cwatkin

I recently purchased my first 1080P camera and am considering another. Does anyone have any basic specifications for running two 1080P cams at 10FPS or so? I was running 1st gen Core i3 370M laptop as my DVR for a while with much lesser cams but have now experienced issues with the 1080P camera. The video stream looks great when I view it in the software that came with the camera but full of artifacts and such when using iSpy. I tried it on several other computers including a Sandy Bridge i7 quad core laptop and a crappy AMD E-300 APU laptop. Neither one was much different although the CPU use was about pegged on the E-300 unit (these things are a joke). The E-300 is in what I call a disposable Wal-Mart laptop that someone gave me and I decided to see if it would work. I am beginning to suspect buggy software or a configuration error by me as the i7 wasn't much better. I have tried VLC and ffmpeg with slightly different results. Anyone have any suggestions?

The camera is an IP camera. The maker is ANRAN and the model is AR-N4PW-IP if that matters. I am pretty sure I have the situation under control and it isn't because my hardware was lacking. I installed the trial version of Blue Iris and all my problems went away. iSpy was the problem. I have plenty of CPU cycles left for another camera or two in the old Core i3. Conor

Thanks. I did download Blue Iris demo software and the issue seems solved for now. I am back on the Core i3 laptop which is the one I would like to stick with if possible. I need to re-adjust the sensitivity and such as it is a new program to me but hope to get it recording automatically to my liking. I will gladly pay the $50 if it continues to work. I plan to run maybe 2x 1080P cameras and a couple basic cameras operating through an analog to digital conversion and this laptop should do it fine from what you indicate. I played around with several computers in iSpy and had the same problems with all of them. Blue Iris seems to natively interact with the camera a lot better as it uses the media port which iSpy does not. The camera monitoring software also uses this port and works well so I think this is the solution. Conor

I have recently purchased an ANRAN IP 1080P IR array camera. The video feed looks great in the basic software that came with the camera and has excellent color and clarity, plus the response to activity within range of the camera comes through quickly and without delays. I have tried using the ffmpeg and VLC plugin options for the camera within iSpy with varied results on several different computers. The first PC was a 1st gen Core i3 730M laptop. I know the HD video onboard with this is nothing special so I tried a Sandy Bridge Core i7 quad core laptop. Things were better with this laptop and CPU usage was much less but the video feed would still delay or freeze from time to time. I also tried an AMD E-300 APU based laptop which is a pretty miserable excuse for a computer and it wasn't really any worse although the CPU usage was pretty much pegged with only 1 camera. The artifacts do look slightly different with each computer so I think there is something to do with iSpy or VLC not working nicely with the video feed and the graphics chipset of the computer. Sometimes the artifacts are a blank space or colorful vertical lines towards the bottom of the display. Other times it is a random mix of colors like a psychedelic impressionist painting. These odd colors often only appear where there is motion such as grass and brush blowing in the wind. There is also a several second delay in the motion with each computer although it is reduced with the Core i7. I only plan to have maybe 2x 1080P cameras and don't want to dedicate a nice Core i7 to this purpose. I was hoping this cast off Core i3 would do the trick. Anyone know why the feed looks fine in the camera monitoring/configuration software but not ispy? I tried using hardware acceleration in the GPU and this didn't change much although the CPU use went down. I understand a slight delay is unavoidable due to processing overhead of the stream but this is different. I have seen other posts about this but no definite answers. I figure this might also have to do with my configuring something incorrectly as I am new to this.

I am seeing requirements all across the spectrum online. I am wondering if I need to turn off ALL power saving features of the laptop and let the cpu run at 100% all the time. I also see that GPU is quite important for 1080P so am wondering if the 1st gen Core i3 370M with relatively basic onboard intel HD graphics is just not quite enough. I am going to experiment some more with the i7 Sandy Bridge as the onboard graphics are much better than ever before on an Intel platform. It looks like a much lesser CPU will decode 1080p without issues but that a better unit is required to encode or stream as in DVR use??? Is this correct?

I was recently given a dead Dell OptiPlex GX 620 that had once served as a security system for a retail store. The person who gave this unit to me is a store manager but knows nothing technical about computers at all. It was diagnosed as dead and he wanted it disposed of properly. I looked into this again and the unit would power on very intermittently. All my troubleshooting suggests that the motherboard is just plain worn out. Anyway, there is an interesting set of PCI cards inside this machine with 8x BNC ports and some odd strip type connector. One is obviously the main card. There is a chip with "PLX PCI6140-AA33PC G 0620 MMOS6 Singapore" written on it. This card has 4x BNC ports while there is another daughter card that has 4x more. There is an additional daughter card with a ribbon cable that has some odd green connector I have never seen before. This ribbon cable wasn't connected inside the PC so I assume this wasn't being used. I am curious if this card has support for Windows Vista/7 or even 8/8.1. The system was running Windows XP its entire life and I have found some sites suggesting support for at least Windows 7 but then they want you to download some driver update utility of questionable character to update my drivers. I don't see any other brand names or identifying marks on any of these boards. I have a basic two camera CCTV system setup to record to an old laptop I had laying around. It uses 2x cheap Chinese analog to digital USB adapters off eBay and some Chinese analog cameras from Harbor Freight. This setup has worked very well for me and the cameras are sturdy and well made for the money. The image quality is about like old style TV so it is nothing special but much better than nothing. I have seen some nice BNC cameras and was wondering if this card was worth installing in another PC for recording purposes. Anyone else use this card? Do you like it? Conor

I was recently given a dead Dell OptiPlex GX 620 that had once served as a security system for a retail store. The person who gave this unit to me is a store manager but knows nothing technical about computers at all. It was diagnosed as dead and he wanted it disposed of properly. I looked into this again and the unit would power on very intermittently. All my troubleshooting suggests that the motherboard is just plain worn out. Anyway, there is an interesting set of PCI cards inside this machine with 8x BNC ports and some odd strip type connector. One is obviously the main card. There is a chip with "PLX PCI6140-AA33PC G 0620 MMOS6 Singapore" written on it. This card has 4x BNC ports while there is another daughter card that has 4x more. There is an additional daughter card with a ribbon cable that has some odd green connector I have never seen before. This ribbon cable wasn't connected inside the PC so I assume this wasn't being used. I am curious if this card has support for Windows Vista/7 or even 8/8.1. The system was running Windows XP its entire life and I have found some sites suggesting support for at least Windows 7 but then they want you to download some driver update utility of questionable character to update my drivers. I don't see any other brand names or identifying marks on any of these boards. I have a basic two camera CCTV system setup to record to an old laptop I had laying around. It uses 2x cheap Chinese analog to digital USB adapters off eBay and some Chinese analog cameras from Harbor Freight. This setup has worked very well for me and the cameras are sturdy and well made for the money. The image quality is about like old style TV so it is nothing special but much better than nothing. I have seen some nice BNC cameras and was wondering if this card was worth installing in another PC for recording purposes. Anyone else use this card? Do you like it? Conor