Scruit

Info on the dashcam: http://legacygt.com/forums/showthread.php/like-my-dashcam-huhi-92540.html The dumpster was just a case of my assuming my turn-around spot was clear. I've lived here 10 years and that space is always clear. I just got into the habit of not even looking. Well, then I ordered a dumpster, then the next morning....

I seem to recall a recent dumpster incident where all the camera's in the world couldn't help you out!

I use a small mini cam with mirror function in a housing on my tow bar. I also have the screen in my car set up so that when I put the car into reverse the video screen switches over to a full screen backup view. Works great. Backing up is a breeze.

Is there somewhere else you can park your car? Capturing license plates is unlikley to be successful by accident. I have 3 cameras set up for license plate capture and all 3 are zoomed in so much that the plate takes up about 1/4 of the width of the screen. If you want to capture a license plate, you have to set out with that goal in mind. Add an extra camera that is set at the right angle to read the rear plate. (Headlights make front plate capture difficult) Could you post a diagram of, or google maps link to, the location being monitored. We could advise on placement.

Ask the shipper to require a signature in person.

Thats what the siren is for Siren won't help you when your nearest neighbor is too far away to hear it... Layers... These are all just layers of security. ADT is fine if the sensors are set up correctly. Coupled with PIR detectors around the house sending you text messages and remotely viewable cameras on a battery backup etc. IF ADT calls then you check the cameras. If your PIRs text you then you check the cameras. If ADT calls and says your internal motion detector went off and your perimeter doors are secure and the PIRs are clear and the cameras are all clear then you're a dumbass who forgot to lock the dogs in their crates. Don't rely on any one layer of security. That means the bad guy only has to defeat one layer.

I've found cameras just holding a mini flashlight to my temple. Seems to work to figure out the angle of view also. Just look for the little purple glint. Of course if I have reason to think I'm being targeted I'll use something a little more advanced!

For the triggers, I use: +1 Ignition On - Detects the car engine being turned on +2 Manual switch - Allows me to keep the cameras running all the time. I use this in dodgy areas, or to prevent constant on-off (getting the oil changed etc) +3 Unused/reserved -4 Trunk Lid switch - Detect the trunk lid being opened -5 Vibration Sensor (Switched Ground) - Detects anything that hits the car -6 Ultrasonic Motion Detector (Switched Ground) - Detects any movement inside the car

LOL. Unbelievable " title="Applause" /> What's so funny? You post an exe that unexpectedly calls out to the internet. Of course we're going to be suspicious. Once I confirmed it *was* calling out I wanted to warn people while I checked it out. After checking it out I determined it was benign. Sorry if I offended you.

If you are an electronics hobbyist then give me a shout. I made my own electronic power controller that takes 6 trigger inputs to allow the DVR to turn itself in situations like Ignition On, Vibration, Someone inside the car (ultrasonic motion detector), doors/trunk open etc. It was a great deal of work to design and perfect this circuit and then etch it into a circuit board. I can give you a copy of the schematic if you're interested. However if you're looking for a setup that you can install and not have to worry about maintaining an tweaking, then go for the off-the-shelf DVRs.

You have two problems to solve. You will need two solutions. 1) Proving fault in accidents There are more and more cheap DVRs on the market now. In fact I just ordered a device called an MD80 for $9.99 from ebay after seeing video clips from a friend of mine who bought one. I've also seen the same device advertised for $100, so shop around!! It's a mini DVR that uses a microSD card (up to 8gb) and records 30fps in 720x480 with sounds. Handles the sun very well. Small enough to install up behind your rear-view mirror. You could install a second one facing back if you want. If you want to go with a more professional unit check out the Aver MOB1304NET. It has GPS and 3G / wireless backup options. Or the old version called the EB1304MOB which is cheaper (About $350) but you still have to buy the cameras and run the wires. 2) Watching you car when it's parked If you can park within sight of your house then install the camera on your house with a zoom lens. Installing a camera in a car and expecting it to run for an extended period of time is a challenge. My dashcam will flatten the battery in about 2 days. (you said the car was sat for 2 days too) You'd need either a pair of dedicated batteries in the trunk or some external power source. Even if you had the extra batteries you'd burn up your alternator continuously recharging those batteries. The MD80 similar small SD-card all-in-one would use much less power and might last a few days. If you go this route then look for a "Battery Buddy" type device that will disconnect the accessories if the battery charge gets low - this means you will always have enough charge to start the car even if some accessory (such as the DVR) starts to wear the battery down.

