cctv_down_under

you will probably find that is a USB grabber with software, betcha it has ****ty compression and resolution, BNC's go on one end and USB input at the other

Geo has POS interface, with linked database and remote reports, but POS Watch Pro is the best one I have seen

Agreed!! i also agree with our learned friend mr IP, but the fact remains most of those features you speak of are already prevalant on some very good PC DVR's one thing to rememebr is that no matter what features, no matter what scale, no matter what abilities, the end result is the systrem must be able to provide evidence, i still feel I.P cams are more succeptable, I am confused with your pricing is that a pricing for software or hardware, most I.P cams...the good ones..not cheap crapola that I haev seen are at least $600 US Minimum, then you have to pay per input for software, ...why when you can build a DVR for under $2000, US and then pay $420 US for a good cam and lens combo and the extra $30 US if you really need a web server, This is why i call it hype because there is a wave growing and I.P is being sold as the latest and greatest..yet there is very little it can dot hat DVR cant, object tracking is already available as well as licence plate recognition, and you dont even have to pay eny extra for the tracking. Also Bosch sells a box that deos motion tracking with any PTZ and is reads it fromt he screen pixel changes. Geovision has the best model I have ever seen for control room software around, but limiting it only to Geo is an error. Agreed, but you havent mentioned anything that is available that DVR can not do and yes...the majority from a browser interface, i think you must have loked at some poor quality DVR products, there will be many advancements, I must say the Biderictional link that Bosch has is awesome, how cool to back focus the cameras over a network, but how long will it be till some DVR mob writes that in as well... truth is that anything available in I.P is already available in good DVR products, but without the succeptablility to bandwidth or network failure. Agreed, but this is already available and has been for some time, once again you rely on the network connection for the result, Epic did this and so did many other companies, but why when there ar products that will conect to you, yourself, and when they do they simply SMS you to let you know that video was stored at the remote server, hell a cash sale transation can send video to rmeote control room software, there are many control rooms out there now that use the Geo and allow for video files to be transmitted on....lost objects, left objects, POS data, wired relay etc etc, this technolgy already exists. i like the geo because it has despatch server that can send to another control room on network failure and because its a DVR it can buffer, it can also check the link between all DVR's using a heart beat.. but this is the one point that IP should have been making....it ONLY works with Geo.. htis is where I.P will be strong...with these packages, but they still need refinement..and the people who sell them still need to inform the customer of the inherant limitations.

Have a friend starting his own wholesale business he wants a three letter business name A.D.T. for example... he wants it to start with "A" Any suggestions for three words relevant to this industry, ..many are taken so I ran out of ideas, I am sure the brains trust can sort something out.

the buffers in I.P.cameras are not large, infact they can store very very short amounts of video files, sure they can store a few pictures but the DVR can do this already, the DVR WILL record if netwrok goes down, and DVR CAN buffer loads of storage... you are right about brands that can be supported by I.P.cams, but like you said once you plug a cam into the DVR it supports it anyway..so I fail to see the point unless there is really something special about that camera. Other than resolution size there is very little advantage over analogue and web server combos and lets face it not all people can transmit tons of 3 megapixel video streams. your point of the DVR possibly crashing is indeed valid, but there is no difference between your recieving station and my DVR so you too face that issue, the diffrence is mine has less chance to crash out because the cameras are hard wired. you keep mentioning this fact but without substance, name one thing!! name a few.. hay I am not trying to shoot you down, if you can convince me then all and good, but I doubt it, I am betting my DVR has more features than your expensive NVR solution. TOM, I have actually seen some of the head end softwrae he is talking about, they write software to interface the settings for I.P. cams into a unified software package, it is quite good in that way, but the cost is incredable and the feature set not as impressive as it will be in due course, I think their main point of sale should be this.. Int eh future if you have the bandwidth and have already installed I.P. cams, we will be able to add features to your system by having a solution that can do features remotely, this is a strong point, it means that although the cam might not do a function it can be added at the end of the stream, but then again that is like a DVR software upgrade.... once again.. it is the future but unless you can tell me why to not get the same result (barring high resolution) and the same remote features and more and have the more reliable option of direct wiring, I will not be changing to a much more expensive product. I went to a seminar for the Milestone product and the silly sales guy was sprouting off about how DVR's are succeptable to virus etc and because teir stuff is I.P it doesnt matter, he failed to mention that any computer getting a virus on their network could easily crash the whole system, you can have the best firewalls in the world but if just one person on the network birngs ina virused disk from home and the nbetwork dies, then good bye security recrdings. to me that is not a secure network and although cables can be cut, its easier to see that happening than a system network failure and less likely to happen by accident.

