Scruit

Raw image right off my CCTV - not edited. (Yes, I know it's just a spider on the lens)

I'm not a CCTV professional, but I was a network administator for a few years. Confused... Dynamic DNS is used in cases where your IP on the public internet can change (DHCP address given by ISP) Sometimes is chances with every dialin, sometimes once a month etc. If you have two DVRs at your place then unless you have two seperate ISP connections then you must have a router or firewall. The public ip of the router/firewall is the one that will change as a result of the new IP address from your ISP. THe DDNS setup would therefore be done on the router/firewall itself. Then the router/firewall will have to be configured to expose the port required# for the DVR and route the traffic to the DVR, which should have an internal IP in the ranges 10.x.x.x, or 192.168.x.x. The second DVR woudl need to be configured in the same way, just using a different public port#. If you are having trouble withthe internal DHCP settings for your DVR then look into using a reserved DHCP address (reserved by MAC) or excluding some addresses fromt he DHCP range and using hard-coded IPs for the DVRs.

I love when they say that specks of dust illuminated by IR light are "orbs". And then they say they can't be dust becuase they 'change direction'... Yep, they call them "air currents".

Last time I saw the multi-colored thing at night it was an older CPCam CP576W DVR using Wavelet compression that was having a heck of a time trying to make sense of an slmost-black image. Even a motion-light turning on would fix up the image (until it went off again.) Same camera is on my current and the red/blue specks are not present. I'm pretty sure my issue was with the wavelet compression.

How can you see *anything* in a CCTV lens? There must be a sheet of protective glass (possibly with a smoked or mirror finish to keep the cameras discrete) that he was using.

If we're going to Blue-Sky automated CCTV... We know that software can find faces in live video feeds... Well, how long before the software can detect behavior patterns? - One dead giveaway for shoplifters is their tendency to spend more time looking at other people than at the merchandise. Software could analyze the video feeds and figure out how much time a person is spending looking around rather that at the products. It can alert a human operator to look more closely. - For the most part, cars that drive past a building will do so at the same speed - ie if the road is 55mph then people who show no interest in the building will drive past at anywhere from 50 to 65 mph. Software can anaylze the image and can figure out if a car is driving at an unusally slow speed - a car that creeps past at 15mph is suspicious, so is a car that approaches at 60mph but slows to 50mph as it passes then speeds up again. Those events could be brought to the operator's attention. - License plates can already be scanned - if you see the same license plate an unusual amount of times then the operator can be alerted. Ie if a business is closed and the same car drives past 2 or 3 times in the same direction in 5 mins then maybe the operator needs to look more closely - especially if the car slows down as it passes. - Another shoplifter train is nervousness. Maybe the software can isolate a person's shape and location in shot and then start to identify how much the person is moving around. If they make lots of rapid movements back and forth (as if trying to get the courage to go through with it) then maybe the operator should look at that. If the person arrives at the aisle, hovers in front of the display, walks back and forth between the product and a vantage position where they can see the staff, etc or is just really fidgety... Compared with someone who walks down the aisle, picks up a product and then walks away. Any of these behaviors can be normal, which is why the CCTV won't say; "Arrest that person!" but it can provide hints as to who the operator should watch more closely.

I'm not a professional, just a home user... My friends keep asking me to install CCTV for them, but I always refuse. My biggest issues are that I just can't bridge the gap between their CSI expectations and the real world, and I don't want to make myself liable for the system not working as they hope. I use the same technique for my long driveway (one wide-angle camera to cover the whole area just so I know if there's someone there, and 60mm lens that shows one car-width at the choke-point on the driveway). People don't understand why I have to have a special camera that only shows the width of the car in order to get a good plate read - they think that they can take an ebay bullet, take a picture of their street a zoom into read every license plate. I cringed the time CSI took a picture of a person's face, zoomed in to the subject's iris and were able to see a reflection of the photographer.... "Why can't YOU do that??"

I would extend the side that has the plug (12v end) - not the side that has the socket (camera end). Messing with the camera will else void the warranty, if you care about that sort of thing. Really, if it was me I'd make an extender using a matching socket and plug. No sense cutting up perfectly good stuff. Try digi-key for the parts. Something similar to this: http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=CP-024A-ND

Camera is a Focus Micro FM-25323 1/3CCD 470TVL. Lens is a 60mm DC. Power supply is a regular 12VDC regulated (12.7v unloaded). Tried running it from a 12v battery - same thing. The camera seems to be really struggling to keep a consistent light level. Sometimes it's far too bright, sometimes too dark. See: These two images were taken just minutes apart. When it changes from light to dark it does so very slowly, over a couple minutes. Most of the time it's too light. Case in point - right now it looks like this: When it was too bright I tried adjusting the DC level down. The picture had the right brightness and contrast but was very grainy and speckly like you get with a fixed-iris camera as the light level drops. Seems to me like the auto-iris lens is just not keeping up withthe light changes. The annoying thing is that it's very dark and overcast today so the lens is opening up WAY too much. But if the lens wasn't working at all then the image would be just black / lens fully closed, right? Questions: 1) Is it ok to use AGC at the same time as using a DC auto-iris lens - or should the lens be able to compensate for light changes on it's own? 2) Anything else I should look at?

