MR2

Actually Bullwinkle(another forum member) had an idea which might be spot on for what you need... he's just using IR globes in normal floodlight fittings, all you need to do is then have the floodlights motion triggered and you pretty much have your solution, must admit I quite like your solution

Exactly as you say... but I figure if I cut it I can always solder it back together if I'm that keen

I don't know, I don't play with the bitrate setting to be honest, I've had a poke and it seemed to make very little difference so I left it

3mp@15fps on 24/7 we generate 1.8Gb Per hour Per Camera

IF I was going to do indoor camera's I'd be just throwing covertly mounted hemisphere camera's in each room needing coverage... I believe quite a few of them could be mounted so that just the lens is showing (look at the grandeye http://www.oncamgrandeye.com/security-systems/360-degree-video-camera/) that or in a budget direction, take one of these apart, mount it in a corner so only the lens is showing http://www.geovision.com.tw/english/Prod_GVIPCAMH264MDR320.asp in theory you could hang some toys or something from the roof around where it's mounted (but out of the vision) so that the lens just looks like a thumb tack my theory is, that as long as you have signs saying "Surveillance in use" on the entry's to the property, and a few obvious camera's outdoors, then your covered for camera's indoors (depends on local laws of course) as you have given "sufficient warning"

the PCB to IR board is hardwired, if I want it off I think I need to cut it! keep in mind we've bought 12 of these camera's so far, and the latest batch we bought have a Version B that might allow turning off IR (it's engrish so it could be hidden somewhere) my boss actually like's to use the IR even if it's not that useful, so I've not had incentive to find it yet

Now...the bad: 1, In Milestone for some reason if you set the camera to under 15fps it stuffs up, I think it's firmware but grandstream show no interest in fixing it 2, I have yet to find a way to turn off the inbuilt IR, short of maybe cutting some wires, this needs to be turned off or you will have issues with spiderweb etc 3, the focus knobs are easy to accidentally bump when it's being installed, most of our camera's are slightly off and I'm going to get a boom lift next time we have a one spare for a few hours and get them just right of other note about the images, I found that I could actually considerably improve the dynamic range in the settings, so the shot up there which shows the Dynamic range is actually worse than what it can do.

So far, other than a few little niggles they have been rock sold, not a single frame drop listed in Milestone, keep in mind that this is a rebadged Grandstream, it's a Grandstream pcb/cmos so other than not being able to be set (in milestone) to less than 15fps they've been great... on to the pictures: Normal image Zoomed in (using software/digital) http://s1056.photobucket.com/user/mgoodwinmr2/media/Zoomin_zpsebbacfcf.png.html?sort=3&o=5 Indoor IR (only 2-3 m from camera to door) http://s1056.photobucket.com/user/mgoodwinmr2/media/NightVisionIPQIndoor_zps0fe0cd32.png.html?sort=3&o=7 popped it open to look at the lens: http://s1056.photobucket.com/user/mgoodwinmr2/media/ipqinsides2_zps608a6043.jpg.html?sort=3&o=11 the IR when mounted 8 meters high, that concrete it's attempting to light up is around 15-20 meters away from the camera http://s1056.photobucket.com/user/mgoodwinmr2/media/lol_zps4093c4d3.png.html?sort=3&o=1 here's what it looks like mounted around 4-5 meters up at night with IR... so you might want to supply white light or follow other suggestions of external IR http://s1056.photobucket.com/user/mgoodwinmr2/media/Night_zpscc1a5bb5.png.html?sort=3&o=2

That is very interesting info! Thanks for sharing

Wow! well, the camera I was suggesting is $210 USD for 3mp 86 degree wide angle lens (at it's maximum setting) + PoE + Freight to Australia, but if you WANT to spend more money

