cctvexpert

The fact is right now when you pass video over UTP uncompressed it is not an issue when using video baluns - it is analog and does not have the latency issues inherent in network transmission. When the HD cameras are released you will be able to do the same thing. Like anything else a market for one product creates another. It is clear you can transmit HD over coax as they do now for broadcast. So obviously you can have a CCTV camera sending HD video signals over coax. The technology all exists it just have never been "packaged" for CCTV yet! Once the product is released video baluns are sure to follow. There is no technical limitations on developing a balun to carry the signal. In fact, I am aware of a company that has already worked on it. Remember today that using RG59 or RG6 the distance you can run compared to video over cat5 or cat6 with baluns is substantially less. Forget even taking into account active baluns which extend the distance exponentially longer. Further, the standard for HD today is H.264 not MPEG2. MPEG2 was the legacy system before the 264 standard came along in 2003. I am still amazed that people think 264 just came about in the past year when there are companies that have been in the market with it for 5 years already. In fact, for the SD market they are several iterations into 264 with the latest being the H.264SVC profile (scalable video coding) Simply stated, we are going to shortly have analog HD cameras running over Category cabling and not have to worry about all the problems of megapixel IP cameras. IP cameras still have the same problems which the manufacturers like to ignore especially when they have no answer - these problems are: . poor low light performance . rolling shutter . poor dynamic range . lower frame rates . ghosting . latency . compatibility issues . bandwidth concerns Don't want to get into a whole discussion about IP cameras but despite all the hype in 2008 they were still less than 10% of the market and most "sensitive" locations will not use them because of the issue of fault tolerance problems.

Stick to what you know best. This is why I don't even bother posting anymore. People here seem to know it all. The smartest people are the ones that know they don't know everything and listen. Unless of course you in addition to your other skill sets are an engineer DSP and FPGA programmer with knowledge of encoding and transcoding. Stick to installing dvr's and cameras

FYI, no one said a "regular" NTSC signal could be high definition. What was stated is that a High Definition signal can be transmitted not using an IP stream. This strictly addresses the problem of megapixel being a bandwidth hog and that to address this similar to running "standard" cameras across UTP using baluns and bypassing the network, you will be able to do the same thing with a signal that outputs 720/1080. Don't twist words!

Altera's Stratix II FPGA family with ATEME's H264 Compression Aricient with Texas Instruments' OMAP3430 Broadcom BCM7043 TI Davinci If you do your homework or understand the chip technology then you woulnd't make that statement.

Who knows by then SD Cards may be in TB they are already up to 64 FYI, newegg is no longer the cheapest on hard drives. They have been moving up in price steadily and they used to be cheaper than buying direct. Now they are way off.

There are new chips out there already. It is very confusing to most people since the CCD which is analog is a digital CCD - so it's an oxymoron. And not sure whoever told you that there is nothing past D1 when in fact Texas Instruments and others already do that.

the industry is working on High Definition cameras that can transmit analog as opposed to digital. Again, if you understand the CPU, CCD and DSP you will understand that this is native and can easily be done.

what we have found of recent is the following. For the most part we are now migrating over to Seagate. For non RAID we use the SV35 which are designed for DVR but yet at the same time not the best for RAID. There are RAID edition drives that Seagate makes that we are just starting to use. The legacy WD drives we were using were the RE series drives which seem to have help up well. For whatever reason I cannot tell you why but the 750's had a better life cycle than the 500's. We also ran into a bad batch of the WD's but that was a couple of years ago.

It is what it is the technology is long gone way before that. I know we use 10,000's of drives every year and we have had the best luck with Western Digital (1% failure rate at most). We have also found over the years that some drives from a manufacturer would do better than others. For example with 750GB hard drives never had a problem and a few years ago the 320's had some issues. I guess when you use as many drives as we do you see a lot more of the reliability as opposed to a fluke. What you read though is correct about environmental conditions. Cool climate that is dust free is best but obviously not always possible. That is why typically when the DVR is going to be in an uncontrolled environment unless the DVR is in an enclosure go with an embedded system, which is a little more forgiving systemwide.

