PeteCress

That is the one I was leaning towards. Sounds like the maker started leaning on resellers sometime last year and the prices are now up around $240 from the mid-100's... and the reviewers were saying that makes it no longer a "best buy".... but the FineVue offering at a similar price does not offer built-in GPS - so, to me, that still leaves it as the high-end choice.

Yeah... that finally dawned on me after reading about a hundred dash cam reviews... slower learner, I guess.... -) One thing I'm thinking about with the separate "DVR" type setup is security of the storage. I'm thinking that, in any accident where they have to cart me away and tow the vehicle; any conventional dash cam is likely to disappear - either by theft or confiscation. Seems like, with a black box stashed under a seat or somewhere, the actual recordings are less likely to follow the fate of the cameras. For the truly-paranoid, maybe a mirrored SD card in a SATA wrapper in a lockbox separate from everything.... although even I think that might be taking things a little too far.... But the black box with a few decent USB web cams hanging on it....

Well *that* was kind of a naive question... at least in retrospect. Now I see that feature is SOP - as is ignition control. Next question: This seems like a ripe area for enthusiasts who want to go beyond off-the-shelf functionality. Does anybody know of a forum or NG dedicated to that? Where I'm going is concocting some sort of DVR system using relatively low-cost USB webcams like my Logitech 9000 (http://tinyurl.com/cauxkb8 which gives impressively-clear images and has a built-in microphone). Maybe build up an XP box on a Micro ATX mobo that's small enough to fit under the passenger's seat or in the glove box... then hang a few USB cams on it - served by something like Blue Iris.... Vehicle's ignition turns on, XP box boots up and cams are online within a minute or so. I can imagine all sorts of issues with such an effort: power consumption, image processing power, confirming that the sys isn't hanging at boot time, and so-forth. So, back to The Question... does anybody of a forum or NG that caters to people with such fantasies?

Checked one of my cams this (cold...) morning and it seems to be stuck in night mode with poor focus and no zoom. viz: http://tinyurl.com/bjlgb2r. Low last nite was in the teens and the specs page in the manual shows 22 degrees as the low end of it's operating range. Seems reasonable to conclude that the camera is literally frozen - although I would hope for it to regain functionality as the temp rises. The Question: Assuming it's not already hosed, are repeated iterations of this going to damage the camera? Should I power it down for the winter? Bring it inside?

A bunch of years ago, our church leaned on us to provide room/board for a couple of kids in a touring choir. They were from Minnesota or Michigan... can't recall which... but one's family had been snowed in for something like two weeks.... temps rarely got above the twenties. To cut to the chase, it was December in Philadelphia and they both had never been so cold in their life. Turns out that 40-something degrees and high humidity is a *lot* colder than teens and twenties with low humidity. If I had to get another cam, the 5611 would be a candidate... in fact, I wish I had gone all ACTi from day one because their camera server is reputed to take minimal PC resources - offloading the heavy lifting to the cams themselves. The 5311, however, has the amount of zoom I need for this particular application.

I'm posting this mainly for bragging rights... but also because it shows that one does not necessarily need a more-expensive IP-66 weather-resistant camera for outdoor use. Here is an EdiMax IC3030-POE that cost about eighty bucks, spent the better part of a year mounted atop a gazebo next to a salt water bay, and which survived Sandy: http://tinyurl.com/a49j2bk. It also has the ability to focus the lens just by rotating an external ring around the lens - no disassembly needed' Here it is in better days: http://tinyurl.com/9dgm6ng And the gazebo/cupola after Sandy: http://tinyurl.com/a5fhqem The last thing it saw before Sandy had her way with the ethernet infrastructure: http://tinyurl.com/ambszd5 I've got another one that's been outside my house for several months through several heavy rains that's doctored up the same way (electrical tape over the seams/ports) but without the skylight filter tub-caulked over the lens, without the plastic bag, but with the addition of mastic around the ethernet connection: http://tinyurl.com/akg5uga My only reservation so far is the electrical tape: it seems to get brittle over time and, even though it was laying flat on a curved surface, the adhesive seems to degrade over time and it wants to peel up. There must be something better, but what?

I'm not concerned about it not functioning at low temps - only with it getting damaged. This cam is for windsurfers and when it is cold it becomes moot. FWIW, temps finally got up into the 40's today. The thing was still frozen and I was fearing the worst. Then I tried re-booting it and it came back A-OK. My only concern now is whether the cold temps are stressing it. i.e. If maybe I should go down there and take it inside before each winter and the re-mount it in the spring. Buellwinkle's comment on the So Cal cams is encouraging.