All available on DVR i am not aruguing with you, just disagreeing with your points, no one has ever had a large network that has not crashed at some point and the fact does remain that if it does you have no way to gett he recordings, this is the advantage of hard wiring the system as it will not affect it, it alos means your bandwith is not being used until you want to watch and this makes network load much less, it doesnt matter how well your netowrk is set up if you do not have the bandwidth, this is still the downfall of I.P. solutions. Look you are right, planning and forethought are the best way to plan any installation and you would be stupid to not allow the bandwith when setting up a network designed to do this... but I find far too many I.P. camera sellers simply saying..."oh yeh no worreis it will just plug into your netowrk, that's our advantage ...no need for any extra cabling", but often they do not mention how much bandwidth is required and the succeptabilty to network problems that may occur. i would rather know my data is always safe from a network situation, sure I may not be able to watch it of the network goes down, but at least it will still record. It is Hype and that is my opinion as you admitted that there is no difference between analogue and webserver so why pay so much.... ok I admit good software makes a difference, but nothing you have mentioned can not be done on my DVR.

Oh and BTW you should not use Kazaa... try Azuerous...not sure of the spelling, it is a bit torrent and works better without spam, also i ahve found that the free VLC Media Player plays everything from images and almost every codec, even damged AVI files, for free it is a good thing.

Its more that the index file.. the file structure listing found in logs, is not linked to the actaul evidence of files onthe video partition, so it can think something is there, the main problem is that because the system recycles, it always fills the hdd, and if a corruption occurs, then it can miss represent thefile, this means the index says... ok writew to this part of HDD, the O/S says, hang on I cant theres something there. so index says.. crap, I have no listing and says, nope dump it there, and trying to write data onto corrupted data can cause problems. Look I am no programer and I do not profess to know more than you do, however we had major problems with corrupted files until UPS's were deployed, apparently its fixed to search and destory corruption in 6.1 but I cant find where, all DVR's that are PC based that I have played with do this..even the comart did it, well it did when i tested it, either that or they dont dump the file at all and index thinks it is there, this is why most pc based DVR's have a database repair utility, your right chances of hanging are slim, but I have found many an irratic buffer overun or memory stack error has disappeared after fixing this problem.

sending on motion already exists.

please explain how! DVR already does this and no licensing costs if you do hard wired, you dont need to integrate that is absolute crap... sorry but that is ill informed information and part of the Hype factor I agree 100%, however DSL and Broadband links are not as stable as teh old phone dialers so a long way to go , and what do you tell people that have a DVR, sorry but you need I.P. cams to be monitored.. there has been a big drop off in monitoring since people realised they could do it themselves... I must add though if I had a DVR and it was not as good as Geo I would consider adding web servers to every camera as well sot hat I could sign to a monitoring station, I think this is indeed the future!! I think it is very important to note that some countries, like places that are not third world Austrlalia havea ratio of probably 1 in evry 10 internet connections being broadband and the rest PSTN, your not going to get the speed you need for the applications you want, like I said it aint far off but it aint here yet Correct, but the catch cry for I.P. sellers, is "hay we dont even need to run any cables or change anything"..what they fail to say is.... most networks are already fully loaded and yes poorly designed, and unless you want to wait four hours to access your file server on the same network then your really going to have to put up with pretty ****ty transmitions. You cant hold out your hand and say, its eadier and nothing needs to be done then say...ohhh well you should have had a bigger network bandwidth..the truth si that I.P. takes bandwidth and I would rather have the stabilty of hard wired and no interference with network, however as codecs develop and flash storage increases and bandwidth increases, it will all be I.P. if only they could find a cheap way to power them without wirs, then you could just move them about and an install would take little time. I dissagree with that comment, you can not say it is as reliable and you know it.. it is fairly reliable, but not as reliable! ACTUALLY THE ANSWER IS YES!!! You can do a lot more than that, you can have two way audio, you can latch alarms at the viewing end, you can count objects from one location to another, you can have full remote control over the DVR, you can look at graphs of movement, you can view POS transactions, you can activate alarms, you can look at an electronic map, you can control many PTZ devices, hell if you wanted to you could paint a box over your safe and as soon as it is taken it will contact you and send the video and vica versa, hell the system can tell you if a sale went through that was over a certain amount...whats more if the network crashes..you still have the recordings... Like I said it is a hype, but a worthy one and one we will be watching closely. you asked me questions now I will ask you. 1/ How long has your I.P. cam company been manufactoring cameras? 2/ What happens to the recordings if the network goes down. 3/ What is the difference between a video webserver and an analogue camera and an I.P. camera (other than flash storage). 4/ What happens to accessing files from the same network when it is flooded by video...hay analogue recorders still have some advantages over DVR and DVR still has major advantages over I.P. I have used,sold,played with both and both have their advantages.

