Kawboy12R

Moving the camera is probably the best one, but you might try painting (or black magic markering) the inside lip of the fascia board that sticks down a bit in front of the camera with something that doesn't reflect IR. Some dark materials show up white (means they are reflective) under IR so it's not always obvious. There are three obvious reflection sources. Wooden soffit, fascia board, and downspout. Mounting the camera lower (with a spacer or on the wall), closer to the gutter, and farther away from the downspout would help keep the IRs away from reflecting surfaces. I assume that you don't want to point the camera down more or away from the downspout.

http://www.bluecherrydvr.com/ Never used it but it has been around for a while and is a Linux option.

Right back at ya.

Aaron, Rory hasn't posted here in a long time. I'm not sure why he left but you can most likely get in touch with him on his own site if you want. I don't know if he got hit with the ban hammer or left on his own. PM me if you want.

IMHO, cubes are cute and non-threatening for indoor office environments (they look more like occasional-use webcams than 24/7 security cams). Domes are hard to break or misdirect and aren't obviously pointing in one direction if they've got a tinted shield or cover (keeps folks guessing). A bullet is more aggressive and might be a better deterrent if it isn't obviously pointing in a different direction.

How hot does your attic get? Electronics like DVRs, computers, etc don't like heat. Even if they don't crash their lifespan can be drastically reduced. Check your docs for the recommended operating range but I'd definitely expect problems of some kind if your attic reaches 40 deg C. Maybe even lower than that. Cooler is better.

Might even be able to buy some of hiddenmountain's gear. Not sure if he upgraded, gave up, sold the place, this is a different system, or what's going on. viewtopic.php?f=22&t=34544

Using cables with pre-made ends makes for large holes, especially if they're ALL going in through the same entry point. Guessing the wrong size hole makes a small job much worse. The holes are smaller if you put your own ends on. Maybe look to run the cables into the soffit to the wall of the utility room and in through the side? Depends on home construction. Maybe along the soffit into the attic and then down into the room you want along a stud? There's a bunch of different ways to skin that particular cat, especially if you use multiple entries for the cable and use your own ends. Just don't drill an undersized hole for a one-hole entrance, run 3/4 of your wires, and then find out it's a real pain to stick those big premade ends through 2 or, much worse, 3 layers of wood and end up yanking the wires you've run, and trying to make your hole bigger without the benefit of the pilot drill for your holesaw. Maybe practice on plywood first to make sure all your last end will go through the hole you think you want to use with all of the other wires already going through the hole.

Just buy one good cable the length you need and don't worry about bad BNC couplers and dollar store EBay crap cables. If you're anywhere near a city then there's a store that sells CCTV stuff and good pre-made cables for about the same price or maybe a hair more than you'd pay after shipping from EBay. If you take your camera in I bet they'll hook up your cam and their cable to a demo system before you pay for it.

No way to get power to the cams except via that trench? If you were going to go wireless, eliminating the $6000 trench would go nicely towards wireless equipment. If this is for a client then learning about fibre is cheap compared to screwing up the job and having him reject a whole pile of wireless equipment if it doesn't work either. I'm guessing that a $150 consumer grade wireless network extender isn't going to work for that many cameras. That's a whole different kettle of fish compared to playing with it for yourself.

Good point numb-nuts. I still haven't seen anybody look up at my cams and stop walking into my yard though, even when there was visible IR pointing out at the street. That doesn't mean that something wasn't prevented. It's hard to quantify things that DIDN'T happen. I'm still amazed that I never saw a visitor look up into the IR of my old front door bullet. Still waiting for someone who has used a non-Dahua network camera successfully with a Dahua NVR to speak up...

What Tom was trying to say is that you've got a budget *DVR* and, because it's a cheapo, it probably makes speed and performance assumptions (among other things) based on having that exact HD installed. You might get issues when, say, recording motion video suddenly after a long period of no motion so the different drive went to sleep unexpectedly. Picture having recording problems right when you probably need it the most. It might work fine, but to be safe you'd better test it well before depending on it to capture things quickly and properly after it might've been asleep. It might also not be able to keep up at peak use periods, say when reviewing video, recording all of the cameras, and maybe someone's reviewing the cams remotely. There might even be firmware issues you're not aware of. Then again everything might work out fine and BETTER than the old one, but considering the effort involved in making sure everything works properly with the SV drive and the possibility of losing coverage when you need it, there's no big reason to switch drives when you know one that works perfectly with that unit. You might call the place you got it from and find out for sure if the SV35 is a recommended replacement drive or not as well. All that being said though, I compared the specs of the two drives and the SV35 is faster and better in all respects that I could tell with the exception of power consumption where the 7200.12 is a bit lower. I'd bet a dollar you'll be fine.

I'm saying that networking gear using UTP (unshielded twisted pair) cable (cat 5, 5e, and 6) won't transmit data farther than 328'. IP network cameras transmit video as network data and have the same limits as everything else. Optical fibre equipment is commonly used for longer runs. You could use wireless technology of some form as well. Depending on neighbouring 2.4ghz pollution, a wifi bridge and some fancy antennae (preferably mounted up high, possibly up a simple tower or on the roof) might work. Maybe. If I read your post right, you want to run 14 2mp cameras?? All from separate locations 1300' away or are they being run wired under 328' to an NVR (or switch) and the NVR's (or switch's) connection to the rest of the network is 1300'? Either way though, that's a LOT of data to run over wireless. Not sure what you're watching, the importance of 100% uptime, or the exact placements of cams, but life would be simpler and the network a lot more reliable if you could run 110v power plus fibre optics out to a sheltered location (weather-proof box of some kind, small outbuilding, or whatever) and run the cameras into a switch out near the end of the run.

