Scruit

I was losing blocks of footage like that with my automotive grade HD (Seagate ST980818AM) I think the problem was it was 5400rpm, I suspect the drive was just too slow. I now use a 3.5" Western Digital WD1600, no issues. Just have to deal with the HD dying every 6 months.

Is there a reason why there is so much wall in shot?

Anyone know a supplier who has them?

Yeah, but the news isn't good yet. To even get close to the IDE write speed of 133MBytes a second you have to go with SLC drives which are $500 for 32GB (100Mbytes/sec) Also, Aver told me their bios was not tested with solid state drives, so there's no way to know if it will work unles someoe wants to blow 500 bucks on an experiment. Not me, thanks! When prices drop to a point where I can get 32GB for about 250 then I'll give it a shot.

This is what mine looks like once the HD gives up the ghost... (and I only ever figure out the HD is bad when I need to play back some video!!)

Dunno about your first pic - that looks more like a cam issue. The second pic with the pixellated/blocky pictures is an image I'm WELL familiar with... I have the same issue on my EB1304MOB, roughly every 6 months. New hard drive fixes it every time. The hard drive always tests fine in my PC afterwards. Stick with Western Digital and that seems to work out. I tried an automotive quality Seagate drive and it didn't last much longer - 9mo instead of 6mo. laptops HDs fare no better. How do you have the DVR mounted? Aver says it must be horizontal/flat. I have mine bolted to the back of the back seat of my car so it's about 20deg from vertical. Aver says this is a no-no as the vibration damping doesn't work at this angle. I modified the drive tray to allow the vibration damping to work at this angle by cutting away some surplus metal that the rubber-bumper-mounted inner tray was bashing into on bumps. Fingers crossed I get more than 6mo this time Aver says my issue is unique and nobody has ever reported a similar corruption.

My house has a license plate camera that I put together myself. It's a BW camera with an auto-iris lens, IR filter and IR emitter. The plate occupies about 15% of the screen and I get about a 98% catch rate - the only ones I miss are if the plate if covered. Just today I failed to capture a plate and there was no good reason to miss it. As I looked closer I saw that the license plate on the car was printed, not stamped. The IR cut filter on the lens removes basically all visible light, so I can't see the color variations. Although I can see stamped plates just fine (the shadows cast by the stamped letters, etc) these new style printer plates appear as completely white. Anyone got any advice on how to catch those? Or am I looking at returning to using visible light rather that IR (and going back to the same issues I had before with headlights blinding the camera at night, etc) All I can think to try is to mount a second camera that uses visible light only, and hope that either one of the two cameras gets a good read.

Bear in mind this is not an avtech device, it's just marketed as working with avtech. It may or may not behave in the same was as your existing converter. I am running a 1TB sata in my CPCam 507HC (AVTech) and it's not given me any gip.

I seem to burn through one camera a year in my dashcam. They wind up giving me darker and darker images until I finally notice the darkness and swap them out. I have tried brand-name cameras (Toshiba, Sanyo etc) and no-names. The brand names tend to be more stable, but the issue seems to just be the summer heat in the car reaching 140-145F cooking the cameras. I buy my cameras used on ebay and tend to pay about $50-100 for each one, and that lasts me a year. I don't want to install anything really nice because I know it won't last any longer in the heat. The cameras at my house? I've still got at least 2 no-name weather proof "Sharp CCD" cameras that are 8 years old, still in place working. I have some cameras in my basement storage that were up for 6mo before they started doing stupid stuff. Lesson learned - even if it's under an eave and is 3' away from the rain, you still need a weatherproof camera or housing!

