Thomas

There were a couple of them. Basic theory: They use a curved mirror and lens to see 360 degrees. Then you use software to move the view like a PTZ.

http://www.icircuits.com/prod_osd_main.html Has some overlay devices you can program. And they have a few customers who have done simular things. Please note that they will require some programing skills.

I can see some use for that camera but it's really, really situational. (I.E. I can only use one camera for fire code/looks/stupid client reasons)

Stupid people are born every day.

On wi-fi networks they are broadcast in the data portion of the packet. (Note that it is sent as plain text if if WEP/WAP is on.) On a router you just do arp -a and it gives a list.

The spoofing of a MAC address is simple. Go into the control panel, system, hardware, device manager and look at the configuration of the of your network card. Depending on your drivers you may be able to tweak it. There is plenty of software out there that makes it trival for even dumb users. How I get another machine's MAC address depends on where I am. The only thing that have the MAC address lets me to is two things. One is kick you off a network and second I can impersonate you on a network. I know I sound pissy on this subject but mostly it's just anger with the IEEE. The flaws in WEP were known before the standard was released but due to pressure it was released with problems.

MAC addresses are pretty easy to spoof. I would never depend on only one layer of security for wireless.

The law on it is less then clear. In some areas signing onto it is treated as "hacking" the network. In other areas it is treated as an open network. It's a problem.

Something else to keep in mind. It's not a deterrant. It won't stop a psycho neighbor, it just gives you evidence of a crime. If your goal is to try to stop, then you want to look more toward alarms or a dog.

It's all relative. If you're just trying to protect your tires from beind slashed then $6000 is unrealistic. If you're trying to protect your house from robbery then it becomes more realistic. But from the manufacturers perspectives, there isn't much market in the $250 to $500 range. Too little money for proper QA, too little money to spend time on coding features, etc. As far as the IR goes, keep in mind that most of the low end OEM bullets are good for 10 or 20 ft tops.

Keep in mind that the dealers here do this as a living. As such it's a reputation thing for them. Most of the gear below the price range they discribe is of poor quality. Not all of it, but a fair chunk of it. I would recommend adding to the budget for the DVR.

Yes and no. There are limits to what the capture card can see (there are only 500 vertical lines in the NTSC standard, some of which are for SAP, closed captioning, etc.) but you can still do some neat tricks with the streams. Covi does an analog camera that has three out puts. One is a downsampled "main view". The others are zoomed in views taking advantage of the megapixel image. The DVR see's it as three cameras. It's nice for some apps, too expensive for some others. At the same time it is a trick an analog company learned from the IP world.

Please note that an industry trade show just finished up on Friday in Vegas. Give people a chance to recover.

I can take that a few ways but welcome to the forum.

Newegg generally requires they be bought with hardware or in bulk.

There is a lot of bad info put out by the IP people and some info that simply is....poorly understood. There is some advantage to putting some processing power on the camera. The CCTV world does it now with PTZs. Privacy masks, auto tracking, even PTZ functions. (Remember that RS-485 was first a computer networking method before Cat5 or even Co-ax.) If I put some processing power at the camera level then I can do some neat tricks. Toshiba's IK-WB02A has an SD slot. It can do motion detection at the camera. It's not as good as DVR but it can be a selling point by the use of redunancy. IF the DVR fails, then the camera still records. Redunancy can but useful in larger jobs as well with IP. Imagine an IP system that feeds to two seperate IP DVR's and an analog one....without splitting the signal. If the network does down, the Analog DVR is okay. If either of the IP systems fails then you still have two differant types of systems recording it. Some idiot puts a nail through the Co-ax? The IP DVR is still working. I can move the second server off-site. If someone blows up the building, I have video. I'm not saying that Analog is dead, and that IP is the way of the future. But it does offer some intresting potential. The most successful dealers I've worked with understand both worlds, either coming from the IP world and spending the effort to learn CCTV and the old school guys who learned networking. Even if they don't us IP based cameras, the ability to talk to the IT departments is key for larger jobs.

Guys, keep it professional.

Shells are legal. Considering MS put in the APIs to do them, and published the APIs in thier SDKs....I don't think they are stressing over it.

I will get there Wensday and leave Thursday afternoon. I'll be at the Video Insight booth most of the time.

I did a google search and didn't find anything about class action lawsuits against Geovision. I did find a referance to this however: Geovision, Inc. v. PCSurveillance.Net et al ohndce 4:2006cv00649 3/21/2006 Anyone have any ideas?

And you won't be able to run high framerate, there just isn't enough bandwith on USB.

It will have an impact on transfer speeds...but on DVR's your bottleneck isn't usually the transfer rate. It can be a bottleneck for DB apps....and pretty much DB apps. For that you should be using SCSI anyway.

It should have been on the shrink wrap.

Top geek you do know there is a reason those are million dollar effects, right? It sounds like what you need is a very high resolution multiplexer. But I'm not sure it's going to do what you need as far as image quality. What exactly are you trying to do with this? I'm not sure that you wouldn't be better off with some video editing equipment.

The problem is that the drive speed is only part of what determines seek time.