Digiscan

Because it's encrypted, then sent to Dropcam, and stored encrypted. I've not heard of anybody having their Dropcam feed hacked. Other cameras have been accessed, whether through incompetent setup (e.g. default password) or security holes in the camera's firmware. In any case, accessing a camera remotely and securely takes more effort and know-how with a typical IP camera than it does with a Dropcam.

Short answer yes. Long answer: too much effort. A UPS is the right way to go about it, but be warned the entry level ones although they will provide the power you need to run it, may not run it for long. If you identify a UPS you can calculate how much capacity it has and compare that to your DVR and camera drain. E.g. if your cameras and DVR are combined pulling 70 W and a given UPS says it can deliver 300 W for 5 minutes, you would get 20 minutes. I have my network on a UPS, but it wouldn't go more than 30-60 min after power outage. I did it partially to prevent it going down when we get occasional power flickers, and also to keep it going if somebody cuts my power (although since I have no internal cams at the moment that's a pointless requirement I admit).

Hikvisions do the same thing. it narrows it, but it also makes it higher

What's happening in about 3 weeks? My guess: absolutely nothing. Dropcam does have a big leg up on security. Works right out of the box and is pretty secure.

In addition to a cam I'd invest in a motion detection spot light. They are cheap. Throw some halogens in there and snag anybody on your driveway.

Just confirmed my hikvision 5.2.0 firmware camera does indeed detect this night -> day change as motion. I agree it's stupid. If the camera had even a tiny bit better code it would temporarily disable all motion detection for the five seconds immediately after any night/day change until it has re-calibrated itself, thus avoiding this kind of thing. Most (all?) people here will tell you that motion detection based on image detection is "decent" at best. You will need to use a PIR sensor to get it perfect. The plain fact is motion detection on all these cameras is not as good as you might hope. I use it, but I'm willing to accept as most of us are many false positives. Otherwise, you end up setting the sensitivity so low you may miss real events. Indoor is easy, but outside motion detection can be thrown by cloud movement or a heavy snow or who knows what. An outdoor pointing cam relying on image detection is going to have false positives, it just is. High end cameras or DVRs may deal with it better; I have no experience with those.

Despite protestations that the info isn't accurate, you've qualified so many times that it seems it kind of was after all accurate The problem with trying to get around Dropcam paid service is that Dropcam can at any time change how things are configured and therefore break people's tricks to get around it. Even if you built a system that pulls the streams of an unpaid account and records them locally, Dropcam could throttle that as well. At the end of the day, the dropcams are still $150 and $200 cameras, and their image quality is substantially inferior to similarly priced wired IP cameras.

May I suggest that you contact a CCTV specialist and discuss the point with them and follow on from there. Bob Isn't that why he posted?

640X480? In 2014? " title="Applause" />

As most of us know, the movies are rubbish, but a skilled person can clean up an image. This was a great post I saw about it--read the top-voted response: http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/17098/csi-image-resolution-enhance-how-real-is-it And he has in his response some examples to work that is plausible.

@*#( no. How can they think that is possibly a good idea. Cameras are already so easy to see there is little time lost canvasing a neighborhood, not to mention most people are perfectly content if they hear of something on the news to see if they captured any of it. That said, I'd be perfectly happy to register my cams if the local police will refund me their purchase and ongoing maintenance, and even then it needs to be optional. My prediction is this goes nowhere and, even if it becomes law, it will be possible to strike it down.

Cheaper than the dog is a dog sign. I have stickers on all my entryways warning of a security system I don't have and never did. I've convinced at least two people (one after two burglaries) to put up fake cameras, too (I prefer the real kind, because revenge is sweet, and high quality images after an event are worth something). Motion detector lights are good. On doors you rarely or never use get the $8 two-pack of GE door alarms from amazon. They are brutally loud and even if it takes somebody only 2-3 seconds to find it that's a couple of seconds they don't want to be there. Or make them wonder wth is going on by having two, one at top of door, one bottom. They'll turn it off and wonder what the heck is making that noise Better of course is an alarm tied to everything. I don't think you need to pay a monitoring fee as long as you have neighbors. Have an outside alarm go off when the security is tripped and no thief is going to ransack a house while 110 decibel alarm is outside. Lastly, make sure all this works if the power is cut, because that is a fairly regular thing to do (I read stats on it--happens more than I had thought it would). Your camera system can be on a UPS, and the alarm stuff should all be on batteries, too.