I disagree thomas, I ahve several corrupted movie files on my home pc, and this has cuased many problems ranging from abnormality in operation when reading from areas where this data is stored and more commonly a mss representation of the file size, quite often corrupted AVI files can miss rperesnt thier size and take up almost a half a hard disk drive even when they are small... Hay try downloading half a movie then play it in media player, watch it crap itself when it gets to the end of the file, then it will hang media player, same can happen if your log says there is a file there, and yes there is a folder structure, but when you got o play it,,,, hay presto lock up, and what happens when a lock up happens.... another corrupted file..

I will validate this answer, but it is a lot more complicated then a hard wired solution....I bet every person that has worked in an office has had their network go down at some point, this can be from absolutely anything, I would rather put my faith in a hard wired solution I can agree with a lot of this, however surely you can see that your solution is more complicated than the way a DVR handles it and it is more expensive. 6.) You get what you pay for is the old adage. Most professional DVR systems cost on a per channel basis - just like NVR software and high-end systems like NICE - can be upwards of $80,000.00 or more - easily for casino applications. In most instances i would agree with your comment, however an excellent Japanes Wide Dynamic camera at $300 US (if your buying in bulk like me) and a $40 webserver is a lot cheaper than most of the I.P. based products out there, so the old addage is not entirely correct, there is too much mark up in I.P. cams at this stage because the technolgy is still new. The geovision DVR is very inexpensive and I am yet to see one thing that Network Video Software can do that it can not excepting the larger scale. i think Hype si accurate, Ia m not saying it will not go this way, but the majority of hype in the industry is in this area and to justify the pricing that they put on the product there would have to be some level of hype, you tell em the difference between an I.P. camera and a Webserver and analogue camera, especially one with remote controls... there is not difference, after all an I.P. cam is just that an analogue camera with a webserver built in, only difference is that it is cheaper to buy them seperately than it is to buy them as one whole unit..now that has to be hype! I think rory hit it on the head, as you can see -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted by IPSecurityPro: DVRs are great in certain applications, but what if you want (or have the need) to pull together, in a multiview the front door of 9 franchise locatioins located across the United States. I don't know of a DVR that can accomplish this. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It is beleived only I.P. cams can do this and nothing could be further from the truth the Geo system can handle 800 remote video streams and when coupled with a despatch server can accommodate 400,000 channels. Mind you no computer could handle that amount even with boocoo ram!!

http://www.austech.info Hay its not much, but ait is a good technical resource fro everything, has a small security section.

