Thomas

1. XP Home is not for mission critical systems. 2. Newegg has Win2k OEM for $147. 3. With MS's new program, your end user suffers nothing. In fact, if they notify MS they get a vaild licence for the machine. You get the legal equivlent of anal rape. I get the lovely mailings in which they brag about the settlements they forced on OEM builders with dodgy licences. Some clarification points about OEM versions of windows. 1. They are cheaper, generally by about half. 2. They must be purchaced with hardware. Some vendors enforce this tightly, some don't. 3. They are full versions of windows. 4. They do not come with all of the manuals. 5. They come with vaild licence codes. 6. You can transfer them to a CD with your drivers, applications, ect for easy install. Some advice to ponder, ment in the sprit of a friendly advice rather then a flame. Please don't cut corners. It comes back to bite you in the butt. Either in increased support calls, or in the worst case, the unit failing at a critical period. That phone call isn't fun, even if it's entirely the user's fault, they are going to be pissed and looking for someone to blame. There are alot of idiots in the bussiness, please don't add to that.

There are some VGA to TV converter boxes, but they look like crap and are painful to set up. There are also some s-video to rca adapators as well.

There are two factors that combine to make "speed" on the net. Bandwith is only part of the problem. Latenacy is the second factor. What kind of internet connection is it? Have you benchmarked the connection, if so what were the real numbers? What is your ping time to that server from the viewer? What is the connection of the machine you're viewing from? And with 256kb up...you won't get 10-15 fps.

One XP licence to one machine. They only exception is corp keys and you won't save money (and you can't use them for this anyway). However if you are building the machine, why not just get a windows XP OEM copy for about $140? MS has been making a big push lately to crack down on OEM's that are using pirated copies of windows. I was a former Windows OEM builder and I still get mailings from them and each month they send me a postcard with the names of builders who they've busted. Now a quick question for you, what is your background?

Mini-ATX isn't bad per se, but I wouldn't want to run one full out 16 cams, max frame rate....but for four cameras it should work, the major problem will be finding one that Geovision works with. I've got a lovely Shuttle clone box here that we use for demo's (both in and out of the office) and we run 4 cameras on it just fine.

It's going to vary a little bit depending on the card. There isn't a really good rule of thumb to measure it either.

Standards will emerge. One thing you can always count upon for IT people is that we love standards. But the IP camera market is going to suck until there is enough shake up to force standards. The general trend in software is moving toward comodity software anyway with the money being in support contracts.

RED SOX NATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But the convergence is coming. IT is already absorbing the PBX stuff in most companies. Security is probley next.

Can anyone recomend a good 2/3" camera? I was doing the math and to get what a customer wants they will have to use a larger CCD.

My problem may be the bit of software I was using. I found a bit of software for the palm that does the calucations for camera angles. It has some limitations and a user problem (me). The only way I could get it to accept an angle was as a 2/3" CCD. The tough one was that they wanted 90 degrees, without a fish eye view and with a high amount of detail, with a FoV that was about 200' wide. And I don't have the papers with me but they needed about the same for the 60 degree angle. It could just be that I was half asleep.

On the user end I see IT people pushing in for IP cameras rather then tradisional systems because it lets them start to absorb some of the budget/personel of security department. Plus they are toys for the system admins to play with.

XP embeded is vunerable to some of the same stuff that XP itself is vunerable to, but not all of it. When Sasser was making it's rounds XP embeded wasn't vunerable. But it was vunerable to the follow up worm that was some idiot's way of deploying the patch. Diebold had a lot of fun cleaning up a bunch of ATM's that were infected. Like any product I would place a hardware firewall between it and the outside world.

It just sounds like a codec issue. GSpot will help identify the file and from there installing the codec (If it's around) is pretty easy.

It's an industry thing, alot of companies are going for "the ugliest interface ever" award.

Nope, no luck. IE:6 XP SP1

People don't want listen to lowly tech support person. ;P

They want an extreme wide angle. 60 degress at a distance of 150'.

Getting the info is part of a good design.

*coughs* Xeon.

I've been off and I'm trying not to check the site from home.

Where are you at, I may be able to recomend some installers. It's been my general impression that those who do it themselves are almost never happy with the outcome.

Generally it would be to a seperate power supply. A little box the plugs into the wall and has screw down terminals. Most cameras don't come with cable, and if you're going to cut your own cable then you will want to make sure you get extra cable and BNC's to crimp on. Are you looking to do this for yourself?

Actully they make a VGA to BNC adaptor and that would let you make it a normal cable run. DB15 cable. That would probley be the simple and cheaper way. The other way is getting a DB-15 cable to go that distance but it would most likely very expensive to get one cut for that distance. The max cable length for DB-15.

You won't screw up the image (unless you use a long, long run to do it.)