Example: I have put 5MP cameras at 40 feet and if you try to read license plates if there is more than a 15 degree angle between the camera and the plate you will be hard pressed to see anything but a blur. Then if you lower the camera you lose the perspective and it defeats the purpose. In the end I used 2 cameras that were a fraction the price and accomplished the same task, which is now being used by transportation departments. We tried several different scenarios and it never worked. Yet there are times you can use MP to cover larger areas such as in car lots to take the place of multiple cameras where it is more of a reactive type situation as opposed to proactive. In those cases it has some good applications, but then again if its an open area you will be hard pressed for subject identification - it will be better than any analog solution should there not be any choke points but not anywhere near perfect.

Again, it depends what you are trying to accomplish. Which is why the question is do you have choke points if you are talking about identification. Ask yourself the same questions when there is challenging lighting and you can take the megapixel camera and toss it out the window. Clearly, there are places where megapixel can be advantageous but it is not a panacea. It is the best there is for now and will get better with time. But don't fool yourself into thinking it will work in shadows or challenging light at distances. IT HAS ITS PLACE

Most of the IP cameras do not have auto iris (not all but most) Most of the IP cameras are incredibly poor in low light (check the lux) - again not all but most. Also, many of the IP cameras are CCD chips not CMOS. So the only thing they are doing is encoding at the edge with lower powered processing compared to encoding at the DVR where you can use hardware encoding at the PC where you can eliminate many of the issues inherent in encoding at the edge. There are also significant lighting issues, which wide dynamic range address a la Pixim. If you want you can do what our organization has done and virtually taken cameras from a dozen manufacturers in both megapixel, CMOS, CCD, etc. and put them through the motions. It became apparent that its a matter of IP is not ready for prime time nor is megapixel. I have not even addressed the ghosting or severe latency issues. Try using some IP ptz and watch what happens when you try to swing the camera. Take a megapixel camera and put it into a shaded area or where the angle of light is such that you get a partial sunny view. The results speak for themself. Also, take a megapixel camera and wave your hand up and down and record it and play it back and watch what happens.

The point is I agree it is not bad. It has potential solely in the megapixel area and even at that the need for megapixel is very limited. If you are in 1 physical building there is no need for an IP camera. If you are in an area where you can have a choke point there is no need for a megapixel camera. Comes back to why spend more and get less. Another drawback is you lose the network you are SOL. Also, the irony is that IP cameras are supposed to be the future yet most utilize MJPEG which is an antiquated codec that sucks up bandwidth. The IP cameras are first starting to discover H264 but even at that they are using the baseline codec when that is not the best solution. H264 has been around for more than 5 years and now they are on to H264SVC and you would think in reading the magazines that 264 is something brand new. The problem with this industry is that there is a lack of adequate information and alot of disinformation. I read these message boards from time to time and it gets amusing how off the mark people can be and I am not talking about opinions I am talking facts.

analog have not reached their limit. It is a very loooooooooooooooooong discussion on what you can do with analog. It is not the DSP since there is A/D and D/A conversion. The question is how you transmit the video. The big deal about IP cameras used to be that you could use the structured cabling network, but then they forget that video baluns have been around for more than a decade and you can run video across UTP and bypass the network so no degradation in signal or latency. Megapixel technology is still very very premature. They are in the lunchpail cellphone stage and have a long way to go. IP cameras inherently have low light issues. So it begs the question why pay more and get less. I am not down on IP I am just realistic and don't buy into the hype. FYI, even with a Gigabit or 10G network remember a network has latency. You can take a 10G network and still try to control a PTZ and watch what happens. Many people will say they have latency lower than 100 milliseconds but as I say go ahead and try it. The biggest thing in general is managing customer expectations and unfortunately sales people over hype technology. For example, the size of the IP market and the supposed death of analog. Curiously enough Axis came out with a press release last week saying the market wasnt growing as quickly as they expected and blamed it on the economy yet the analog market suffered no such degradation, funny huh.

it is just recommended. For the most part there are no laws with respect to "video" in a public place. There are only issues with respect to areas where there is an expectation of privacy like a bathroom, etc. What is of concern is audio recording where each state has its laws which require either one party or two party acknowledgment. Surreptitious audio recording can be a violation of the wiretap laws. But yes check with your local law enforcement agencies.