I've been doing CCTV stuff at my house for about 8 years now, ever since someone broke into my house. In that time I've had many iterations of the DVR itself. I've had a CPCam CPD576W - nice enough unit but very low frame rate (9 channels, 25fps max). I liked it's cheap reliable simplicity so much I bought a bunch of CPCam bullet IR cameras too. As part of normal expansion a few years later I replaced the 576W with a 507HC (16ch, 120fps max). The 507HC has not been a reliable DVR at all. The network function fails on a random basis and requires a reboot of the DVR. If you fast-forward through the playback in 16ch display for more than a couple of minutes (looking for footage) then it craps out with a system error that translates to "All video chips failed". It will randomly "brick" (stop functioning completely and have to be unplugged for several minutes before it will fire up again.) But more than this, my problem has been the level of support I get from CPCam. The vendor I bought it from (online CCTV shop) referred me to CPCam for support, and CPCam's support is, well, do they even have a support department? Online support is a mail form that has never been replied to despite several attempts on my part. I managed to track down a human being in California and when I asked for support I was asked fro my phone number for a callback. I'm sure you know how that went. I did speak with a guy from CPCam in New York who was pretty knowledgeable about the device's functionality and was able to explain some of the idiosyncrasies but was unable to help with the problems. And so they remain. After a recent run of network failures, culminating with the DVR bricking right in front of my eyes as I was talking with my wife about replacing the DVR, we pretty much decided that the DVR was more trouble than it's worth and I'd rather unplug and forget it rather than spend time every day babying it. I just ordered an Aver 5216 hybrid DVR/NVR. Let's hope this is a better unit. Fingers crossed.

K, here's the deal... The Certificate Revocation List is downloaded from microsoft by the player on it's first execution. Not sure why it needs that list, but it downloads it anyway. That CRL comes with an expiration date. In my case the expiration was July sometime. Now that I've allowed it to download the CRL it will not try again until the existing copy of the CRL expires in July. This is probably why most people don't notice the behaviour - it happens only once every 3 months or so, and unless you have good AV/internet security like Sophos it won't notice it. SophosLabs responded to my submission of the file sample. They don't consider the file to be suspicious, and they modified their detection engine to flag the file as an internet connection *attempt*, not a *threat*. This would prevent the false "threat* alarm in all other sophos customers, however the internet connection "attempt" message was, and remains, valid.

Ok, whatever it's doing appears to be some vestigal microsoft functionality within the player itself. It's calling home to Microsoft, downloading this one file and then quitting. Not clear on what certificates it's looking for, but it's definitely this "player" The behavior is interesting and unexpected, but does not appear to be malicious. Either way, if you have AV software good enough to detect this behavior then I'd suggest blocking it. If your AV didn't see this, get better AV.

Curiouser and curiouser... C:\Documents and Settings\Grae>ping crl.microsoft.com Pinging a1363.g.akamai.net [24.143.196.57] with 32 bytes of data:

I have tested this on a sacrificial PC with wireshark running... The player does the following: 1: Connects to 24.143.196.66:80 (SYN, SYN_ACK, ACK - So the address is live and working) 2: Issues a HTTP GET for /pki/crl/products/MicWinHarComPCA_2008-01-08.crl 3: Succeeds with a HTTP:200 (OK) 4: Gets the file, which is a certificate revocation list I terminated the connection at that point. Any attempt to get the file from the URL using a standard browser is rejected with a custom checksum error message (not a 500, 401 or 404) Doing some more research to decide if this is a threat, and why any legitimate CRL would be hosted out of a cable roadrunner address.

All: Don't download the player until I post again.

I'm 99% sure the file will come back from the lab as Ok, but security is all about not giving them that 1% chance. Trust, but verify. Apline - none of this is meant as an insult to you. My apologies if I come across like that, it's not intended! As far as the video is concerned - not enough detail for me to make out the type of car. You have the same problem as me - the action always happens *just* outside the useful range of the cameras. Mailboxes are dime-a-dozen - I'd be more concerned at the interest they showed in the car. I'd go with a camera that's zoomed in on that car out there.

No, the .exe extension was not a problem. The problem was the IPConnect behavior that was detected as a threat. I have sent a copy of the player.exe to SophosLabs for analysis - they will tell me what's up. I wouldn't wireshark it because you'd have to let it run first. If you have VMWare you can build a sacrificial VM for it. Nobody else reported issues? Maybe they should be running Sophos instead. It uses behavioral analysis to detect new threats rather than relying on signatures. So that's not any address of yours? What about at home? You have Cox business at home? 24. adddresses are usually cable. Is there any chance your DVR exported a player.exe with your IP encoded in it for convenience and it's trying to connect?

The file player.exe was detected as a threat by my Sophos antivirus classified as "IPConnect". It tried to connect to 24.143.196.66 upon execution. That's a roadrunner address in the Virginia block. Is this expect behavior, OP?

Was hoping for a live view, but I don't see that aver makes a blackberry viewer.

