phred

Your mainboard drivers should have been installed by Dell (unless you have a late Friday afternoon special ). Have checked out all I can find about your card and I am sure it does H.264 in software. If it was full hardware compression Wave -p would be making a big song and dance about it. Hardware compression cards are relatively recent and the chips make the cards much more expensive (my four channel card is $600 in the US). Running at 240 fps you are getting remarkable performance especially since H.264 is very processor intensive. High CPU usage is definitely what you should expect at this frame rate. Dropping down to only one channel or cutting back the frame rate should give you a drop in CPU but a bug in the software keeps the CPU running high. Wave -p have a fix that should solve the problem but cpu will still be high at high frame rate. I see a lot of cards coming from the far east described as ' H.264 Hardware Capture Card' - better read that twice. If you are ever looking for a true hardware compression card then check the chips onboard. A true hardware compression card will have DSP chips like the Texas Instruments DM64x or Philips PNX1500. All the ones I have seen also have around 256Mb RAM on board. Regards

Sure I'll sell you some

Maybe one day I will but I am scared of guns and George Bush

Hey, I'm really disappointed now. I love big trees. Ever seen the pictures of that one they cut a tunnel through for a road rather than go round it - think it was something like 30 feet diameter.

Jokes on me - in the US you call it LPR - License Plate Recognition

Nice little covert job here http://www.roundshot.ch/xml_1/internet/de/application/d438/d925/f934.cfm Just being silly. But if you use something high res you can drop the spec on the lens and get wider coverage at the same time.

NPR = Number Plate Recognition

Thanks for the info Russ, I would really need to see the chips on the card to be sure but here are my thoughts. There is no mention of hardware compression in the spec so I am wondering why you are sure that the card does hardware compression – maybe it says so in the manual or something. Why do you have encode.exe running in software – have not seen anything like this while running a full hardware compression card (but I don't know them all). Dropping from 8 camera view to 1 , I would expect less CPU if software is serving the video but agree it seems excessive. The change from the ATI card to on-board graphics could simply be caused by BUS arbitration ie graphics card and capture board sharing the same BUS (just guesswork though) Have you checked the recorded video to see if you are getting the frame rate you think you are getting. I have seen a few cards that just drop loads of frames when they cannot keep up. If you can transcode the video into an AVI then load into VirtualDub you will find the true frame rate. Also check the size of your video files - H.264 should compress them way down - just for reference I get around 2Mb for 1 minute of video at D1 25fps and quality is hard to tell apart from the live view. Don't forget to check your software for that bug I mentioned, there should be a patch for it that could be an easy fix. Regards

Must be a new design then, what compression chip are they using? My DVR only uses a few % cpu at 100fps and D1 res. with motion detection also running on all channels.

Take those specs with a big pinch of salt. You need a camera with wide dynamic range (WDR) to cope with headlights. If you want reliable number plate recognition then I suggest you look for a proper NPR camera, they are highly specialised and built for the job.

Pretty sure CollinR is on the right track and the route of your problem is not your graphics card. Please remember that this card is not a hardware compression card. Unless the design has changed, the Ether uses Philips SAA 7130. This is a 9 bit ADC (analogue to digital converter) and not a hardware video compression chip - video compression is done by your CPU. Processing 240 fps in H.264 takes a lot of processing power. If you want to run at this frame rate and also want low CPU usage then you need a proper hardware compression card. The card I use will run on a 2ghz pentium doing 100fps at 704x576 with around 6% cpu. One other thing- I remember something about a bug in the software for this card that causes high CPU usage even with only one channel running, so check Wave-P for a fix.

Also worth looking at some of the multimegapixel IP cameras like those from Arecont. They can do high frame rate at lower resolution.

Ultrasonic device called a Mosquito is becoming popular in the UK only works on teenagers (and dogs) though.

5 metres in diameter in 30 years is some growth rate. Just remember to leave some room for growth or the bark will soon engulf your camera.

No knowledge of this exact model but others I have seen in the Samsung SHR range (RTOS, mpeg 4) will not allow you to read the drive directly in a PC. Disks use a different format and files are encrypted – I think each machine has a unique code. On those I have seen, you can output a converted AVI or view files on a connected PC, but that is it.

If you really need that frame rate you will need to look outside cctv stuff. Take a look at machine vision cameras, they can go to very high frame rate - the cameras and capture cards are expensive.

Thanks Rory, Works a treat Regards

Cheers Rory, I will check that out. Fortunately the Vguard cards run just fine on a plain vanilla XP install, so chopping down XP is more about elegance and convenience and not for stability/performance. - although leaving it with the ability to play Call of Duty or whatever is probably not the best idea. The fastest way for me would be to stick with the same hardware each time, install and configure everything then use disk cloning to make a drive image. It would take less than 5 minutes to copy over the image to a new drive. Only problem is XP activation/license no. (I know a way round this but don't want to go there). Running Linux from a live CD is even more attractive but I would then need my DVR software and drivers and that is the cruncher. Writting the code to run H.264 on this hardware is a job for a team of ninjas. Had a look at Vista not long ago. I won't be going near it until we have cheap quadcores running at 5GHz. It's a real hog.

Its not me.

Might also need the skis. It has started to snow here

Truth is there are only around 200 hard core programmers working on Linux, then loads of enthusiasts creating small apps on the fringes. If you want to run a dedicate server doing a single task or do some hard core programming down at the hardware level -like CollinR's example- then Linux rules. As your every day desktop though it is no match for XP in simply allowing you to get on with the task. I don't have Linux installed on any box, I mostly just run Knoppix from a live CD – You can let the kids loose on this without fear of screwing up your system or picking up something nasty from the web. Can see many advantages in running a DVR this way – like no boot partition or OS install. Should work well with hardware compression cards as most have onboard RAM. As for MACs – their latest gui may be slick but the hardware has always been overpriced. Once had to replace the motherboard in one - £700 when comparable PC mobo cost £90. Anyway this guy sums up the MAC experience better than I can - enjoy

What is the spec on the HP? Would you be happy with low resolution recording at low frame rate – a few frames per second per camera– or is your requirement for something better? Other question you should ask is how much the company has spent on installing 12 cameras and are they still up to the mark. If they are good professional jobs then it is worth spending the money on a good recording solution and getting value out of them.

Did you catch the guys that stole your lawn then?

Sorry to hear of the reason for your trip. Hope you will also get some time to relax and enjoy some real beer. Weather is getting warmer and wetter throughout the UK so you can expect everything all in one day at this time of year.