Thomas

Sounds like a DirectX error, have you installed DX9?

Naw, one good pot hole and the bike is gone...

The other tech support person keeps bugging the programers to add an interface for a USB/Serial joystick. So far they just laugh.

*coughs* You can already control PTZ camera's through mouse clicks. And the joy of IP camera's being webservers is you can redirect the streams.

Eh, it's not that much easier going the other way. I'm a software/hardware guy and I know jack about cameras. (Which is why I'm here.)

Another thing to keep in mind. When doing multiple drives together, you never want to use software spanning for an application like this. Software spans are very sensitive to power changes and crashes. Drives in RAID 0 offer a little more robustness then a simple software span. RAID 5 gives you wonderful redunancy. Drive fails, you pull it, put a new one in and let the raid card rebuild the system.

Generally you want software on the C:\ drive and the video on E:\ But with W2k you may want closer to 5gb on the system drive.

There is software that can do it. For us, what we do is have our software share the same MSDE (MicroSoft Desktop Engine, or SQL Server 2000-lite). Then you can connect multiple DVR's together on a network. Our Network/Web Client will then display both machines. But we don't work on Geovision cards. With three remote locations I would suggest a VPN. Or with the webclient you could just use Firefox and set a bookmark that opens all three sites in the same group of tabs and just tab between them. I know some of our competitors can do it as well but I'll stop here before my bosses read this.

Eh, then get one of the small linux distros and use a 486.

Eh, I get unlimited at 2500 now and I can always use the massive fat pipe here at work. (Ping times to make you drool. Fiber connection to the ISP which is three floors down.)

Maybe if I can get broadband and not pay by the gig.

It doesn't install Java but you can get it from the plug-in faq link on the toolbar. I haven't had a problem with MPEG-4 streaming except when the site is idenitifying the file wrong. And you can always set up Firefox to send the stream to your video client of choice. The linksys firewalls are linux based and using IPchains for it's firewall. A bit cheaper then buying an XBox, modding it and loading linux on it. (Not that I object to that but it is a bit pricier.)

And which browser are you using?

I still get them, have you checked your cookies?

With the one capture card you generally are looking at a design issue. Not all companies are using the same cards. You'll find that those PC's are probley a hair on the slow side.

Stripping Windows down isn't too hard. Honestly though 2000/XP isn't too bad a set of OS's. The stability is there if you go with good hardware vendors. This insures good drivers. Then making sure the software is good. If your software has memory leaks then you have a problem. If your software is buggy then you'll have problems.

We're in Houston, but we don't do installs.

Well that resolution does suck, crank it up to at least 800 x 600.

Some other things, what is the quality of the parts in the DVR, better parts cost more but will generally be more stable. Is the 240 GB of storage two drives, or five SCSI drives in a raid array, one costs alot more then the other.

They exist. They also suck. The out and out failure rate is unacceptable. (70% success rate in real world situations.) There are probley some companies out there doing it comerically but I would take the sales department with a mound of salt.

Simple yet functional design. Muted colors are an excellent choice, most people go to bright with yellow. You did repeat the bio info three times.

Do you have a picture of the board for that DVR?

I generally define embeded by the processor. If I can swap it I call it a full PC. Other factors are if it follows the ATX, Mini-ATX, Micro-ATX form factors.

For DVR work, you'll find those PC's a hair under powered for the 15-20 camera range. As far as building it yourself goes, just remeber that cheap parts are cheap for a reason.

Um, not to take sides in this debate but there are some facts by both of you that are wrong. 1. Power PC chips are what powers Macs. Currently they are made by IBM and Motorola. IBM uses chips from that family in some of thier high end bits of big iron. Power PC boards accept the same standard parts that the x86 family does (PCI, AGP, DDR, ect). The major differance between the two is that the power pc stuff is big Endian and the x86 is little endian. (Big Endian reads binary from left to right, little endian reads binary from right to left.) The Power PC's have a smaller instruction set, but that only matters to assembly coders. 2. Embeded devices do run more then one proccess. A proccess isn't the same is a program, it's closer to the thread of a program. At least one of those proccesses is an OS of some kind, Another is going to be the writing to the drive, the third will be encoding/decoding the video and the GUI will be a fourth. 3. CD-RW does not require a PC. Back in the early 90's the first consumer grade CD burners were released by Phillips and were A/V units that one added to one's home sound system. It didn't take very long for them to move to PC's (since you could have the OS do what the circuts did and more cheaply). 4. Embeded units do not have to use standard PC parts. I'm sure many do, but there is no requirement for them to. Many embeded units have embeded ram, OS's stored on CF, ect. 5. There are other chip makers then Intel and AMD making x86 CPU's. VIA, Cyrix, and Transmeta all make low power very low heat, high enviromental tolerance CPU's. All three of those comanies all make chips for the home, laptop and embeded markets. Now a thought for people to ponder. Embeded XP can be run on a standard PC. Linux can be set up like the embeded flavors of it (Tivo uses a stock linux 2.4 kernal in thier boxes, they just load things into CF and do some other tricks for speed). The line between appilance and PC is starting to blur in this area.