I've had an ACTi 5311 down on a New Jersey bay (ExtremeSurfcam.DynDNS.org:8080) for the better part of a year now. It even survived Sandy - although the house it was in didn't do so well. But it has gone offline several times. Each time I've driven down there and fooled around with things based on the assumption that the problem was a bad physical Ethernet connection. One time I wiggled the plugs, another time I replaced the RJ-45 plug and so-forth. Each time, it's come back online and stayed up for weeks, if not months at a time. A few weeks ago, it went down again. Had the owner of the house wiggle and re-plug, but no-go. Owner left town last week and it miraculously came back online yesterday. This time I figured "Damn... that switch has spent two years in the Windsurfing shops bayside shed and it's contacts must be corroded and somehow the signal broke through the corrosion", so I went down and swapped out the POE switch for an almost-new duplicate I had at home. Funny thing: it was online before the swap, but offline after the swap. "Double-damn.... Now I've got to lean out of that second-story window, unbolt the thing, and bring it inside for disassembly...." But just before I was about to do that, I thought "Whyyyyyyy not?"... and rapped the camera a couple times with my finger. Oops!!! It came online immediately. Normally I don't think of electronic stuff responding to field-boot maintainence - but this one has me wondering. In rtetrospect, every time I've gone down there for whatever reason, I also managed to touch the camera - whether to tune the aiming, move it to another mounting location, or whatever. I guess the only thing to do is to wait for it to go offline and then ask the resident to rap on it a couple times and see if the miraculous recovery can be replicated. But meanwhile... would anybody care to speculate?

I'd already been there, but now that you pointed to it, went there again and realized that I had missed page 3, which gives the all-important example of command context. I think I'm on the right path now. Thanks. FWIW, I've used several brands of camera - including Sony - and ACTi stands out when it comes to manuals and instructional material.

I've got an ACTi5311 here: http://extremesurfcam.dyndns.org:8080 Seems tb doing the job, which is letting windsurfers know how many sailors are out and whether or not they are planing. I'm using Blue Iris to serve it and BI presents 8 zoom levels at the bottom of the browser window. User clicks a number from 1 to 8, and the cam zooms accordingly. So far, so good. But sometimes the result is not focused that well - especially level 8. I know that because I can TeamViewer in to the server and click the camera UI''s built-in "Refocus" button and it gets better. Looking at the BI docs, it looks like I can associate calls to outside routines (.BAT or .CMD files?) with those numbers 1-8 instead of having them passed directly to the cam. That being the case, I could associate each number with two commands: one to zoom, and the other to force a refocus. The Question: Assuming my last supposition is true, has anybody done this? Sample commands?

For my ACTi 32x zoom I got what seemed tb the only game in town: http://tinyurl.com/apm9cvw Unfortunately, it's adjustments are in the form of notches in the mating plates.... so fine changes to left-right or up-down are not possible.... and heaven forbid the installer should not get the bracket perfectly level bc there is no angle adjustment. Not a big deal until it gets into 20-30x zoom - then it's a hassle. I can see retrofitting some sort of semi-soft washers between the mating plates and hoping for continuous adjustment that stays adjusted but I figured I'd go for the gold first. Does anybody have something with continuous adjustment that will fit this camera?

I have a situation where my existing LogiTech Webcam Pro 9000 USB camera would do a nice job if only I could get to it at the end of an Ethernet cable. i.e: Camera Server Running On PC => Router => POE Switch (or injector) => Ethernet Cable => [some sort of hardware device] => Logitech 9000 Google-ing reveals a plethora of USB/Ethenet solutions, but I have not yet found one that addresses this exact situation. The bottom line is being able to hang that Logitech 9000 on the end of a Ethenet cable; have it get it's power from the cable; and have a PC on the network see that USB camera as if it were plugged in locally to a USB port. Anybody been here? Or am I trying to fool Mother Nature and should just suck it up and buy another IP cam? FWIW, it looks pretty straightforward to do this via USB-over-120v-AC... but I'd rather keep AC out of the picture in this case bc the camera would be located outside of the building and Ethernet is easier to run.

