rawfuls

Check to make sure your internal ip address has not changed (on the DVR) if your router is set to DHCP. This is as easy as logging into your router page (usually 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.2.1) and checking the DHCP Client List/Table and finding the DVR. Once found, make sure that ip address qualifies under the port forwarding required by Night Owl.

Try supercam. Plug in your IP, port, and credentials, and it will log right in. SuperDVR (the computer based DVR I'm using) is activeX w/ IE (only), but seems to work.

We're looking for a pretty cheap new camera, with about a 60-70ft range. Must have BNC support, and will be going on our Q-See QSPDVR04 PCI card: http://www.amazon.com/Q-See-QSPDVR04-Channel-Digital-Recorder/dp/B00069ECUY Obviously, we're not looking for the best quality, but some decent quality would be nice. Otherwise, we might go with a $60 Swann 580CAM: http://www.amazon.com/Swann-580-Daynight-Camera-SWPRO-580CAM/dp/B0050U67HU Color, if possible. Thanks guys!

This morning was a GREAT example. Starting yesterday morning, after I return from practice at around 7:10AM (I leave at 5), I notice a boy and a girl sitting on our curb on the corner of the house, seems like they are just talking and whatnot, but I know that they were here to do something inappropriate. Watching the recorded sessions, I see nothing out of the ordinary, they are just talking, and then leave a few minutes before school begins. Today, they were looking rather suspicious, so as I was dressing & doing some last minute things, kept an eye on the remote browser from my room. Sure enough, I see them smoking. Not only that, I see the boy run up our driveway, and what seems to be either stashing or reclaiming something in the bushes [we cut down a tree long ago, and it left a little burrow, cave-like, where a person could pretty much crouch in and be completely concealed minus the opening which is faced towards the camera]. Unfortunately, I was not quick enough to hit Urgent Record, but I do remember it firmly. It was also out of the range of the motion detection (if windy, it will cause it to record... a lot), so no recording was done. However, I rewatched the footage when I came home, and the motion detection picked up their movements, at the time where it was obvious they were smoking something. In addition, I saw a car pull up, and the girl suspiciously walking to it, either speaking to the driver and/or exchanging something. This worried me the most. This set off the motion detection and it went into recording mode as soon as the car pulled up. I have snapped frames of puffs of smoke originating from their mouths, and the car 'exchange'. I called the school up, spoke to the dean about this, and requested additional patrols in the neighborhood [literally, 100ft away from the school campus]. They requested pictures, sure; sent it off to them via e-mail. The pictures are not too great, and cannot make out a face at ALL, however, they are excellent for providing proof that this activity goes on, and instead of us just complaining verbally, we can now show proof. I will be putting our CCTV to constant record from 6:30 (sun-up) to 8:00 (school begins) and then motion detection after that to see if I can capture anything else. Other than that, I briefly looked into the little burrow area, to see nothing that popped out to me. This has served us well so far, not to convince my father to purchase a better camera!

Some of you may remember from my previous thread: viewtopic.php?f=56&t=29732 Just wanted to update you guys on a few things. I've officially solved the SuperDVR issue and it crashing, I've now got to fix a crashing on the computer in it's entirety. The computer is sitting in the corner of a garage that gets some direct sunlight, so through many layers of concrete, it gets hot, fast. It will crash about once a day, especially when it's hot. I've solved this issue temporarily using a small 9" desktop fan blowing directly onto the computer components to keep them cool. Anyway, onto the system. It's working out great so far! For a $60 dollar setup, not bad at all. (Technically $30, since we have two cameras in use, and the free PCI card) We currently have two SWADS-100 we got for $15 each, we have four. Only two are installed because we are currently not sure what to do with the other two, and the other side of the house. We are looking into a few BETTER cameras. In any case, the SWADs have been good for keeping a general knowledge of what goes on outside of the house, as opposed to use for evidence. The primary purposes of this CCTV is to see what's been digging up the roses in our garden (which we are able to say raccoon for sure [before it was just a guess]), and to help scare off the teenagers who have been smoking around our house prior to school (down the street). Either that, or to use the video as proof that we DO have these teenagers coming up here, and request additional school patrols in our cul-de-sac. That, and I've always thought the concept of CCTVs and remote browsing was really cool.. I hope to keep this thread open as a discussion for updates, or whatnot. Hopefully this is alright. I feel like I have to share something whenever something 'goes down.

