graphicw

I will say the same for the movers and not remove my post when the heat is on. "Yes, they do need to grow a pair. Stand your ground and learn you have to be man sometimes!" Now to cover the legality of the issue at hand. If you make your cameras obvious, then you cannot be accused of voyeurism. Don't aim it straight for the neighbor's windows, but rather cover avenues of approach to your property. If the neighbor's yard happens to be in one of your views, so be it as long as it is a legitimate avenue of approach to your property or doors and windows. I have cameras that have three of my neighbor's property in view. They cover legitimate avenues of approach to my property and most of the frame is on my own property. If trouble ratchets up, just walk the dog with a piece in plane sight. Do some target practice back in the woods with your AR-15 and AK-47 from time to time. This gets the message across without ever having to threaten anyone. They know you will stand your ground and have the means to do so if pushed. Yes, I have had to do this in real life and if I am ever pushed to bear arms on someone, I will do it without hesitation. My problems are zero, I live happy and healthy and did not have to move even though I had two neighbors trying to create some problems some years back.

One other thing, if you go with Diginet, you can only use a Kodicom card or clone with it. Any of these will work: KMC 4400 KMC 8800 KMC 8016 KMC 8416 KIO 1616 for IO, PTZ and alarm integration Look those up in google and learn about them. I can tell you anything you want to know about them as well, but if you cannot get original equipment, let me know the source of your clone. Some of the clones are very bad and work erratically.

Diginet is a good move and is one my favorite CCTV programs. It also works well on a fairly low spec computer keeping costs down. You can also integrate your motion detectors and reed switches with Diginet as well. This means you can integrate this package with your security system in the future. You will need a Kio 1616 card for the sensor and control interface though. Luckily, they are quite cheap and can be had for $50.00 and are very often Kodicom orginals. If you want 16 channels of video, you will want a KMC 8416a. This board will allow you 16 channels video and 4 channels of audio. You will be able to view and record 30fps on each channel at CIF resolution. If you run at 640x480, you will be able to record at 15fps on each channel which is more than suffice. Try to get an original if you can. This is also an MPEG4 board so it is more efficient than the Engine K boards like KMC 8800 and 4400 types. If you want this board PM me and I will send you a source that you can wheel an deal with to get ahold of an original KMC 8416A, KIO 1616 and all needed cables for about $250.00. He will try to sell it at $899, but can be talked down to $250.00 It is original Kodicom equipment too and therefore wont give you the problem that comes with the clones at times. Diginet will work with IP cameras well, Acti and Axis brands, but resolution will be 640x480. Best to stick with analog as IP is more expensive. You do not need movie quality video for CCTV. You just need to be able to see what is going on and identify the perpetrators causing your issues or threatening your propery. Choosing the right cameras and lense types will allow you to achieve this with analog. I use all analog equipment. You can download the Diginet 5.2 client for free and I will allow you to view one of my systems and check out the software before you buy (I do not sell this software, so this is to help you out, I gain nothing from it). PM me if you want to do this.

Most retail establishments I have dealt with try to keep two months of video on hand (department stores and such). Your common gas station is normally about a month or so. Never installed a system in a pawn shop, but I would venture to say at least a month.

Simply move seems to suggest running. I have never been one to run and plus it takes resources to move. That is not a solution for most people due to cost alone. I would also hope that the majority have more guts than to run. The problem can be solved peacefully as long as the perpetrator has something to lose. For most people, the threat of being caught in their actions or coming up against someone who they know will fight back will be enough to deter them. Those that just no longer care anymore will still approach, but we all know how those kind of people have to be dealt with.

Now that is comparing "Apples" to Oranges. lol The products you mention are officially sanctioned by the actual owners of the rights to make the product. In order to maintain their reputation in the marketplace, they gnerally keep a tight control on quality. It is the cloned or illegally copied products from China that are the source of the problems I mentioned.