Just unpacked two from Costco. *Nice* little housing. Seems like a down-sized clone of my Sony SNC-CH200's housing. But I'm having a problem getting to the cams' video streams. Port 85, no problem: I can log into the cam's web page and either see the live stream or do setup. But when I try to access the cam's video stream directly via the port I assigned in the cam's web page > Setup > Network > Connection > TCP Port, no joy. Having assigned TCP Port = 1400 and being able to ping the device at 10.0.0.140, my expectation is that http://10.0.0.140:1400 in a browser window will render a video stream. Or have I got it wrong? I have it accessible via BI using BI's Dahua RTSP driver and with the cam's RTSP port set to 1401.... I even tried putting 10.0.0.140:1401 into a browser and, at least, the browser confirmed it was reachable by throwing an expected: RTSP/1.0 405 Method Not Allowed Server: Dahua Rtsp Server At least I know port 1401 is reachable by the browser. OTOH, when I feed port 1400 to the browser is returns Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data. ... so I'm guessing that shows that Port 1400 is, at least, alive.... if not well.... Port forwarding, although I'm pretty sure it's set properly, would appear tb moot in light of my accessing the cam via it's local IP addr. CanYouSeeMe.com even says that the service is reachable - and when I unplug the cam, it says it is not reachable. Firewall, I dunno - although it has not been an issue with any of my half-dozen other cams and I have not had to take any explicit action with any of them. I must be doing something wrong, but what? Is anybody using one of these cams? (QSee's QCN7001B)

After looking at prices, I have to agree with you. What I was trolling for was an el-cheapo way to use the 1080 rez/really-good motion/autofocus/autozoom on the Logitech. Also, it's dawned on me that the $100+ solution is probably not routeable - just using the copper in the Cat5 plus some sort of amplifier/power supplement scheme. Heaven forbid what the price would be on a routeable solution - if one even exists. RE/The Indoor-camera-outdoors thing, I have an EdiMax 3010 POE cam down at the shore outside in the cupola of a gazebo behind a hotel on the bay. It survived several storms this year until Sandy had her way with the place. Sometime soon, I hope to recover the camera from the gazebo (which is apparently intact, but no longer in it's assigned location...as in http://tinyurl.com/a4yoqvd.). Then we'll see if I can brag that my indoors cam sealed in a DIY IP-66 housing (i.e. a plastic bag) survived Sandy.... -)

Just found a ccTV thread on it: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=11322&start=630

Here are a couple of very short clips from supposed security cam footage in PBS' "GreatPerformances-PaulMcCartneysLiveKisses". What is noteworthy to me is the quality of the detail. Frankly, this is the kind of low-light quality that I expected in the first place from my Sony SNC-CH260. Assuming that this is not faux-security cam footage (as in a "real" video cam with the stream set to B/W) can anybody speculate on possible makes/models/prices of equipment used?

Thanks!... I think that's what I was trolling for. Figuring on the 18-month doubling thing, it sounds like consumer-grade stuff might be comparable to that in a few more years.

Mea Culpa: Dumb question in retrospect. It's just that I was doping out the terminology from context ... But it begs the same question. Given that it was a 2 mp camera - "Security" or otherwise, how come my $1,200 Sony SNC-CH260 can't deliver that kind of low-light detail? Or is it something where there is much more light in the outdoor clip than seems from looking at the clip?

So... it's faux security-cam, right?

It's going back to NewEgg today.

Can anybody say what is going on here? (the blocks of color, not the heavy pixelation)... The cam is inside a garden shed - sort of in "Burn-In/Test" mode. First thing that came to mind is that it is sharing that shed with an IR-equipped cam, so I unplugged it - but no change: (the light bco the motion-sensing flood that I triggered when going in to unplug the IR cam) I tried powering it down and then back up. Pic was ok for maybe five minutes, then same-old-same-old. This is an el-cheapo cam, but I've had pretty good luck with one just like it at an outdoor location and never seen anything like this.

No. That one is fresh out of the box and I did not even unpack it until late in the day on an overcast day. Also, it's identical sister has been working a-ok for most of the season looking out over a bay in all sorts of weather. Could the IR-emitting cam in the same shed have burned out the sensor?

Finally got it installed - albeit with only 1 camera allowed... The instructions/blurbs seem to imply that motion detection/recording is automagic. But it's not happening for me and my Sony SNC-CH260. Might there be someplace in Exacq setup where I need to tell it how to recognize that the cam is throwing a motion detection event?. (I *think* I've got the cam's motion detection set up..... but anything's possible at my current state of cluelessness)

Well, now I'm seeing files in the directory mentioned... and able to view same... after setting the schedule to "Free Run". Now to go back and see about motion detection...