What would be the equivalent max TVL in terms of the card? No analog cards will record higher than D1, which is 720x480 for NTSC video. Essentially, anything over 480TVL is wasted - some people's tests show slight noticeable differences going up to about 600TVL, others not so much. There's a lot more to quality video than just the vertical resolution. Long story short: don't get hung up on TVL numbers. It's an indicator of relative resolution... it's not a sure indicator of overall image quality. Gotcha. What would be the general measure of the overall quality I should be looking at, and making sure I'm under, as not to waste money into a camera higher than the card can handle? Excuse the ignorance, learning as fast as I can!

hi. dont spend alot of money on cameras if you are going to use that q-see card. for that card look for cameras around the $40- $60. your only recording in low FPS at CIF (you cant make it better by buying 600tvl cameras) your just wasting money. http://www.apexcctv.com/c-49-infrared-security-cameras.aspx What would be the equivalent max TVL in terms of the card?

In your price range, consider this much better camera than the one you're linking to. And they all come with a power supply included. http://www.gadspot.com/p-328-gs4031sm.aspx Holy crap! That picture of the car lot with that gadspot camera looks pretty incredible.. How would it rate against one of the Dahua's that Soundy posted earlier? The ones in the ~$50 range? Could you recommend one in the ~$50 range, and what would the pro/cons be of the 40/50 vs 70 models? Since factoring in shipping and tax, that perfect $60 model went up to a $75 model... Just need to gather some ammunition before I convince my dad to stray away from that cheap Swann

Any particular to keep an eye out for? Need them to be weatherproof (though they will be under the roof) Mostly looking for the wide-lens since it will be put in one corner of the house and be pointing across the entire front lawn. And definitely some decent IRs.. Also needs to include some sort of power supply, we can run the extension cord through the attic.

Are you sure your ports are forwarded?

OFFICIALLY SOLVED! I had forgotten LogMeIn installs it's own VGA drivers everytime. I would install Windows, install VGA drivers, then wireless drivers, and then LogMeIn so I could run into my room and finish everything else, multi-tasking. Well, I reinstalled Windows (incase it's own uninstaller didn't remove all hints of drivers), only install NVidia drivers, then threw everything else on. AND IT WORKS! I'm not sure why it was having trouble with B/W only, but now it's working with color! I've installed Teamviewer, and I'm on my way. Hopefully, I won't experience the same thing with Teamviewer. Ahhh, so good to finally figure something out for once I assume whenever I threw in a new AGP card, I would install video drivers. Then I'd run SuperDVR, and it works. Later, I'd check up on it, through LogMeIn, which reactivated LogMeIn's drivers, which caused the crash. Also worth noting that the videos look somewhat better! Adjusted some of the colors slightly, and the colors are actually getting closer to what they should look like. All in all, for $60 total, this isn't bad at all!

Hey guys, my dad wanted to piece together a VERY CHEAP surveillance system for a few spots around the house. Again, I'd like to stress the words CHEAP and BUDGET, as this is not going to be anything serious, it's mainly here to scare off the teenagers we have coming up our street to smoke outside our driveway/lawn. Currently we have two of these Swann ADS-100 cameras that we picked up for ~$15 off Fry's BF deals: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=765924&Q=&is=REG&A=details There are at the purple boxes on the Northwest corner of the house, one is pointed towards the sidewalk path coming from the opening of the street, and the other is pointed at the opposite sidewalk, which is a cul-desac. In addition to the Swann's, since we are keeping this very light on the wallet, we got a free Q-See QSPDVR04 from my boss, since he switched to IP cameras for the store. http://www.q-seestore.com/product-p/qspdvr04.htm We threw this into an older Pentium 4 computer we had laying around, and also tossed in a AGP card, nVidia GeForce FX 5200 (very old card). We installed SuperDVR which Q-See recommends, and initially worked but we only had grayscale-black and white even though they said both the card and the cameras supported color. But we didn't mind as it was recording upon motion only (what we wanted), and was working fine. My dad begin to fuss around with the settings, and he told me he clicked on the resolution, and then clicked on "De-Interlace", which is a feature within SuperDVR, which would ideally smoothe over all the video for playback, and wouldn't be as choppy.. Either way, once he clicked on this radio box, he noted that it immediately crashed (SuperDVR did), and claimed a DirectDraw Error. Since then, I have followed his steps with a different AGP card (reformat, card replacement, nothing worked), and clicked De-Interlace, and sure enough the error came. However on the second card (MX440SE), I installed SuperDVR v4.6.1, which actually worked PERFECTLY with COLOR. We were amazed. I tried the PCI card on my current computer which worked flawlessly, then again, I have modern hardware, that racks up the bill quite a bit! We are trying to make this work with the current Pentium 4 rig we have for spare without shelling out money. On the MX440SE (the second card), and the FX 5200, we are now unable to bring up SuperDVR as upon startup SuperDVR claims a DirectDraw object cannot be created, and will not start at all. I tried endlessly reinstallations, wiped clean the drive, reformatted everything, reinstalled, driver updates, windows updates, nothing. Any thoughts on this DirectDraw error? I tried reinstalling the driver, reinstalling DirectX, reinstalling GPU drivers.. nada. Attached is a diagram for what it's worth. EDIT: Anybody know of any options other than SuperDVR for viewing & recording?