What makes Chinese product have bad reputation is that much of it is hacked copies of the original not even built to the original spec. People buy this crap thinking it is the real thing at a lower price. It then becomes a pain in the ass for those of us that install it because we get blamed when the cheap crap does not work like it should. All of the Geovision clones I have seen have been complete and total crap that cannot even use the newer versions of the software and then do not work reliably with the older hacked versions they come with. You know how useful a DVR is that decides to BSOD every so often is? Not very when you have to wonder whether or not it is working. The only good clones I have seen out there period are the Kodicom clones (only some of them at that). Problem is that Chinese manufactures like to skimp on needed components on their clones like the proper resistors and sometimes leave out capacitors that are included in the original card. Such shortcuts ask for an erratically operating card. You can keep the Chinese copy crap, I stick to the originals where I can. I install a lot of Kodicom, but I go out of my way to get original hardware whenever I can. I am selective about what clones I use when I cannot find original hardware.

There is no reason to buy opensuse. It is an open source OS. You will need to do more than study software, you will also need a good understanding of hardware as well. Linux based DVR will make a good DVR, but do not expect to integrate that with any alarm system. There is a large selection of Windows based DVR software that will integrate with motion detectors, reed switches, alarm relays and all kinds of goodies. I use Linux on my desktop, but I tell you the facts when I say a properly set up Windows box can be just as secure as Linux that is properly set up. You can very easily disable many of the services that make Windows insecure. You also have to change your habits in regard to a Windows machine once it is set up as a DVR. In other words, don't browse the web with it, use it for playing games or anything else other than runnings software for your security/dvr system. It is OK to use it as a file server, though I would refrain from using it as an app server at any time. You will find that once you disable certain services, your use of the machine will be restricted to the actual intended purpose. You will also find that most retail establishments use Windows based DVR software with Diginet, Protech, Avermedia and Geovision being quite common.

Baud rate is the data speed. The higher the number, the faster the speed. PTZ cameras generally use baud rate settings.

Here is what I found on this card. http://www.surveillance-video.com/55-600d4-160.html?cmp=googleproducts&kw=55-600d4-160 It is advertised as able to do 16 cameras and 1 channel of audio. I very rarely deal with Geovision cards. Too expensive for what you get when you actually get a true and original card. Most of the E-bay ones are fakes and do not have the ability to take advantage of the latest software though they are cheaper being that they fake. I prefer to use the older Kodicom cards. I can reach the same analog quality as the Geovision software and still use IP cams if I choose to as well though still only in 640x480. A Kodicom 8416A will allow you 16 channels of video with four channels of audio. There is currently one person selling the entire card kit with Kio-1616, 1608 board, all cables and 8416A for $899.00. He accepted offer for $250.00. It is original Kodicom equipment and not the usual clones you seem to find on E-bay these days.

In my case, I do not have a wife or kids, so I do not have anything to lose in this world. If they want to burn my house down or shoot me, then they can come on over and do it, but I am not going to make it easy for them. All doors and windows have magnetic reed switches, All rooms with exterior doors have have motion detectors and audio glass break detectors. The room I reside in does not have very many windows and is the farthest room from any entrance to the house. I will have plenty of time upon the alarm sounding to pick up the AR-15 walk to the livingroom doorway and open up on the perpetrator. My CCTV system is far from any points of entrance and so are my weapons. Everything is close to where I am. The house is cinderblock with some interior walls being cinderblock as well. My chances are better than average if I have someone decide to pay me a visit and like I said, if they come I do not spend much time worrying about it. If I win, then I justifiably solved my problem for good. If I lose when they enter, well I guess I wont have to worry about anything anymore. lol I do have several 1,000 watt metal halide lights that I decided to line down the side of my house aimed at the problem neighbor. Night was day for several weeks when they began causing me problems. I had three of those lighting them up. The cameras on that side never even entered infrared led mode the light was that good. After the problems stopped, I quit using the lights. They kill you on the electric bill, especially when you forget to turn them off during the day. A 3 kw draw does make a big impact on the power bill when it runs 24x7.

There is nothing illegal with recording neighbors in most of the US. There are plenty of Youtube videos of "neighbors from hell" caught in the act. About two years ago, I got into a dispute with a neighbor because he was dealing drugs from his house and his visitors were blocking my own driveway as well. I ended up putting up a "Do not block driveway" sign that ended up ripped down. I also ended up with a flat tire when I ran over screws thrown into my driveway. I ended up lining up one side of the house with cameras all pointed at him (total of four). All of my problems suddenly stopped once surveillance was obvious. If your cameras are obvious enough, the "roaches" may scurry like they do when someone turns the lights on.

