Thomas

In the middle it's amazingly calm. The most beautiful days I have ever seen have been in the eye of the hurricane. Of course the rest of it sucks. Looking at the ocean you see millions of shades of grey. The water, the sky the rain, it's grey, all differant colors. Beautiful in a depressing way. The surf rises up, crashing down, trees bend in the wind, But it's not what you see...it's the howling of the wind, when the winds are sustained.

Yeah, we'd perfer to implement the protocol in the software rather then have another piece of hardware do it for us.

PTZ protocols don't need drivers, they aren't handled as hardware but as a serial port protocol. The converter is just changing the wireing, it isn't changing the signal at all. Your not going to get a card that does anything better then mpeg4 for a reasonable price. I'd even be suspicious of people saying they have mpeg4 in hardware for under a thousand. But why do it in hardware, if you can offload it to a much cheaper CPU? You'll probley want to avoid flash, it's slow as heck to write and rewrite and you'll want some swap space. Those little toshiba drives that Apple uses in thier iPods would probley be better and allow you to store some video. Unless you're going to require NAS, at which point you'll want two ethernet cards, at least one doing gigabit in, and one doing 100 mb in for the NAS. Even with an embeded system, 128 isn't going to cut it. You'll need at least 256. Even with a small kernel, you'll need a decent web server program and it doesn't take much for them to eat resources. Apache will probley work but you'll need mod perl for any kind of active side scripting. (Sure you can use PHP but it's notoriously insecure. And with perl you have the advantage of no one understanding a single line of your code.) And if this sounds expensive...you haven't even begun to look at the R&D costs, the software development prices, the "that should work yet it won't work" costs....

It depends. The protocol can be built into (or added) into the DVR. Then you use an RS-232 to 485 (422) converter to run the wires to the PTZ. For this you can use a generic converter box. Katel seems to require a second converter between thier camera and the DVR. That second converter converts thier open protocol (or Pelco D) to the camera's protocol. Please note that this is how it works with us and with other systems I may just be talking out my rear.

Everfocus makes some nice PTZ camera's. I've only gotten to play with one of the Katel PTZ camera's. It was pretty good, but you have to get a special converter box if you you're using a RS-232 to 485 converter.

Florida is next on it's list...

Um...might not be a wise move.

It's a professional orgainisation for foresinics people. That particular group is a subcommite formed at the prompting of the FBI to come up with standards. I read through a number of their docs and it's all just standard stuff. Make sure the cameras are focused, color balanced, ect. The parts relating to DVR's are the chain of evidence stuff and the making sure you can help the cops get the video. I don't see it being a massive problem for installers and it's only going to affect the US.

There are other solutions then IP cameras that can handle your requirements. For instance our web software is a web page without any plugins. It's compliant on most modern browers (IE, Gecko family, KHTML, ect...) www.demovi.com

But aren't they required to split the signal and run it to a VCR based system as well?

First rule of thumb. No surge protector you can buy will protect against lighting strikes. The one people that come close are power companies and even then they are ment to be one off.

I know Katel has a special converter box to take Pelco D and convert it to thier protocol. You can get it from them. They also have two protocols, one that is open and they give out, that talks to the converter box, the second is the one from the converter box to the camera, that one they seem unwilling to send out.

That's gonna suck.

You should be able to view it in safari or firefox as well.

The compression is MJPEG rather then MPEG. It's a trade off, larger file size but the digital artifacting isn't as bad. It also is a bit easier to stream without a plugin (active-x or other wise) so your end user gets a little more flexiblity in what they use at home to view it. We've tested it against IE, Firefox (and other members of the gecko family) Opera, Konqueror and the site still works.

Well what are you going to be using it for? What is your price range, how many cameras do you need, how much video do you need to store? Which is more important, ease of use or certain features?

Christ, neither of you is going to convert the other and this arguement is making both of you look like fools.

A few things about those ammo cans...one, you need to get the ones for big ammo. A mini-atx board will fit in a small arms around can, but you can't fit a full on PCI card or embeded unit on it. You'll probley want to use the industral grade velcro to secure the box. And you won't be able to use air to cool it if you're running stock AMD or Intel, you'll need a water cooling system. Cyrix and transmeta both make slower chips that will run fairly cool. One of my co-workers has an ammo can based PC that he uses for the playback of mp3s.

I know you can get RG-59 with power cables, I have a big spool of it next to my desk. Our supplier was COPS USA, but what the industry term is, I don't know.

There is always a grey area in where something is made. Our card is fabbed in Asia, but our software is coded in the US. Our tech support and testing are in the US. So what do we count as? We're in a global society and it doesn't matter so much where something is made anymore.

*coughs* No java on our site. Some javascript, but mostly it's an ASP.net back end. Basicly what we're doing is sending .jpgs as a steady stream. It avoids the whole plugin/codec/activeX issue all together. Streaming the video is a little bit harder, with Mpeg-4 you're going to have to have a plugin installed on the client end (something like Quicktime, which is most likely preinstalled.) You can do higher resolutions on our software. For more info you can go to www.video-insight.com

It depends on what software you're using. With us it's a matter of making the image a call to the link for the camera. Like this

One thing to watch for is the MTU setting, AOL likes theirs at 1400.

I can vouch for the casino's. We have a couple of units in a casino in vegas, and the gambling laws forbid them from using them to exclusively watch the floor. Now the resturants, doors, ect...are a differant matter.

Gentlemen, please calm down. Perhaps a breather for this thread?