantime, IT WORKS!

I'm thinking there's GOTTA be a way to do this, I'm just not clicking in... It would be really handy to have something (battery-powered ideally) that one could plug into a standard wired IP camera, that would provide an ad-hoc network for a laptop to access the camera. There are times that a direct cable connection is impractical at best, impossible at worst. I suppose one could use a "spare" wireless router but that seems a bit overkill (and it wouldn't be battery powered)... something small and portable that I can just toss in a laptop bag would be ideal.

You're not likely to get a signal through that concrete (which isn't JUST concrete - remember there's a nice rebar mesh in there too). You COULD look at something in an ethernet-over-power system, it MIGHT work, depending on how the electrical is laid out in your building. Something in-car might be the best way to go, though. Take a look at Memocam's products - covert cameras with built-in recording to flash (SD) cards. There are others as well, that's just one that came immediately to mind

Hmm, have you considered just a couple good old-school camcorders? I know it's not as sexy, but they're probably a lot more robust. Or you could do what a friend of mine did in his race car, and just mount a small digital point'n'shoot camera up between the seats... one that has a good video mode and supports really large SDHC cards should give you tons of recording, and they aren't bothered by a few bumps. Pick up two or three older used cameras for cheap and you're good to go!

Yeah, was thinking about doing that with an unused DI-614+ I have here... only problem I could think of is, would I still need to connect the camera to my laptop via cable to either assign it an IP or enable DHCP? IQEyes come with neither selected, so I'm not sure if the IQFinder utility would find it via the router. Guess the best way to find out is just to try it

Since none of the documents Panasonic has online list Pelco protocols, I would suspect not. It would require a serial connection, which it doesn't appear to have. The spec sheet has a diagram that shows an "I/O connector" but nothing specifies exactly what its purpose is. http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ModelDetail?storeId=11201&catalogId=13051&itemId=207163&catGroupId=15568&surfModel=WV-NW964&displayTab=R

If it's manufactured for sale in the US, it should have an FCC ID number on it... you can look it up at www.fcc.gov

Lot of times I find it easier to get it "close" with the focus ring, then fine-tune focus using the zoom ring - generally seems to be less "sensitive" on most lenses.

Does the 964 have serial (RS-232/422/485) connectors? If not, I'd expect it doesn't support Pelco D/P.

You've never seen a bunch of gamers all running on WiFi then, or someone running a bunch of torrent uploads/downloads... where lots information is being exchanged constantly. Still not the same analogy. If it were, you couldn't have two households using the same type of cordless phones (be they 900Mhz, 2.4GHz, 5.8GHz, or DECT 6.0) in any proximity to each other. Same frequencies, different channels. The bigger issue with wireless, or at least with WiFi, is range. It's so limited under most conditions, there's little point to it - most distances covered would be close enough to run a wire. There are exceptions, of course, like if you need to cross a large open area, but in general, wiring within those distances is probably far more efficient.

I stand corrected. Florida, among many states are two party states. There have been some attorneys who have taken their client out of Florida, and to a One party state, and recorded phone calls using this "loop hole". This is why I posted the link: http://www.rcfp.org/taping/ If you click on the link to the left titled State by State it will list all 50 states, and you can click on your state to get the info that you need. Got one for Canada? Anyway, the important thing is, wherever the law is concerned, ALWAYS CHECK YOUR LOCAL LAWS. The great thing about the internet is how it allows discussions like these to cross international boundaries... but that's also one of the great dangers when it comes to this sort of thing.

Google image search. http://images.google.ca/images?q=smv116&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enCA280CA280&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

That's all well and good, but none of it addresses the points I made above about the costs and issues of hi-def analog CCTV. You poo-poo IP for being more expensive than analog, but that only applies to standard existing NTSC/PAL analog. Sorry to say, but my experience completely disagrees with this. I can outfit a restaurant, liquor store, pub, convenience store or gas station with fewer than half the number of IP cameras and still get better coverage and clearer video than would be possible with analog, and since the IP cams are only about twice the price of the analog equivalents (of sufficient quality - I'm not talking about $50 offshore board cameras), I can do it for lower total cost (especially once you factor in cabling costs, since I'm now running less cable as well).