That card supports up to 16 cameras with a total of 50 fps (PAL) shared between all of the cameras. Here is one that is less expensive and will give you full framerate on 8 channels at 640x480 resolution. I have a great deal of experience with using these cards. You can either use the Diginet DVR software with this card, or use Zoneminder in Linux. Here is a the link for the card: http://www.camsecure.co.uk/CamsecureBT878aPCICard.html

The link appears to be dead. Normally any activeX will be loaded from the DVR itself, not from a remote address. You may need to make sure you have set up the DVR properly as well as checking your firmware version to make sure it is up to date.

I finally discovered the purpose of the 26 pin header on the 8416 series DVR cards. It is to allow a direct connection to the video card via a 26 pin ribbon cable. This is kown as VIP or video interface port. It was one of the major stand out features of the 8416 however video cards with this port are no longer common. Not a bad feature though to allow direct video transfer without using the PCI bus. The Kodicom advertised function of VIP was higher quality of video. Mystery solved. I hope that somebody has found this useful.

I am working on a KMC-8416A in combination with a KIO-1616. I would like to use all the functions that the 8416A has to offer. I have been able to get audio to work by connecting the first four pin connection to the Aux In on the sound card. I have been able to get my 16 channels of Video In and Video out to work from the top rear 34 Pin Header. What I have not yet figured out is the 26 pin front top header and the 2 pin connector at the back of the card. I am guessing that the two pin connector is possibly a reset. If that is the case, what would I wire this connector to? I did receive a cable for the connector, just not sure of where to wire it to. In order to best assist anybody willing to help me, I have included a picture for illustration showing what I already known about the card and the two ports I do not yet know the real purpose of. I am pretty impressed with this card. I never realized that these older KMC actually had hardware compression. It was an unexpected treat to find that for sure. There were four Samsung RAM chips on the back of the card as well which I assume are for the video processiong functions of the card.

You can also setup a VNC server and control the desktop remotely. It would be like you were right there sitting at the DVR PC but you would be on another PC using a remote VNC session.

I looked closer at the photo on E-bay, it came with version 7.05. You pay possibly have a clone of the GV-600 and therefore your card may not work with the newer versions of the Geovision software.

Graphics card wont matter much with this card. An old ATI 9250 or similar will work fine with this card. What software version came with your card?

I am looking at your doorway there and it looks like any potentional perpetrator is going to be up close and personal. I recommend analaog in your case. It will save you money and provide you with the service you need to protect this doorway. This door only has one avenue of approach due to walls on both side of it. The perpetrator has to approach from the front. A camera just above the door will catch an image of the perpetrator well before they have a chance to disablie it due to limited angle of approach. Now IP will work great on an exterior wall of the house where you may want to have high resolution to cover a large area or at least give you high focal detail. On this door though, stick with analog, IP will be a waste with this limited point of approach door. Put your megapixel + where you really need it.

So you are in South Africa from what I am seeing. It is pretty chaotic there indeed. If you cannot have an armed guard on hand, then you will need to set up a CCTV with remote storage. You can direct it to an IP address on premise where the perpetrators cannot find the NAS or if you have sufficient bandwidth you could use an offsite server. Zoneminder willl allow you to do all of as will Diginet and most other major CCTV software. Most of my experience is with Zoneminder and Diginet. Those are the two PC based systems that I set up most often. I have worked with Geovision before as well . The same can be done with that software too. I was beginning to think you were making up stories because I thought you were in the US, but now that I see you are in South Africa it is believable. I suggest you run a PC based DVR using some form of remote storage. Keep in mind that the presence of cameras may draw more attention to you and make people think you have something worth protecting. You may be better off in your situation with discrete cameras. In America, it is usually best to make them obvious, but most of our communities at this time have reliable police response and the crooks know it. Over here, they are apt to avoid a house with CCTV, of course there are exceptions, but as a general rule, most crooks here will pick an easier target. Good luck on your setup. Let me know what software you decide on in the end and I will provide you some pointers on the hardware. If you go with a Diginet based setup, you can get by with lower powered hardware than if you go with Zoneminder, however you will need an ATI based card with at least 128 megs of ram. If you go with Zoneminder, you will need to focus on CPU but video card will not matter since you will be running in text only if you set it up correctly. Running Linux as a CLI will give you a more secure and reliable system in the end. Keep in mind that your Zoneminder is really a web server, that is where the focus will be if you take that route.