Yes that and Milestone... but make sure you have no moths in your wallet, the Geo control room is the best I have ever seen, the only limit is that it will only support Geo, if they made an open protocol they would be billionares

Ip cameras are great and will indeed be the future, the Milestone software is the best i have seen for controlling an integration of all I.P. products, but there are several downfalls to I.P. cams. 1/ if your network goes down then...no recordings, hard wired pretty much guarantees you always have connectivity. 2/ If your cam does not compress then you take huge bandwidth and the advantage is supposed to be that you dont have to run new cables, but lets face it most networks already out there can not support uncompressed video from too many streams. 3/ Now before you say..."oh but they can compress it" the problem with that is that if you compress enough to transmit, then that is what you record at the other end, highly compressed video. On the other hand a DVR can choose the level of compression so you could record with little compression and transmit with heavy compression. 4/ Used to be able to say that I.P. cams were crappy as they are made by companies without the necessary manufactoring experience, however, these days it is the opposte, i have seen some fantastic I.P. cams and price has dropped considerably, it is actually cheaper to get a Sony I.P. PTZ cam than it is to get a Pelco PTZ analogue. 5/ Any analougue camera can be an I.P. camera, this is so simple, just add a web server, currently you can buy 4 ch webservers for $100 US, thats $20 per camera, this is something I.P. manufactorers should have taken note of. 6/ Have a geez at the price of Milestone once you get past a certain number of cameras..it is ridiculas to say the least, most DVR products these days allow for multiple connections and they dont charge so much for it. For example the milestone softwrae is expensive but control room from Geo is free??? In reality I.P. is seeing a big boom at the moment and it is all because of the hype, same as standalones did fairly recently due to hype of failing PC products, I am not saying it wont end up this way... however I cant see it happening for a few years yet, consider that not all countries have the bandwidth or technology available. i think as profesionals we all realise it isnt far off and we have all had a look, but the pricing is too much for the advantage they offer, there are many jobs that should only be done on I.P. and there are many applications that are well suited to this technology, but I think it still has some way to travel.

Especially if you go for the models that employ "Buck and Boost"

ACT Gone...extension available

It usually does not , but the thing is if you dont tell the index file that is the association between the log program and the actual folders there, then the software can get confused, as it thinks it is still there and avoids writing there.. and visa versa, ohhh and yes same goes for comart, well did ages ago when I tested it.

Almost forgot, some folders wont preview if nothing in them...if you find a folder that wont auto preview, then simply open it and if a media file is there try to play it, if it is corrupted then it will nto play in media player.

There is nothing you can do about on and off switches, not that i know of, I mean they can always pull the plug anyway, you could re route the on and off switch to hide it somewhere. Geo and every other DVR that is PC based, utlises ram to store video events in memory, if you kill the machine it is like the memory takes a punch in the head and cant rmemeber the last thing it thought of, but unlike a boxer that will just forget completely, it dumps what it had in memory to the HDD, this means an incomplete AVI file is dumped, in this way the HDD is liked to having bad sectors, but the index file has no idea the file is not ther.. so what happens is the index file says..."ok time to write to this section of the HDD space" but in reality that part is corrupted so it cant write there, this causes many problems. Easiest way to test for corruption if using XP is to go to drive with log files on it, go into each camera folder in turn..firstly look at the dates (names of the folders) if they are out of sequence (for example you have a folder that is 6 months old and your system only holds 2 months), then chances are you have corruption... obviously if you only just diud it, its hard to find, but if using XP, then chaneg the folder view to THUMBNAIL and you should geta preview of the contents of the folder on your folder icons, if no preview, good chance you have corrupted files. To remedy, format the drive...not a quick format, run a surface scan (may not be necessary), re map the drive in system config and then run the dtabase repair utility to update the index file. This is why we use software integrating UPS devices, they shut down the machine when power drops, after all power outage is the same as pulling the plug, once again.. silastic around power plug, proves that it has not been tampered with as long as they cant get to the other end. Hope this helps...

AVP Gone ACS Gone Extension available ASK Gone Extension available XTS Available... but I think many people would confuse the EX instead of Xtreme

Let you know in a few weeks when I start there...LOL

Yep was a bug in version 5 Every time you do this you cause a corrupted file in the recordings, and this causes system instability...

Audio Video Supplies is gone...so is AVS

Thanks Tom, I really want to be known as ASS!! might be apropriate but not the best image. Will try that one Alan, I like it, also does not limit you to anything, funny thing is though that all abreviations seem to be used, wonder why, I wonder if I use the full extension, can I use the abbreviation in any way?