I'd like to claim some success! One of the reasons we put this camera setup in place was becuase we were pretty curious who was coming by and digging up our roses, and whatnot. We've always suspected raccoon/skunks, but we were never 100% certain. Well, we are today! I fixed it up yesterday, put everything in place, camera 1 picked up some strange little guy with white in his eyes (probably just the camera), as he crossed the middle of the two cameras, light sensors picked him up and on came the lights. Camera 2 then caught him walking towards the front door and into the rose area... That's where it stops because we've yet to install the last two cameras! Out of sheer laziness, I suspect.. As per the questions before: The double stamped time & date, is because when I took the snapshots, it wrote another time and date over where the camera recorded it. I guess from now on I will ask it to be snapped bare, that way it will have the original time/date the camera embedded. The files are all in .avi files, playable through VLC (videolan.org) Direct album with everything (combined with the pictures before). http://s53.photobucket.com/albums/g68/godzilla1994/Security%20Camera%20Snapshots/ Pictures:

Threw in another AGP card, this time a Nvidia GeForce 6800. Works so far, and won't be messing with it this time!

I'm now on Spring Break, so I should have some more time to fool around and try and get the thing back up and running. We have a few more AGP cards that I can give a try, other than that, starting to make me mad!

Once burned, the footage actually is viewable through VLC (a program I use on every computer at home), and I believe is burned into the .avi format IIRC. Time & date was a little weird too. Will give it a fresh wipe and see where it takes me.

It seems I have spoken too soon. I was browsing through some footage earlier, trying to find some events that took place out front (say one of our family friends came over, I wanted to see just how much it'd captured and if it was any good) to find out that our time was off. Being the OCD type, I felt the need to correct this, so I closed SuperDVR, changed system time, restarted, and tried reopening it; until I was prompted with the DirectDraw error, yet again. Given, this time I had installed a few updates (Net framework 2.0 for the DDNS client, Windows Malicious Defender, or whatever, Office Service Pack, and one other small thing). Obviously, either the system time change affected it, or the software updates did; but I have a feeling nothing will defeat this until I get a decent graphics card that will actually offer DirectDraw, regardless of just how well the computer is still able to push out the video.. Will be in search of a few test cards from my AP Comp Sci teacher, and will be digging through the parts box to see if the old GeForce 6200 is AGP compatible. Until then, seems like my toy is offline, yet again.

Assuming the cut filter is what I think it is (similar to a cover?), would I be able to grab a decent one to just put in front of the camera, this would increase the color drastically, or just merely?

Got a few PMs asking for some pictures of said cheap cameras. Here we are. Cam1 is of my main driveway, captures any cars that comes into the 2-car driveway, also captures our alley gate, as well as the corner of the end of the driveway. Cam2 shows corner of end of main driveway (huge blind spot between the two, but not too shabby), and extends to the end of our secondary driveway, and a bit into the neighbor's driveway. The reason for a huge blindspot, is mainly because we wanted to mount it in the exact same area where our motion detection floodlights are. Ideally, if the lights pick something up, the sudden change in light change will catch the motion detection in the camera, and turn those on as well, and after a second or two of adjusting from night to day (with the help of the floodlights), should be perfect. We tried this out a few times and seems to work well for now. As shown in pictures, motion detection went off on CAM1 detected the car passing, and passed into CAM2 range, where CAM2 started recording right away. It actually pulled into the neighbor's driveway (behind the giant orange tree), and stopped there. Quality isn't great, but for a $15 cameras we definitely are not complaining. The colors of course off, but I'm not one for messing with color, so I left it as-is. Anywho, the batch of pictures: http://s53.photobucket.com/albums/g68/godzilla1994/Security%20Camera%20Snapshots/

Ended up redoing everything in a different computer (Still a Pentium 4 rig, but with a different motherboard), seems to work. Definitely not touching that De-Interlace button, though! Now capturing some decent color, of our front.. We spent about a total of $30 for these two cameras, computers & card were both already owned, so nothing spent on that. We still have two more cameras to put up, whenever we have time & it stops raining on the weekends!