I don't think there is any legal implication (?). You can film your own property, this much is certain. There is also no right to privacy in public, e.g. somebody driving down the road. This is relevance to you, but certainly longer than I am going to read! http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/OC/htm/OC.1702.htm Unfortunately for you I think the legal argument is of less merit, because ultimately the HOA has a ton of say over how things look. Now, law does trump HOA with certain things likes antennas: http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/condoblog/2014/04/can-an-hoa-prohibit-an-owner-from-installing-a-satellite-dish.html I googled some others and it seems it's fairly common for HOAs to mandate this kind of thing. Best of luck, it sounds like you may need it.

Ah interesting. Yeah so that confirms my fear. I never bothered testing it, since I wasn't going to take any action in any case at this time. I don't run default ports, but I have no idea how much that really helps. I think scanning ports is quite quick, and no clue what/if anything my router's firewall would do about it.

I think you're right about the linux. if you truly want english it's probably worth paying CBX. I understand he spent a lot of time on it, and has a lot of content customers, so I think it's worth the time to leverage his fairly extensive testing, though you can surely google more about it. I didn't need to do it in my case because I was able to put multi-language 5.2.0 onto my chinese-region camera.

I haven't seen anything that's truly hidden and at the same time worth using, at least in a reasonable price range. Can you not get inventive and build something yourself? A camera can be hidden in a bunch of things. Ultimately you need only the lens exposed if you're able to rely on day time or exterior lighting.

Yes I do ...... DNS linked none trace IP .... Location Russia ..... But then a China link. Short term host created July 2014 but I thought you would of checked IP before leaving link to steel forum members IP You don't know for certain they are recording incoming IPs and checking those for cameras. It makes sense that they would, though. I did check this from home and failed to VPN first, but the site is terrible. Worthlessly slow. I've seen it posted all over the web so many people have gone to it for sure. My cameras email me on a failed login attempt. I've received no such emails, though I don't know if that site uses the TCP entrance and whether other ways to get at the cams would not fire that email. IP address does not give one's location very specifically, just the location of their provider. You would have to know an area quite well to combine them while scouting a residence, and then if anything it's warning you not to attack that residence for theft because, as you can tell, they have a video camera system I don't see a benefit to hiding this site. Anybody who wants this could easily find it on google anyway, so hiding it now would not help people much.

I have three recent hikvision 3mps. All came in Brown boxes, two from a US vendor and one from a US vendor reselling a Chinese cam. Two of them are english region, meaning I was able to put english firmware onto them and now they are 5.2.0 (most recent). One was Chinese region. It was multi-language, so I could select (as I can on the others) my language, and the entirety of everything on the camera is english BUT when I tried to put on the english 5.2.0 firmware I got a region mismatch. I never tried forcing it on with the TFTP approach. Fairly recently somebody has posted online (google "Firmware 5.2.0 in English") firmware that will go onto a chinese-region cam and still everything is in English. At this point I would personally buy cameras from aliexpress because they are wildly cheaper than US-based, and that firmware works fine. $85 shipped buys a camera, whereas just in September I paid $150 shipped for a US-based one. Granted, US had an awesome warranty (I'd probably not even bother with a china based), so that counts for some, and China takes two weeks to get here. Finally, a fellow named CBX on a couple of forums seems to have an approach (but you pay him, though it seems all his customers are very happy) to make a chinese camera change to an english region. If you did this presumably it would remain that way forever and english firmware would work right through the web-upgrade interface.

One of the purposes of a forum like this is to help people. If someone doesn't want to help, don't help, it's simple. There is a Private/Professional section for the pros. Another purpose of a forum is advertising revenue, the more members/traffic, the higher the revenue. That is usually considered a good thing. Thirded. All experts started as a newb at some point. The more DIYers who create systems they are happy with the more they're going to recommend it to others and use what knowledge they have gained to spread it to others as well. Ultimately, more money hits the industry, which means better cameras at lower cost, earlier than if we only had pros doing this for businesses.

I think technically even coiling can impact signal (at a very minute level), but at the distance you mentioned and the coiling described you'd never be able to measure it. I highly doubt it's as simple as corroded connectors. I think better money is a connector is either so bad it's not working or good enough that it is; we're talking a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of metal compared to the entire length of the cable. I think you'd need to be terribly unlucky that it's corroded just enough to let things "kind of work".

