kao

Heat and cooling can be taken care of. We are in a northern climate where the temp reaches 100 in the summer and -40F in the winter)

Yep. I couldn't agree more. So...I wrote Geovision a while back and asked them when they were going to step-up to their competition (Avermedia) and offer the capability to integrate IP cameras into their system. They said its on the way. Anyone know when that is going to happen?

I pretty much agree with all that. We install in a lot of schools. We started looking at IP cameras and software because the cabling costs of running coax through a building as large as a school (some are K-12) can get very expensive...in fact, sometimes 50% or more of the quote. Throwing in IP cameras sounded like the way to go. However after gathering IP camera prices and sketching out installation plans, I find that installing an IP based system ends up costing more. Like mentioned above...network drops are rarely located in convenient places for camera mounting. I thought going to wireless would solve that problem, but then you still need power for the camera...so now you are still running a cable for some distance...and usually at the price of an electrician doing the work and standard union rates. The selection of cameras for IP is pretty limited. Sure you can use a video server to convert an analog to IP, but that just adds to the price of the camera $150.00 or more. Network bandwidth is an issue. Even tho most schools have a fast network, it is being heavily used already...taxing it with video is bad. To me, the proper way to do it would be to install a separate network...now your talking new cable runs, new switches and PoE devices, all of which = $$$. Network outages are another issue. If the outage is near the camera, that's no big deal, but if the outage is near the recording server(s), then you are not recording anything Backup power - we always design a surveillance system with the DVR and cameras running on battery backup. To battery backup a large network is difficult and expensive. Security wise I dont think either system has much advantage over the other. If someone hacks into your network, they can see all your cameras on the DVR or they can see all the cameras on the NVR. Wireless IP cameras have an additional (minor) risk of someone using a laptop to hack into one. The advantages I see for IP cameras are the wireless quality, decentralization (no head end required), and their sometimes easier installation. At this point, there are a few installations where IP shines. One example would be - we have a client that owns 40 small offices around the country. He wants 1 camera at each location. Putting a DVR in each location would be cost prohibative. However, each location has broadband, so we proposed installing a wireless router in each office and 1 wireless IP camera. Back at his HQ we install a PC with IP camera recording software connecting to each office and recording. We quoted it both ways DVR+camera at each location vs Wireless router + IP camera at each location. It was twice as much to put in even the smallest DVR. I am guessing its the ratio of Analog/DVR to IP Camera solutions is about 98% analog/dvr to 2% IP. As IP standardizes, compression and quality get better, software gets better, and camera selection increases, we'll probably see those numbers go to 50/50 over the next 10 years and continue that way until IP is clear dominant player. My 2 cents.

If I understand your situation correctly, you can still use the webserver, but you will have to use dynamic dns. Or...purchase a static IP from the cable company. Around here its like $6.00 per month for a static IP.

I've set up a few PTZ cameras in the past and they work ok...but none of the things like touring or presets worked. I had to set them to Pelco D protocol just to get the pan, tilt and zoom to work. Since the cameras I was working with were not listed in the Geovision drop down menu, I actually tried every combination of protocol and camera. /sigh Anyway...I have another job where the customer wants a PTZ camera to watch over a parking lot and I'm looking for a camera that is known to be very Geovision "friendly" and also be a decent camera. The camera should be low to midrange for price and have 18 to 22x optical zoom. I'd like to set tours and presets on it. Hell...if you're a dealer, shoot me a PM with a price as I am not purchasing the same PTZ from my normal distributor this time. I'd much rather deal with someone that has worked with the camera AND the Geovision software. My current dealer does not have any Geovision experience.

Camera that you mount to look at a specific spot (say a gas station pump lane) and you can program the camera (not dvr software) to zoom in to a specific area for X amount of time when motion is detected by the camera. Anyone have a link or model number they can drop?

I heard about this camera from a potential customer. They were give a demo of it recently by a competing company, but they like us and want to see if we can get it for them. They couldnt get a name or model number but it doesnt sound like a PTZ camera. It sounds like a box type camera with an optical zoom lens. Pretty much what vf702 posted only using optical rather than digital zoom. It is programmable on the camera itself...to program it they hooked up a small lcd display and went thru a menu on the cameras on screen display. This solution sounds like it would work well for some of our bank and retail customers without the expense of a full blown PTZ camera.

Bump. Come on...someone has to have a ptz they'd recommend

Thanks...Im doing some other installations for this customer soon...so I'll try some of these things and keep you all posted.

I've seen this before and it turned out to be a problem with the ATI software. This happened to me when I upgraded the ATI software and drivers. Reverting back to the original ATI software CD fixed the problem. After a lot of tweaking the newer ATI software I was able to get both the tv and monitor to have the same image, but the spot monitor was purpled out on the tv.

Do you anticipate having a lot of activity needing to be watched at one time? 80 cameras is a lot to keep an eye on. One thing you may want to consider is setting up the Center V2 software on the office pc. That way the guard can see screen pop-ups when motion is detected at a camera. The observer can choose to keep watching that camera or the whole server if he wants to.

Thanks. Which brand/model do you use? Any in particular you would recommend to use or avoid?

Never thought of that. I love learning these tricks on this site!

Sorry..I was getting my picture elements and resolution mixed up :/

I may be able to trace the cable, but it won't be for some time. Part of the problem is that the client location is a 3 hour drive one way....so 6 hours round trip. The system seems to "calm" itself down over time and the fading becomes much less noticable. I'll be going to the site once more in the near future to set up a camera that wasnt working due to one of the cable pulls having a broken power wire somewhere (electrician was hired to pull the cable, so they have to fix it.)