All file systems can be fragmented, if you're only using a single camera this will not be you're issue though, a few seconds to change between live and playback does not sound like an issue to me, I suspect if you want faster you'll probably find half of that time is the software changing over to playback mode and the rest going and hunting for the playback streams, so you'd probably want to change over to SSD's, and the way that Video streams write, I don't know how long an SSD would last. they are getting cheaper though! for some of our other servers we've bought 800GB SSD's that are 2k each... good for 8tb per day for 5 years...

yeah, that's what I'll probably do long term I think, use normal globe housings, just get a cheap timer/sensor that flips the whole IR circuit when it's dark

I concur with your concerns, but maybe you can just do a defrag or something? not to be rude or XYZ is the best here, but I think this is why most of Milestone's solutions that are capable of more than 8 camera's have the ability to archive to a NAS, it seems that all the streams (in fragmented form) get dumped to local/fast storage on your chosen server, then the Milestone software defrags it as it offloads to the nas, in theory reducing the fragmentation which kills the speed on old rotating hard drives... flicking back to a single stream in playback mode takes around 3 seconds on our server, more if you do playback on multiple camera's at the same time, maybe it's just limited to disk speed? we're just using the cheap $200 4tb Seagates

I personally think IR is ****ty compared to white, you can get really cheap well designed/efficient normal white lights for bugger all, I found when we used IR that you get a terrible light spread. would only want IR where the residents complain about the light, else we can get white lights that use the same power as LED IR and give a great spread etc.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Synology-IP-Camera-4-License-Pack-Kit-4-for-Surveillance-Station-All-Bays-NAS-/160785724273 might get a better price in your country? I can see it a little cheaper locally, but your not in Australia so....

if you can afford it external illumination is always the way to go, just it costs...not just the illuminator, but the cabling for it & installation.

I've played with Express and we now have a few installs going that are great, I loaded up GO on a desktop PC and it seemed fine, more or less identical to Express but with a few limitations

http://www.securitycamera2000.com/products/Full-HD-1080P-IP-Camera-3-Mega-Day%7B47%7Dnight-IR-40m-Waterproof-2.8mm%252d12mm.html

An Interesting topic.... viewtopic.php?f=19&t=35868&start=30 I'd be curious what questions you have after reading that

Actually I stand corrected, I just did a test and it's the Source servers hard drives holding it back I sent data from my laptop and it was limited to the network connection speed

What'd be nice is if they gave the NAS's decent IO processors we're reasonably happy with our RS3412+

on the other side of things, we just upgraded the main switch's at our work to the HP 5120-48G-PoE+ switch's, these are Fully PoE+ compliant and cost $4.5K each you can see why we feel the V1910-24G-PoE is a steal!

yeah I did a double take too, but we've got a PoE+ light that pulls 25w all night if you dig back through the specs, right back to 3com's specs (these specific HP switch's are rebadged 3coms) it states on 3coms documentation that they will do up to PoE+ but the total power envelope is 530w or something, so you can load up as many ports as you want, with up to 25w or whatever it is per port (that's 25w at the device) until you hit the wattage envelope... I don't see that as being an issue for us, our PoE camera's only chew 7w in operation, so we could fit something like 10 PoE+ lights on each switch and still not need the RPS to go with the switch I believe HP don't rate the switch at PoE+ as, from what i can understand, you can't load the whole switch up with PoE+ devices without the RPS to go with it. I can dig up more info if you like?

You're wrong, it is actually PoE+ compliant HOWEVER it does not support 30w on EVERY port unless you have a RPS power supply added to it (24 x 30w is 720w) the standard power supply is a 375w, so you can use PoE+ on roughly half the ports, if you want to enable the rest you just add in the RPS power supply if you wish for proof of it supplying over 15w I can supply a screen shot

HP V1920-PoE-24G (http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product/sku/10250374) $1200, has ports for SFP so we can run fibre straight into it, we run it in IP65 rated cabinets since we wish to keep dust out of our switch's it is also capable of PoE+ (we have some PoE+ Illuminators)