Update: For my home DVR, I added the SATA power adapter and the HD worked great. Why IDE-to-SATA converter? Because I have 3 hard drive slots, 2x 500GB IDE drives and I need more retention. I can get 1TB SATA drive for $70 and tha adapter/cable ran me $10 together. How much is a 1TB IDE drive? If this works out OK I can pay another $140, replace my existing IDE drives and get a total of 3TB capacity in the system, and even have a drive or two spare in case of failure. Mobile DVR - Why not SSD? At the time I first looked at SSD there were two options, the "slow" MLC SSD or the "fast" SLC SSD. The MLC ran about $200 for 64GB and the SLC ran $999 for 64GB. MLC had stated speeds that were lower than the IDE bus speed. Technology has moved on and the price/capacity points are headed in the right direction, however it's still around $600 for an IDE SLC (has MLC caught up to IDE speed yet?) versus $200 for an 80GB automotive HD rated down to a temperature hat we'll never see in ohio. Also, I asked the DVR manufacturer and the warned me away from SSDs as they had not been tested with the DVR BIOS and they couldn't be sure if it'd even work. Plus, if I had a mobo issue after installing an unapproved drive then I'd have warranty problems.

I have run a 2.5" laptop hard drive in my mobile DVR (dashcam) hoping it would handle shock better. It worked, but died after 6 months just like the rest of the HDs I've burned through. I'm running an automotive grade HD now ($200 for 80GB ) and it's been fine so far. It does give the occasional blip of bad data especially if I go over a speed bump or something but recovers immediately, whereas the consumer HDs would blip and "stay blipped". If the SATA adapter and 1TB HD won't work in my DVR I just install the HD in my PC instead. No big loss.

It's the same deal with the ftp. The image name will be motion_x_y_z_200904271917.jpg where x, y and z are the channels that were acticated. To mitigate this put your most important cameras on the lower channel numbers. The FTP process sends the actual jpg file. I wrote a batch file to process these images into folders. ie: N:\MotionEvents\CH01_LicensePlateCam N:\MotionEvents\CH02_Driveway N:\MotionEvents\CH03_FrontDoor N:\MotionEvents\CH04_BackGarden The batch file looks like: @ECHO OFF move N:\MotionEvents\motion_1_*.jpg N:\MotionEvents\CH01_LicensePlateCam ...etc Then when I get home at night I can click into each folder, look at a thumbnail gallery of all the motion events that day. Takes me just 10 seconds to review each channel. Then I have a seperate batch file that moves :\MotionEvents\CH01_LicensePlateCam\*.jpg :\MotionEvents\CH01_LicensePlateCam\Archive Works for me.

I'm having a hard time trying to find a lens that meets these critera: - mini lens (for board camer) - Varifocal around 4mm to 8mm, or fixed focal lenth of about 6mm - Auto iris - ir coating for true colors outdoors. Can't seem to find this combination. Can anyone help?

I'm having trouble with a Philips LTC 0829/20ND PTZ camera. The video image is messed up, vertical hold issues and lots of flickering sideways. The onscreen text during startup is also affected, so the problem is after the overlay circuitry. I have taken the camera down and attached it to a different monitor and different power supply and the problem still exists. Any ideas?

My 1304MOB needed a powered cctv microphone.

Finally got it put together. It's a very simple circuit, just lie the diagram above only it switches the center connector of the coax instead of the + wire of the power. It works great. I'll have to use this in other places too... Maybe my front-port camera can swtich to a close-up face image based upon a motion sensor... Hmmm...

I would like to have two cameras attached to the same channel on my DVR, and I'd like for the system to automatically switch between the two channels. The scenario is the rear-facing camera on my dashcam setup. For the thrid time now, while the car was being worked on at a dealership a tech was examining the camera system that is behind a false panel in my trunk. The rear-facing camera is mounted to the towbar. All I caught was their ankles and they were discussing how the system worked and wondering if I was a hidden camera TV show or something. This got me thinking about if someone breaks into my trunk - the camera system will turn on automatically but I'll only catch their feet from the towbar mounted camera. It'd be great to get a face shot (bearing in mind I still have to deal with dark subject/light background etc). So, I'd like to install a second camera inside the trunk that would see someone who enters the trunk. I'd like the trunk cam and towbar cam to share the same channel on the DVR. Normally I want the towbar cam to be active, but when the trunk opens I want the trunk cam to be active instead. Here's a simple circuit I was thinking of: I know this might make the DVR see a VLOSS as the cam switches over, but I can live with that. So, would this work? Would it blow my DVR up?