That would give you some of the information you are looking for. But by installing the software on the Geovision system, you will be able to see how much bw it is actually using on the network. This will give you a place to start. If the bw is low, then I cant see how the Geovision system would really be taxing the network. If the bw is high, then I would start tracking down what specifically is using so much bw. Taking a guess here, but the only way I could see the Geovision causing problems on the network (assuming it has no spyware or other nefarious software loaded), would be if there were several hubs (not switches) in the network. If a person logs into the Geo server and requests to see live video, then the outgoing traffic could be causing several collisions in the network IF there are hubs in between the requestor and the Geo. Replacing the hubs with switches would solve that problem.

I see your point. As a matter of fact, I have a dvd player looping a chapter on a demo system and I compared that image side to side with a std cctv camera that is plugged into the same system. The dvd stream does appear much 'crisper' than the cctv camera and I suspect it has to do with a few things. 1. I believe the native resolution coming out of the dvd player is much higher than that of the cctv camera. DVD output is 720x480. Most cctv cameras are around 470x320. 2. Light handling. As you mentioned, the cameras that they use to make the movie that is on dvd are very good cameras. They handle light very well. Also - digital editing and filtering may be done on the final picture you see on dvd - creating a very nice video. Cctv has to deal with 'real life' without all of those finishing touches. While not as robust as a hollywood camera, I hooked up my sony camcorder to the Geovision system and found that it dealt with light much better than any security camera I have used (with the exception of some nice PTZs) and provided a picture almost as nice as the dvd player.

I have tried swapping the cameras around...a non-flashing one with a flashing one. The result was that the non-flashing one started flashing and the flashing one stopped flashing. That is why I was thinking it was a problem in the cable. But I will try replacing the cameras with better brand name ones and see what happens. BTW, is there any way to test the coax cable for some kind of quality? Some way to see if there is anything disturbing the video signal? The best I can do right now is put a 50ohm terminator on one end and run and ohm test from the other. I get results that are well within the tolorance specified by the terminator.

I ran into a similar problem and this may or may not help you. The problem I had was that a camera pointed down a long hallway. The customer asked why, when reviewing video clips, the video would stop before the person/people would get to the far end of the hallway. The problem was that by the time a person or two would get halfway down the hallway, they were too small for the geovision motion detection algorithm to detect. Moving the sensativity to 10 and lengthening the post record time solved the problem. Sometimes if the people were walking slow, the video clip would still stop before they reached the end of the hall way - because the motion detection stopped picking them up at about the halfway point...beyond that it was all post-recording that would capture them and if they were walking slow, the post-record time would run out before they reached the end of the hall.

Keep in mind that when you plug a camera straight into a TV, there is no processing, compression or recording taking place between the camera output and the tv input. When you put a DVR card and PC in between the camera signal and the output monitor (tv, pc monitor, etc), you will be in effect 'slowing down' the signal a bit due to compression and image processing.

I would highly recommend using the 80GB drive for just he OS. It has been my experience that once the Geovision starts recycling video (when the hard drive is almost full), that the drive becomes very fragmented. If the drive with the OS (and usually the Geovision program) becomes too fragmented, the whole system slows down too much. I'd recommend getting 1 or more drives just for video data to be saved on.

Echo what Adam said. However if you want to be sure it is the Geovision system chewing up bandwidth, download the free trial of this software and put it on the Geovision server. http://www.bwmonitor.com/ It will show you a graph of all traffic incoming and out going on the LAN (local) as well as all in/outgoing traffic on the WAN (internet) from the Geovision system's perspective. If your getting paid to troubleshoot their network, put this program on each pc and see who is really sending and receiving traffic and how much bw they are using.

24v AC Cameras are KT&C brand. Model kpc-1000ch 480 TV Lines, 0.5 LUX/F1.2, V/DC Drv., C/CS MOUNT, Dual PW AC24/DC12V Sounds intriguing, however it is happening to 6 out of 8 cameras. Maybe it is an incompatability between camera and lens? It is a KT&C lens that supposedly matches the camera. Could this 'lens hunting' happen at random? Would these controls be exclusive to the camera or would the software/geovision card have any affect as well?

Yes, thank you.

Hello, I notice that the different IP software out there seem to have different ways of recording video. It appears that the mjpeg software records several jpeg images - 10s of thousands per camera per day on a 100mb network. This leads to a file management nightmare for Windows XP on a 4GHZ PC with 2GB of RAM. It really slows things down trying to view or even delete that many files. Also the bandwith used while recieving the images from the camera is fairly high at around 1mb per second. High compared to MPEG4 anyway. Other mjpeg software seeems to pull all the jpeg files in, then squeezes them into some sort of video file like AVI. This seems more efficient than leaving the raw jpegs laying around, but still produces high bandwidth. While testing software that was recording streams from MPEG4 cameras, I found that the bandwidth usage was far lower - on a magnitude of 20x less and picture quality was still pretty good. What I would like posted here is your insight on how most of the common IP software solutions are storing their data. I know they do not support IP cameras (at this time) but I really like the way Geovision manages their video recordings. I would like to see an IP software solution that does it the same way. Anyone care to shed some light on how these softwares save their video data? I am interested in both MJPEG and MPEG4 formats. Luxriot Go1984 Visual Hindsight Milestone IVista Netcam-Watcher Video Insight