Don is right, you won't be able to integrate Dropcam with any system right now. They have some semblance of an API http://blog.dropcam.com/dropcam-api-beta-program/ or were going to, but it doesn't seem they care a great deal about it: http://support.dropcam.com/entries/21455573-dropcam-API Closest you can get right now is you can pull jpgs off the camera but only if you make it public: http://m.accuweather.com/hu/weather-blogs/weathermatrix/hacks-for-google-nest-dropcam-mount-removing-mic/28273881 But I think you can make public a dropcam that has no subscription plan. I had a couple of Dropcams until quite recently and although I'd still recommend them to people with no technical skills or interest to spend time on a technically superior solution, if you have half decent skills + time I'd say don't bother. I have a hikvision 3 MP cube that I paid under $150 for and it leaves the Dropcam Pro's image quality in the dust, and then some, plus it has a much better IR light and micro SD support, and of course no monthly cost. It's just much better hardware. The fact that the Dropcam HD is still going for $150 is kind of hilarious. I sold one for over $100 about a month ago on Amazon, used. People shouldn't be paying that much nowadays for a camera with that picture quality. It was okay two years ago, but not now.

A couple of less expensive US-based sources I can think of include wrightwoodsurveillance, which I haven't used, but buell recommends it (saving him a post hehe). I've ordered a few cams from LTS Incorporated, which re-brands Hikvision cameras and is located in New Jersey. They ship quickly and English firmware also works on the cams. As a DIYer myself I think the market has a lot of products aimed at us, but there are many sacrifices made in the process, generally it has to do with the quality of the camera. The learning curve on a low-end professional solution (e.g. with the camera you're talking about) is much higher than with something you will buy at Best buy or Walmart, but the pay off is far greater. You'll end up with a greatly superior camera. If you insist on wifi, I do think SD is a must because when the signal drops you're still recording to the SD. My indoor cube is setup with wifi and it's been very reliable, but I don't trust it to get everything or maintain high bandwidth 24/7, so the SD covers me in that regard. If you get that dome you're looking at and eventually decide wifi isn't going to cut it, you're still left with an excellent camera that can be wired in.

I wish I could help, but perhaps my links portrayed me as more knowledgeable than I am I hadn't compared pro vs consumer grade SSDs, and certainly the quality of flash is different. I know that Kingston was getting hassled lately when they started selling an SSD with slower NAND than what most of the early (including review) models had used. One of my hikvisions is running at 720P because it's indoors and on a 32 GB card recording 24/7 I just checked now and it is amazingly going as far back as a week. That's only 5 GB/day! I think it's at 20 FPS, 15 at least. My 3 MP hikvisions at 15 FPS are taking up about 50 GB/day, so your math at one day = 64 GB card is dead on for those ones. I have no idea how the cube is using 1/10th as much capacity even though it is on about 1/3rd the resolution. I think it must be that, since it is in a room, very little is changing most of the time so it's able to compress tighter, whereas the outdoor cams have constant lighting changes, tree moving, etc.

I really don't think the lifespan of SD is too big a deal. Solid state drives have the same issue. Although a cheap USB drive is going to have a limited lifespan if written/read often, a good SD card, like a good SSD is going to outlast the likely scenario in which you need it. Here was an interesting test using an SSD: http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4178/10/hardwareinfo-tests-lifespan-of-samsung-ssd-840-250gb-tlc-ssd-updated-with-final-conclusion-final-update-20-6-2013 With a micro SD that's fully re-writing, say, every couple of days, I expect you'll still get some years out of it to be honest (http://superuser.com/questions/17350/whats-the-life-expectancy-of-an-sd-card).

I'm a newb compared to buellwinkle, so I have nothing to add to what he said about those cameras. I think the reason the OP wants Wifi is the same reason it's a hugely requested feature on most entry level consumer cams: it's easy as pie to get going, and no wiring needed that doesn't already exist. The problem, which buell already mentioned, is that it just simply, truly doesn't lend itself well to this (security cameras). There is a reason why wifi is so ubiquitous in entry level cameras (go to amazon, it's got tons of them), but "mysteriously" missing from higher end, more expensive cameras. It's because the manufacturers know it's just a very difficult requirement to meet. The low end cameras do it because they are 99% indoor only, and they sell on features, not really on how the cameras actually do. Dropcam is the premier consumer grade camera IMO and it still has no outdoor model. Homemonitor.me does have an outdoor wifi camera, and it's fairly well reviewed on Amazon. Its picture quality is poor compared to a cheaper wired POE camera, as far as I'm concerned. Here is their $253 (amazon) camera outdoors: That looks really bad compared to a wired camera costing 2/3rd the price (e.g. ). This also enhances the apparent clarity by tightening the field of view quite a lot. I strongly recommend the OP do what many of us do, which is start at the place where we think wifi is good and move away from it for this. Once you get comfy with the idea of wired your options open way up.