If you want to integrate with a security alarm, then Windows is your best bet because there are simply more options when it comes to integration with alarm system. You can interact with X10 devices via Zoneminder, but it is not easy to set up and that function is not very reliable in the software. An improperly setup Linux can be hacked with ease. Linux is more secure by nature, but in the process of making it easier to use, there is not as much focus on security. You would be amazed how simple it is to slip a VNC server on an Android device giving you the ability to see everything on the screen without the user being aware whatsoever. Windows can be made more secure by disabling certain services and functions within it(many of the same functions and services that dumb it down to make easier to use). In the end, it wont matter what system you have if the perpetrator can gain physical access to it. The way you describe your situation, your best option a full time armed guard and using remote storage of your CCTV video capture. Fortunate for you that all the major software allows that function, including Zoneminder.

What is the complete model number of the DVR? Some of the Swann units are toys and do not even have an e-mail alert feature. Some have text alerts, but do not forward snapshots. It all depends on the model that you have.

Good point there Soundy. If he opts for a BT878 based card like one of the Kodicoms, he will be better off using Diginet because it is less CPU intensive than Zoneminder when used with Kodicom card or clone. I do know that to get 8 cameras at 640x480 at 30fps nearly uses the full CPU resources of dual 32 bit Xeon 3.2ghz processors and that is using 8 bit grayscale. In Diginet, you can easily handle 16 channels in color at 30 fps without a hiccup on the same setup even though Diginet does not use multi-threading and therefore only actually uses one of the processors. If he opts for Diginet, the software is $99.00 through Say Security for Diginet 5.2 that will work with Windows 2000 and XP Pro. You can get it to work in Windows 2003 as well, but it takes a little trickery to make it work. Diginet 5.3 is $300, but it will work in Windows 7 on a 32bit install. CCTV in Windows usually does best in 32 bit, in Linux, a 64 bit system is fine and will work better actually, especially if you have an SSE3 capable processor. Zoneminder is about all there is in Linux, but it is free and performs well on a 64 bit setup.

Since I cannot find anybody out there that knows for sure what the 26 pin header is for near the front top of the card, I have decided to take a different route on the install. I have opted to take a 32 pin ribbon cable with three ends to wire from the octoboard (the connection board for the two eight port video dongles) to the Kio-1616's 32 video input pins to the 32 video input pins on the 8416a. I am going stick with what I know for sure. Turns out the Kio1616 is only a two layer board, so I could follow the traces and find out all of it's functions even without a schematic. I have gotten the control and senor functions of the KIO-1616 wired up now and will get the video inputs wired in next once I get the cables so I can use the external monitor control features of the diginet software. This KIO-1616 is indeed a strange animal though, it does not have any kind of PCI interface chip like a PLX or similar type of bus control chip. The PCI bus is used mainly for a power source with very limited data sent over it. This card depends on a cable from the RS-232 port to a serial port for full functionality. That is where the real data work is done, via a serial connection. The only as three major components to worry about, an 8 bit Atmel microcontroller with 256 bytes of RAM, a crosspoint switch for video switch via a cd22m3494sq and 9 relays (8 of them for device control and 1 relay to act as a reset swtich). I will post pics of the KIO 1616 with all functions mapped out in the near future. I cannot figure out the 8416's so well because they are multilayer boards. I cannot see all the traces. I need a schematic to figure it out all the functions or someone who knows all the pinouts on the cards. I cannot find a manual or schematic for it, so for now, I am going to stick with what I know for sure about the card. As it stand, I have figured out the vast majority of the card and have the major functions working now.