Anyone know where I can get a speaker that I can plug into the RCA "Audio out" connector on my DVR? I was in an incident in my car last week where I had to show the police on the scene what happened but there was no audio because I don't have a speaker. My car's radio doesn't have an aux in (or a cassete player). I'm going to install an LCD screen inside the car and wire up a speaker so next time I can get instant playback for the police on scene.

Thanks Scorpion. I'll keep those in mind. Right now I'm trying to decide if the direction of the playback environment should be inside of the car or outside of it. I'm wondering if a cop is going to be willing to jump into the passenger seat of a vehicle to see a video like this, or will he prefer to see the video while standing outside the open trunk. From a tactical perspective I can understand an officer refusing to get into a subject's car. If I have him standing outside the car then I need to shroud the video screen from the sun, and provide a set of amplified headphones that will work from the RCA audio out. The shrouded video screen with headphones combo might work better. BTW, I'll tell more about the incident after the criminal trial is over.

The first thing I tried (before reading your response) was to swap two cameras over. The 60mm lens is now on a different camera and once the rain stops for a moment I'm gonna put it up. From there I can see if the light fluctuations follow the lens or the camera. If there's still a problem then I'll go through your steps above. Thanks for the response!

I keep all my old time lapse vcr and give them to customers to put them out in the open so the steal these instead So did they find the thief after you reported the stolen PC to the police?

Check you manual - the channel may be in Covert mode. Covert mode hides the image from the main display when the admin is not logged in. This lets you run a camera watching your employees and they can't tell you have it just by looking at the DVR screen.

Does the DVR have a CD/DVD or USB backup? Sounds like an AVTech or CPCam DVR. The CD/DVD/USB backups will save a file called playback.exe with the .787 files.

Over the last few days one of my cameras has been failing slowly - the image drops out completely. When it does this I just have to unplug and plug it in again. Finally got annoyed enough that I replaced the "Barn Camera". Done. Then I started adding the new camera that will cover the bottom end of the garden where a suspicious person was seen last weekend. Took about an hour to run the wires etc, pretty simple though. Barn camera is down again. Dangit. Wall wart read 20v. Whoop! Unregulated! Replaced the power supply with a regulated wall wart. Then I had to tweak the new garden camera which means getting back up on the roof. Got it all sorted out. Barn camera is down again. I replaced the F-type to BNC pigtail at the camera. (all my wiring is exclusively F-type at the camera end so that I can easily switch from an BNC connector camera to an RCA connector camera by using an F-type to BNC pigtail or anf-type to RCA adapter) Then I decided to mow the lawn - opene the double garge door on the workshop and something went wrong - the door came off the track and jammed. Took me about 5 mins to figure out that the strap holding some wiring up on the ceiling had let go and a bunch of wires got wrapped into the torsion spring / cable roller assembly. Those wires included the burglar alarm, magic eye for the door, and the RG6 for the workshop camera. Took about two hours to fix the door and replace all the damaged wiring. Barn camera is down again. Replaced the BNC pigtail on the DVR side. Mowed the lawn Barn camera is down again. Took the wall plate off and replaced every connection between the DVR and the cable the runs out under the deck to the workshop (where the camera is mounted). Get it all working again. Go downstairs to get some coffee. Barn camera is down AGAIN. Switched it to a different port on the DVR - maybe that one port is burned out?? By the time I get down the stairs the CCTV is reporting video loss AGAIN. Barn camera is down. Ok, recap... I have replaced the following: Camera, camera power supply, all wiring between the camera and the workshop-to-house line, all wiring between the workshop-to-house line and the DVR, AND the DVR port. ie the entire camera setup for that channel is all new. Camera is still dropping intermittently. Finally I decided to check the workshop-to-house coax. That meant following the wire down through the walls into the basement, out under the deck and tot he workshop. Then I ripped up all the deck boards until I found this: Rassin'-frassin' mice.