Umm... I'd say that's the start of your problem right there. I found a picture of that MUX - you should find it has four connectors beside the camera loops: a MAIN MON that goes to the monitor's input; a VCR OUT that connects to the IN jack on the VCR a VCR IN that connects to the OUT jack on the VCR and a CALL MON that's used for a secondary monitor (this is pretty much universal to all multiplexors, BTW, although some will have slightly different labels). The proper VCR connections are crucial: because since the VCR can only record one video signal, the MUX has to take all the cameras and generate an output for the VCR that basically consists of - wait for it - flipping quickly from one camera to the next, a view you're probably familiar with by now When you playback the VCR, the MUX then has to take those flipping pictures and replay them properly depending on the view you select - split-screen, single-screen, etc. When you go to playback, you'll want to hit the TAPE PLAY button (in the MODE box) - it will give you a flipping image as well until the tape actually starts playing. Again, you DO NOT connect the monitor and VCR directly together - the MUX has to do the job of creating the proper video stream for the VCR, and then of "descrambling" it again to send to the monitor. And as I said before, there's a chance that you won't be able to view anything recorded before... so be ready for that to NOT work once you hook everything up properly. The "acid test" will be to record some footage once the connections are right, and then play that back, and see if it works. Don't trust any existing connections - just unplug everything and start clean

Ermmm... better advice would be to check your local laws, as they vary in this regard. In these parts, you can record all you want... but audio evidence is inadmissible in court unless there's notice given (oddly, the same doesn't apply to video evidence). As far as phone conversations, only one party has to be informed... so if YOU know you're recording your own conversation, the law is satisfied (the law is designed more with third-party wiretapping in mind).

I assume you're talking about WiFi? Ever used multiple computers with a single WiFi router? Same thing... no problem. The walkie-talkie analogy doesn't apply. A bigger concern with WiFi is the limited range and interference from other sources.

That should work just fine.

How is that? Gigabit switches cost nothing these days. And 100 mbit/sec can give you superb video (Blu-ray disc video runs at 48 mbit/sec). Add to that, running analog-HD-over-singe-wire, you're taking a step back to needing an individual run from each camera back to the DVR. Using IP gives you the option (desirable or not) of using existing network infrastructure, especially between separated locations. Example: I have to two buildings on opposite sides of a property (this is a real-world example, BTW). To use analog, I either have to have a separate DVR in each building, or I have to pull a wire for every camera in the remote building, over to the DVR location, and if I want PTZ, I have to run data lines as well. With IP, I can just pipe all the cameras in the remote location into a switch, and use a single run to get all that data back to the DVR/NVR. If I want backup recording, I can also drop another NVR - or two or three - anywhere on my network (be it existing infrastructure, or a dedicated network); I don't need to split out or chain-through video signals or pull a second set of wire to another location. Things like that make IP VERY attractive even without the HD resolution. Their market share is no doubt due to high costs. ...and that's becoming less of a factor as well - a 1.3MP IQeye is barely twice the price of most decent 1/3" analog box cameras. As far as quality, remember too that "HDTV" resolutions max out at 1080 vertical pixels. A measly 1.3MP IP camera is already near that at 1280x1024. Go to a 2MP camera and you're at 1600x1200 and already beyond HD spec... meanwhile 3 and 5MP camera are already common. If this "new analog system" is going to even hope to match that, it will have to be working under a whole new range of video specifications, because existing HDTV doesn't measure up. That means all new capture hardware as well... If the knock against MP IP cams is the cost, it's only because the technology is relatively new, and we've already seen prices drop by 1/2 to 2/3 in just a couple years. It wasn't that long ago that even 4CIF/D1 capture was costly and esoteric, and now you can almost get it at any corner store... and it had the benefit of 50 years of an established, common video spec. And IS there an established, published video spec for this new system, that all the manufacturers will adhere to? Or will we end up with a spate of incompatible systems as different manufacturers decide to tweak things to their own benefit? HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, anyone? Beta vs. VHS? Anyone remember AM-stereo... and the four or five different, incompatible formats? In light of all that, I don't see a new spec, with all new hardware, remaining anything but costly and esoteric... by the time the technology even reaches market, megapixel IP cams will be only fractionally more expensive than NTSC/PAL, and as amirm suggests, you'll see some pretty substantial improvements in the issues listed above.

Well, if your TVs have VGA inputs, you could always just use a VGA splitter to split out the signal from the DVR to its own monitor. The downside to that is needing to either run VGA cables to each TV, or pull Cat-5e and use a pair of VGA baluns for each (not cheap). That would give you the best quality, but you'd be limited to the TVs having the same display. You could also either find a DVR with a separate composite output that will give you a split-screen display (best option), or use something like an AverKey to generate a composite signal from the VGA output (most models have VGA pass-thru). I know a number of PC-based DVRs that will do the job (most that use a XECAP card have the composite MUX output), but they're a little beyond your price range.

The ASUS looks like it would be ideal! I thought afterwards about maybe a gaming adapter like the Linksys, but I know I've heard of problems from people that have tried to use those (gaming adapters in general) for anything BUT game consoles.

Hmm, my Vigil system lists Sony and Panasonic network cameras in the setup... it doesn't have that specific Panasonic model listed, but you could check with 3xLogic; if they don't have it, it probably wouldn't take much to have it added.