Thanks!

It's not that it's bad kit necessarily, it's just that capturing number plates is a difficult task to do well. You can get progressive scan analog cameras but they're tough to find. The DVR should have settings to change the image recording quality between CIF and D1, but the cheaper DVRs only have this as a system-wide setting, whereas the better systems let you set D1/CIF per camera. Dropping that one channel to CIF will stop the interlacing problems instantly, but then you're running at half resolution. If your camera is close enough to the target then CIF may work out for you. If you have to drop the entire DVR to CIF then it's not worth it. Also bear in mind that because capturing number plates is such a difficult thing to do well, the cameras used for the task are generally specialised and expensive. My LPR setup uses a BW camera with IR filter, IR emitter and auto-iris ir-friendly lens to help deal with dazzling headlights etc. That one camera cost me over $500.

BTW, I love the euro plates! Can read them from a mile away! Even at full d1 you gave to be zoomed in to pretty much the width of the car to be assured of a good read of a US plate just because the text is so skinny. (speed and lighting are separate issues) A primer on progressive scan vs interlaced: http://www.axis.com/products/video/camera/progressive_scan.htm OP: Is this an IP cam/NVR or analog cam/DVR?

That's a full D1 (or 4CIF) image that is interlaced. You'll get that 'combing' effect (love that term, gonna use it from now!) because the image is made up from two individual frames that were taken a split-second apart. Frame 1 makes up lines 1,3,5 etc, and Frame 2 makes up lines 2,4,6 etc. You could try dropping that camera to CIF and see if you still have enough resolution for a plate capture (try zooming in closer to offset the loss of resolution) Or you can try to slow the cars down so they don't move so quickly through the shot. Or you could try to move the camera to a place where the number plate is move more directly towards or away from the camera to reduce the shifting from side-to-side. The downward angle and car going through shot at an angle is going to make any capture difficult, and a Full D1 interlaced image can't do it, as evidenced above.

Are you using motion detection too? It may be sequencing the motion channels as well. I thought that when there was an alarm it would sequence only the alarm channels, but that would the external alarm channels AND internal motion channels.

I'm trying to find out the time/date of the earliest recorded video, but I can't find a way to do that easily. The event list and record list only shows the events from newest to oldest and it looks like I have to page down approximately 300 times to get there (each page appears to only show the events from a time period of a few seconds, and I can't re-sort the list to oldest first) Any suggestions?

It takes me about ten minutes to figure out how much video I have recorded - I just have to search back 10 days and see if there's video, Then 11, then 12, then 13. Etc. It's a pain.

How to prove he's watching your property without doing anything actionable... Hmmm... How about a long range IR illuminator aimed directly at his camera? It will blind the camera to anything behind it, but not damage anything. Would really only work on a B/W or day/night camera. Check his house for illuminators by pointing a cellphone camera (or other camera with LCD screen) at his house - any bright white dots that appear on the picture that cannot be seen by the naked eye are IR illuminators. If there's one built into the camera facing you, then you could counter with your own illuminator to blind his camera. See if he comes out to 'fix' the camera. If his camera can see your pool then it may be lawyer time - get a cease/desist letter written up. Don't do anything that will damage his property. Catch anything he does to damage your property on camera. CCTV Pro legal question: Can you get a restraining order to force a neighbor to adjust his camera so it does not show your property? Heck, my neighbor asked *me* to aim one of my cameras up to catch his property. Old bullet cam on a spare DVR channel that was watching over my external AC unit back when copper theft was a huge thing. He saw me put it up and asked if I could tilt it up to catch his garage doors in case someone broke it. I was happy to do that, and gave him a still image from the camera so he can see what I can see. It's all about the relationship you have with your neighbors. Mine are all cool.