A couple weekends a go while my kid was playing in the back yard (2 acres) I saw a man standing in the treeline at the back of the garden, 300' from the house. He appeared to be staring at my kid, and ran off when he saw me. After doing some research I found that the house on the other side of the property line has a convicted child sex offender registered there. When I called the police they came out and told me that unless I could identify the person or establish a pattern of suspicious bahavior they woudl be unable to confront the man. I was too far away to identify the person, but the officer did take a report so that we have a official written record of my report that could help show a pattern later. So, back to CCTV... I need to be able to do 2 things... 1) Find out if he comes back 2) Be able to match the person to a photograph I have of the sex offender I'm gonna find out if he's coming back before I try to get a good facial ID. I have a 60mm lens lying around here that should get me about a 25 or 30' wide view at 300'. That's about how wide the clearing in the trees is. I already have the DVR set up to FTP images if there's motion - so a single person walkign through a shot that is 30' wide should show up on a sensitive motion detection. Then I can glance through a folder of thumbnail images of the motion and see if there's someone there. it only takes a few seconds to review the tumbnails at the end of the day. The big problem will be at night - the 60mm lens is no auto-iris so I'll get terrible images at twilight and nothing after dark. I'l thinking that maybe running an IR illuminator attached to a tree out there adn connected to a motorcycle battery would give me a few days at a time of illumination - just enough to see if there's a figure there at night. If he's coming back then I'll work on getting a closer pic - but that probably means running a 300' trench or something. ugh! Right now my approach is tokeep my kid safe and in my sight at all times when out in the garden, and my main aim with the camera is to find out if he's coming back. I don't expect a camera to keep my kid safe, but it will hopefully give me some insight into the problem. If I can catch him watching my kid then maybe he police can so something about him. Any advice or guidance? Either on camera/lens selection or ammo selection? If someone presented this same problem to you then what kind of camera configuration would you recommend, if any.

What's a TDR? I couldn't have found the problem also by disconnecting the wire from both ends and plugging one end into a 120v outlet. Then just follow the smell of burning mouse. *Disclaimer: This post should not be read by people with no sense of humor, or anyone stupid enough to take me seriously. Not typical results. Side effects were generally mild and included headache, burning fur and occasional vaporisation.

The problem with troubleshooting this camera was that breaking and reconnecting *any* connection made the camera work again for a period of time. When I connected my portable LCD to the camera directly it worked fine. When I connected the LCD to the DVR end of the wired it worked fine. Then a couple hours later it would drop. Even testing the continuity of the long cable probably wouldn't have identified the problem because unplugging the camera to plug in the multimeter woudl have liekly had the same effect - ie making it work. I could have left the LCD connected to the camera directly for a few hours, but other than that I'm not sure what else I could have done. What I need is some king of logging multimeter that would allow me to do a resistance test across the center pint and the shield of cable while I had an old network terminator on the other side (50 ohm? I have a couple of those lying around). Then I could see if the cable went short ot open at any point. Or I could have drafted my wife to watch the multimeter, I dunno. oh well. Yup, conduit - and smear the calbe with warfarin paste.

Well, I was troubleshooting for a while and I remembered the thread here about regulated & unregulated power supplies (as I recall, unregulated supplies need a load to regulate properly) I tested this power supply and found it read 20v unloaded and 12.5 with the camera attached. I put a regulated power supply in there - no difference. I have 3 of these same cameras and when I checked the other 2 I found that they had the same unregulated supplies - all 3 were shipped with the unregulated power supply. And the other 2 have had no problems - in fact the one I removed is still fine. Most of my cameras don't mind the unregulated power supplies, but some really can't handle the extra voltage (image smears etc). No, turns out the only problem with this camera was the chewed cable.

I just had this exact same symptom on on of my cameras today. If I disconnected and reconnected either end then the video was restored for anywheref rom a couple minutes to a couple hours. Turned out that mice had eaten then coax. Can you account for every foot of the wire? Is it possible that there could be a damaged section that is hidden??

While diagnosing a problem withg one of my cameras I noticed the power supply (no load) showed 18v on my multimeter. Then I tried a different one and it also had the same problem. I then tested every power supply in the house, and all showed abou 5 or 6 volts above their rating. I tried this with two different multimeters, both gave the same result. The same two mutimeters show correct voltage for household batteries and my car battery (12.34v while the car is off) Next I looked at the battery in my RC plane - it's supposed to be 9.6v and the charger was spitting out 19v... When I checked the battery it was 12.5v with no load, and about 9v under load. So, what is it? Either these 12v ac adapters are supposed to be 18v while not under load, or somethign has caused every power supply in my house to fail in the same way at the same time...? The wall outlets show 119v AC.

Does your DHCP sevrer allow you to reserve addresses by MAC? That way you can use DHCP and still keep a 'static' address.

I have this same problem with my CPCam 517HC (I think it's the model #). I have to reboot it to get network back. If you hear of a solution then I'd love to hear it.