morten.tor

A camera that is labelled 4K ought to be able to deliver a full 4K live stream too. I think they are trying to deal with the idea that a 4K stream is "wasted" on a 1080p screen. Naturally, when you are looking at the full FOV, you might say that 75% of the pixels sent across are not seen, and therefore "wasted". But if you digitally zoom into the live feed, you can zoom 4x before you see ANY pixelation on a 1080p screen - assuming that you are using the entire screen for the video feed. If you are showing the video in a smaller window (most likely you are), you can zoom in even further before pixelation occur. Keep in mind that if bandwidth is an issue, then - having a 4K go to the NVR, while opening a secondary 1080p stream to a client will obviously INCREASE total bandwidth output from the camera, while on the other hand, lowering the bandwidth from the NVR to the client. Another option is to do server side transcoding (to go from 4K to 1080p for example), but that is VERY CPU (or GPU if you like) intensive. 4K is going to require some pretty beefy client machines if you want to see more than a few cameras on screen at once, OR a whole lotta bandwidth. (why do people call it 4K UHD? isn't UHD redundant?)

Hey Forum, There are now a couple of free, cloud storage solutions: SkyDrive, Google Drive, DropBox and I am sure there are more. For the DYI'er it would seem like a good way to do a simple cloud based solution, but are there any systems (cameras or NVRs) out there that allows the camera to upload to any of these services?

Just so I understand fully, I've got video surveillance here, but it requires a PC that must be up and running 24-7. If I have a PC running, I might as well record all the time, that way I don't miss anything (perhaps due to misconfiguration of motion detection). But on the other hand, I don't really need 24-7 video. If I am at home, I might need one or two cameras online, and the inside cameras do not need to record at all. Naturally, at night, and when I am not at home, I want the cameras to be online. I have an access control system, that consists of a lot of PIR detectors around the house. These are cheap and simple to install. When I then leave the house, the system gets armed and the cameras kick in too - the PIR detectors work in darkness and don't trigger when the cat walks around the house. If they DO trigger, I can set it up so that the lights turn on, and the cameras start recording. I would imagine that 99% of the time, there's nothing going on, and so the cameras are not taxing the bandwidth. But if something were to happen, the amount of data uploaded would probably not cause me to hit the cap. I suppose I COULD set up the cameras to upload to an FTP server, but that requires a lot of manual fiddling it seems. So I was just wondering if there was an app that would allow me to point to a camera and say "if you have motion, upload to my OneDrive" (SkyDrive is now called OneDrive... trademark issues ), and if there isn't - is there's no need for it either? A little disclosure: I work for a company that makes video surveillance software - as a developer.