bike_rider

I just spent a while going through the manual for GV and for my camera (a Pany). I can't find anything that talks about that button. In playing with mine, I found that it causes the camera to spin 180 degrees. It does not matter where the camera is facing, it goes around 180. Odd, but I suppose it could be useful.

Have you done a competitive analysis? There are already several "door bell video intercom systems" on the market. Take alook at their features, and compare them to what has been suggested here.

As another home owner looking to keep an eye on what's going on, let me chime in. As another post said, a PTZ really isn't a great idea for home. I have the Pany PTZ that you mentioned and if I had to do it again I would not buy it. The problem with a PTZ is that it isn't always looking where you want. Unless you are going to sit and monitor it, you are left to its own tracking ability to decide where to look. I keep mine focused on the mailbox at the side walk. As people walk by, it will track them until they go out of view. This is good, but depending on where they go, it can end up pointed at a tree. Then the camera sees the leaves as motion and stays on the tree until the controller times out and sends it back to its home position. You would be much better served by several cameras covering various choke points. The Pany CP484 is an outstanding camera. As far as catching cars speeding, this is tough to do. You will need a camera that allows you to control the shutter speed so the cars are not blurry. Even if you get a good shot, the city isn't going to give anyone a ticket based on your video. And if you are hoping to get license plates, well, let's just say that is harder than you would believe. The first problem is that you can't see plates from more than about 30 degrees off-axis to a car. So, unless there is a turn in the road, or you can hide the camera right next to the side walk, you won't get a good view. Your camera placement is a good start. In general, I like to cover choke points (doors, gates, parking spots) with aclose view and then use a wider view to see general activity. Is your utility panel outside? If so, you might want to cover that.

I've never used the hotline setup, I've only used the emailed alerts. However, let me caution you that Geovision will send many many false motion alerts. GV sees trees, and moving shadows, and leaves and moths and lions and tigers and bears as motion. unless you are looking at interior location with consistent lighting, you will probably not be happy with the frequency of bogus alerts. I ende up using an external passive IR system with GV IO card to know when there really is something moving. There are a bunch of places in GV where you have to setup "alerting" - in the scheduler, on the specific camera (or IO device), in the "general setup" tab.

A neighbor has the Nuvico and I have not been impressed with the image quality. She says that it is set for the high quality settings, but it looks to me like there are a fair number of compression artifacts. Most of her cameras aren't great, but she has a high res pelco B/W that should look pretty good. Is the Nuvico setup wrong or just living up to its price point? Would an ICRealtime DVR give better playback quality? I expect a couple of other neighbors to ask me what to buy and I can't get excited about the Nuvico. I'm using a Geovision system, but I think they will want stand alone units. Thanks

Ah, that is using the GV system to set the presets. Is there a display on the camera view itself? I think the button is "show" on the setup screen in GV.

OK, if you can manually control the camera with GV, then the problem is not in the cable or termination or anything like that. Don't waste any time on those. You are correct, the GV software just isn't sending the right message to the camera to get it to go to a preset. I don't have that camera, so I don't know how the presets are setup. I presume there is some on screen display that you navigate to set them. Is that correct? If so, does the camera go to the presets when you use the OSD? (Again presuming that is how that camera functions.)

What is the camera model and what do you have GV set for?

There are alot of cctv lens calculators on the web. One example is http://www.webcamsoft.com/en/faq/lens_calc.html Covering an area 15 feet wide is actually border line for recognizing a face. I like to keep the covered area at about 6-9 feet. Even so, 15m to target, with a 15 foot field of view and a 1/3 inch sensor, you need a 15mm lens.

Your other option is to use a USB-> Serial converter. Plugs into a USB port and presto, you have a serial (RS-232) port.

When I bought mine, I was told they were built to order, so if anyone knows some places that keeps them in stock, that would be cool.

I use a windows macro recorder to change the settings on my PTZ between day and night. http://www.mjtnet.com This is a very powerful program, but the more functions you use, the more complex it gets. For example, you can tell it to do different things depending on whether or not a given button in on screen. But to do that, you have to know how to do screen captures and save an image of the button and then you have to write a program in their script language. There are good examples on their web site, but if you have never done any programming before, that feature is probably not going to be useful to you.

One other option for viewing at the site is a portable DVD player. We have one and I completely missed the possibilty of using it to aim for the first 5 cameras we put it.

I'd guess that you will not find anything like this because there is little market for it. Coverts are usually made to look to blend into an office setting, and most people don't spray down their offices. However, it should not be hard to adapt something like a PIR to waterproof. A little silicon caulk goes a long way.

At some point it is subjective what is distorted. It you think of the field of view of normal vision, that's something like 45 degrees I'd guess. Once you get wider than that, things look weird. More cameras may be your only solution.

You may be stuck here. A quick check with a field of view calculator says that if you are using a 1/3" sensor, 16 feet from the target with a 30 foot field of view requires about a 2.6mm lens (which you probably can't find). Simply put the wider the angle, the greater the distortion. Your choices are to use a mast to mount the camera (100 feet would need a 16mm lens), cover a smaller area or use more cameras.

What is the exact model of the camera? I can't google for the manual without. Remember that transmit on the card connects to receive on the camera. Did you try just reversing the wires? Did you check continuity on the cable? Did you measure the voltage at the far end? I don't know much about RS485 (my PTZ install with GV worked the first time - lucky me.), but wikipedia says thousands of feet should not be a problem and the voltage tolerances are liberal, so 18-22 gauge is probably fine IF that splice is good. Does the camera manual say anything about termination?

Try com 4. Have you done a lot of these before? What connections on the GV card did you connect to the cameras - specifically which wire to what connection. You might have them backwards.

Com 1 and 3 use overlapping configs, so you should not have to devices on them. You can buy a USB to Serial converter that you can set to com 2. Describe your wiring to the camera. What model of camera?

I just realized that for all the back and forth in this thread, nobody answered the original question.

Lots of places in Geovision to tinker with the quality. For each camera, on the System Config screen, set the recording quality to 5 and press the arrow that lets you choose 720x480. Same screen, set the Rec Video option to Geo MPeg4. Set the video source to 720x480 de-interlace. On the web cam setup, you can set the max resolution for web cam. It is on the video tab. LCD screens tend to look worse than CRTs.

You can send video lost messages to email addresses, so you can send them to the phone. It would be better to use a real alarm system to detect people - what if they DON'T cut the cable? I'd suggest putting the wire in conduit. It'll look better.

You're going to have to give us more information. What kind of phone? What browser on the phone? I don't know anything about the "DVR Net" product (google wasn't helpful), but I would guess that the camera screen requires an Active X plug in and mobile phones don't usually support those. Did you contact tech support? Does the manual say that it should work on your phone?

Can somebody tell me the settings for the best recording quality in geovision? Which codec, etc? No worries abou disk space or CPU or fps, just best image quality. Thanks.