You can transmit analog video over cat 5, 5e, and 6 for more than a 1000' using baluns. I've read some crazy distance numbers using active baluns. The 328' limit for IP isn't a camera limit it's a network design limit. Seems strange that internet covers the planet but once you start running it yourself you seem to be limited to 328'. You'll have to convert to something like optical fibre for longer IP runs. Sit down before you get a price quote though. Wikipedia isn't a bad place to start to learn about the specs and limits of cat 5e and cat 6 cables. You can run more power and more data over cat 6 but you're still stuck with 328' max for IP networking. If you can place a network switch every 300' or so then you can do 1300' in chunks. Burial grade switches are hard to come by though.

How do you plan to get an IP camera to work for longer than 328 feet per run? With an active repeater of some kind every 100m you don't need 1300 unbroken feet at a time.

We got another good storm the weekend after the big one that buried us and New England. That driveway was drifted in to over 5 feet deep in spots two weekends ago but it's been pretty warm off and on since then. I was away that weekend and that poor snowblower had been kicked out of the garage for lack of room and was buried when I got back. I'm doing some renovations and the garage was full. Now it's frozen in for a while. Good thing it's my spare. Now we're having freezing rain and ice pellets off and on and are due for another 8 inches tonight.

Pretty close. It's just over 6' but under 7' and mounted sideways on the frame of the garage door. Didn't quite work when mounted horizontally on the doorframe because of the joists of the veranda overhead sticking down so it was either sideways or build a little shim or platform to drop it a bit lower. I know most folks want their cams up high to avoid tampering but you get a great view when mounted at head level and I figure if someone's going to play with it, well, they can play with something mounted up higher as well. With it mounted under the garage door framework it's pretty immune to drips, dirt, etc coming down through the decking.

Hope you're happy with it. I'd like to see some samples of what it is like with the IR going. I still have to find a longer zoom replacement for this spot in my driveway coverage.

If it's just one camera then why not use a network camera? You'll put the cost of the dvr card into a higher definition camera that'll run off the same computer.

If it were me I'd get the 12mm version for the driveway. I've got a 6mm P3364VE version covering my driveway. Unless you're likely to need the wider coverage angle (6mm will go to 105 degree coverage and the 12mm will only do 82 degrees at its widest), the 12mm can be a much better distance camera if you find you need it. If you get the 6mm version you'll be adjusted pretty well out to 6mm to cover only that scene and if you ever decide that you want better ID quality at night of folks coming in your driveway the 12mm can give you that extra zoom. I can't comment on the IR quality of the LVE version but the VE version catches license plates easily at night (headlights on or off) to well beyond the length of your driveway in colour mode but can't read them when it switches to B&W because my 940nm IR illuminator whites them out. This is with just a couple of reasonably dim porch lights on. I'll attach a pic from mine to show the field of view of the 6mm version at maximum zoom. The license plate is about 43 feet from the camera. Use the Pelco camera tool and plug in some test values for different fields of view to give yourself a bit better feel for the end results. Remember that the grey area of the field of view cone shows the distance they consider the max for a really good facial ID if you have "recognition: human face" selected. It's not very long. http://www.pelco.com/sites/global/en/sales-and-support/downloads-and-tools/tools/pelco-camera-tool.page

The voltage drop has to be checked under load which means testing with the device hooked up and running at full power. Something like this should work- http://www.amazon.com/Converter-Step-Power-Supply-Module/dp/B00A71CMDU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361902327&sr=8-1&keywords=12v+to+5v+dc+converter Mickey mouse approach but if you don't mind Rube Goldberg devices then go for it. With all of the playing around, complexity, etc you'd probably be better off just using something properly designed for the job and distances involved though. Seems like a lot of work to end up with something mediocre.

Microphones come in different forms. Is the mic built into the camera or external and plugged into the dome? I'll guess that your mic is a lower voltage external one (not built into the camera) but the DVR is expecting a powered mic. Depends what you mean by "distortion" I guess. Normally I think a powered mic is being plugged into something that expects less signal when I think distortion rather than static, but a built-in mic from a dome camera that would normally be plugged into a DVR _should_ output properly. It'd help to know exactly what cam, mic, etc you're using. If the dome doesn't have its own mic, try getting a cctv microphone like one on this page- http://www.etsnm.com/microphones.html

Assuming you read your tester correctly (I'm a bit skeptical if you have doubts), you've got a camera that runs on 5v DC? I'd expect 12v DC, 24v AC, or PoE. 12v cam won't run on 5v power even if you run 10 gauge wire to the camera. We won't worry about how you measured the .005A from the PS for now.

Oh, just thought I'd explain the tool a bit better. On the 1.3mp 2100 bullet specs that you plugged in, facial recognition (a really good facial ID) is good only to the grey area on the cone, not the red area. That's about 15 feet. The details in the 3300 bullet show a really good facial ID out to about 25 feet. You can stretch those distances and get a decent ID but the exact details get fuzzier as you get farther away, especially at night.

Ingress Protection 6/6 means completely dustproof and "protected against powerful water jets". That means good for outdoors with complete exposure to rain and wind. http://viacam-security.com/ip66.html