Thanks for the reply. I tried this already. Had to download the .jar file and email it to myself. The phone gets stuck on "connecting". Suspect it's a network thing. :-/

Nice solid looking unit. Surprised that the audio and video loop-out require special cables that don't come standard. The first bootup took several minutes and didn't give much indication that it was actually booting up so I was worried at first. I like the gui interface. The provided a mouse but not a keyboard so I got a mini keyboard for $15 that works great. Setting up things like camera names was a breeze with the keybard, and the gui makes it child's play to adjust a page full of config settings. The vga output is much better than the tv output of my last DVR (CPCam 507HC), of course, and the mouse allows for point/click zoom to individual cameras (including a nice right-click-drag zoom feature inside a single channel). My DVR arrived with the .19 firmware that was unusably slow of playback/searching, and channel 16 didn't play back in single-channel mode. The DVR rebooted itself while trying get ch16 to work. I updated the firware, an easy process, to .21. I forgot to export the config, shame on me. It's easy to export, just a couple of mouse clicks. The new firmware solved the playback issues completely. Configuring the individual channels is easy enoughto do but I nticed that you cannot over-commit the framerate. Example: 240 fps over 16 channels is 15fps each. In "Smart" mode the channel can run at a lower framerate until there is motion, then it jumps to maximum. As I never expect to have motion on all 16 channels at the same time I had homed to be able to set the channels all to 30fps (understanding that only a handful will be at 30fps at any given moment) but it won't allow that. Therefore in smart mode the DVR will never see 240fps unless you have motion on every channel. In a busy bus terminal that might be common, but in a residential setting that's not likely. Searching/playback is a doddle. I can use the event view to find either a motion or alarm event, double-click on it and it comes right up - however it always brings up the video a few seconds AFTER the event time, so I always wind up rewinding it to get to the actual event. Plus it defaults to a 4ch view of channels 1-4, so I have to do the extra step of clicking on the 16way view. No big, really. Haven't tried CD/DVD export, but the usb key backup was very easy and provides excellent quality. There is no analog 16-way output which was a problem for me because that's the signal I sent to the big TV downstairs. Instead I use a VGA-to-SVideo converter inline with the VGA cable to the monitor. Lower quality and an extra cost, but works out for me. There are two spot monitor outputs that are controlled by alarm rules. I can create an alarm rule that says "When you see motion on channel 1 set the spot monitor 1 to that channel, and set spot monitor 2 to channel 7" This works well because I cna have spot 1 set to a close-up view of the alerting camera and spot 2 can be set to a camera that provides an overall view of the same area. On my DVR spot 1 and spot 2 are mislabelled, so spot 1 in the gui actuall controls spot 2 as labelled on the DVR. I have spot 1 and spot 2 connected to two spare channels on a smaller DVR, which is set to record on motion for those two channels. This basically means I can use the smaller DVR to run a playback of someone moving from camera-to-camera, and all the channel-hopping is already done for me. Having this second DVR record these images provides an excellent backup recording location in case the main DVR cannot play back the video for any reason. The alarm inputs take relay contacts too, which is great because I have a wireless driveway monitor with 4 relay contacts. This means I could set up a rule for driveway monitor relay 1 to set the spot monitor to the correct camera and send me an email. I had previously hacked this featre together using a USB io card and home-written software. The DVR will send email from different senders so I can set my phone to play a different ringtone for each alarm channel used. e.g When my phone gets an SMS from HomeDVR_Alarm01@myisp.com it plays a ringtone that says; "Front Driveway Alert", etc. The web-based viewer is excellent. AVTech or CPCam just use the software as a surrugoate remote control and provide a poorly digitized video output. The aver web viewer is great quality video even on fullscreen 16way. Haven't tried it across the web yet. I called Aver to ask about the audio cable. They are sending that to me for free but I had to pay $30 for the video loop-out. Aver support has always been very responsive. Compare that to AVTech or CPCam, where there is no actual support at all. I got answers to all my questions in under 48 hours using their fabulous web-based ticketing system. Suggestions to Aver for improvements: - When setting up the motion mask / percentage, please have some indication on screen of whether the motion sensor is being tripped right now. - Please allow the 16way image to be an option for one or both of the spot monitor outputs, - Please allow the fps to be overcommitted. If I have two channels I want to set them to 4fps no motion and 30 fps when there IS motion. That way I get better/smoother video wehn something happens under one camera because the motion camera can borrow unused fps from the camera that does not see motion. I understand that 240fps is a max so if both cameras see motion they will both max out at 15fps. The "people and cars leaving artifacts" problem described earlier does not appear to be happening with mine except for the last second of the video expoert to a USB key. I paid $1300 for this DVR new from buy.com. I love it. Overall it's great unit with excellent video quality and a robust software. I'd like to see the GUI controls be a little more responsive rather thanwaitng for up to 3 seconds for some controls to take effect, but otherwise this DVR inspires a lot of confidence in its reliability and features. -- Support questions I've asked -- Question: Where is the audio cable? Answer: Call xxx-xxx-xxxx for the sales team and they'll send you one. Question: Why is the deinterlace setting in 3 different places? Camera settings, DVR playback, and remote PC playback? Answer: Delinterlace settings affect the display, not the recording. It appears whereever the video is displayed. Question: Why is the FTP option greyed out? Answer: It's a placeholder for future functionality. Not availlable right now. Question: Why does the watermark validation say that the exported video is bad? Answer: Researching... Question: Can I get a 16-way output on the spot monitor? Answer: No. You must select which channel to show on the spot monitor outputs using alert rules.

No ip cameras yet, but the hybrid was a great selling point. Definitely look forward to getting some megapixel camera on there, but not until the proce drops significantly. Will check out vga over utp. Thanks!

Resolved the issue by putting the ip address of my DVR in the trusted sites section.