The problem is hard drives originally were never designed to run 24 7. If you think about it on most corporate networks, the hard drive only cycles when it is either saving data or writing or seeking. With DVRs they are running all the time. To answer the call most of the manufacturers designed hard drives for the DVR market and those drives have an MTBF of almost 100 years and carry a warranty of 5 years. These drives though do not perform as well when operating in a RAID environment and for those applications there are drives designed to perform for those specific applications.

The more lines, the closer the lines together and the closer the lines together the higher the potential video quality.

the first question to ask is why do you want IP. Understand that today you can run analog cameras over UTP with video baluns. So you can use the Cat5 infrastructure yet bypass network usage which is the best of all worlds. If you are in a single building I would run all analog using structured cabling and terminate in the DVR then go networked to leave the building.

virtually all of the systems today use the same technology which is pixel changes. So all will be the same in this regard. The only time this changes is when you get into the intelligent video which determines which is real motion and what it is. In other words, you don't want blowing trees or debris setting off motion alarms. When you get into the intelligent video analytics it gets very expensive.

IP cameras are ridiculously overrated and not ready for prime time. You are going to find that networks have latency, end of story. An IP camera can never compare with an analog camera except for the use of megapixel. I am sure you are going to see HD analog cameras coming out in the next year or so as people realize you are going to continue to have problems transmitting the HD images across a network. Megapixel IP cameras also have issues with ghosting, day/night issues, etc. In essence, they are overhyped by the companies that have nothing else to offer.

I think you are pretty much right on. But here is what I would also recommend in general. With cameras it starts at the lens. The better the lens, the better the possible shot. In the past we have bought cameras and we found out the camera was good but the lens is what hurt the end result. Aventura does make good cameras and uses Japanese lenses with a good f-stop. I am not sure about the warranty as I have been told they have 3-year warranties. If there are any issues that may result in difficult lighting conditions the latest and the greatest is wide dynamic which cleans up some of the back lighting problems and glare. The fact is you are 100% right you get what you pay for. The questions you need to ask about cameras are what lens, resolution and the technology. The CCD are usually either 380, 470 or 520 lines although some call a 380 a 420 and some call a 470 a 480 and some call a 520 a 540 or higher but they are all Sony chipsets regardless. The second aspect is wide dynamic and then of course low light concerns. What we have done in the past is make sure of the return policy then before committing to a larger volume of cameras we have bought one of each from a few suppliers and compared them. Many were the same during daytime and normal lighting but when u got into difficult lighting or nightime there were issues or noise. I like the Panasonic, Sony, Bosch and Aventura products they all work well. From the DVR side Aventura definitely makes the best product although many other diehards here will scream and say otherwise but I say if it's good enough for the big boys I am sure it works fine in the smaller installs too. As far as who "manufactures" so u understand with CCTV cameras the CCD 98% are made by Sony since a foundery to make the CCD costs in the $$billions so they really don't have much in the way of competition. So whether it's Aventura, Bosch or whomever they all buy the CCD from Sony and then they make a board set and then assemble and add a lens. So it comes back to the quality control of the board and the quality of the lens.

champagne taste - beer budget

why do u guys only push geovision. plenty of other better choices out there with hardware compression on newer platforms.

the DVR surveillance guide on the Aventura Technologies website has information about a comparison of pc based vs. embedded. www.aventuratechnologies.com/dvr_tutorial

I think many people still miss the mark with these issues. Frame rate obviously has nothing to do with visual quality, rather it is a sequence of consecutive images. Further, 4CIF also does not indicate a standard of quality. The only thing that provides the image quality is the bitrate. So a 4CIF image with a low bit rate can provide lousy quality. There is actually a great DVR tutorial on the subject of video technology on the Aventura Technologies website. www.h264usa.com - it is very long winded but incredibly gets to the point.