survtech

One small tip - don't use the Motorola Canopy wireless solution.

I assume megapixel over analog would require the transmission system to pass higher frequencies. That is do-able with coax (but with reduced distance capabilities?) but I have not seen either active or passive CCTV utp converters that are capable of greater than, what, 5-6MHz? Analog megapixel's bandwidth requirements would be just as restrictive as IP's in many respects. It sounds to me like a solution in search of a problem!

Hopefully by then they will have improved the chips to get more than 10,000 write cycles.

It could just be the WD5000YS's. WD is being pretty much silent on the matter other than their report. We've talked to their engineering staff and they minimize the problems. I seem to recall they had similar problems with the 320 and/or 400GB RE's, too. Of note is that there are a substantial number of reports of premature failure of these drives on newegg.com and other websites. Oh, well. In a couple of years we'll have to change our storage once again to accomodate a major expansion. At that time, we will probably switch to a SAN-based storage solution utilizing substantially larger drives (2TB???) and redundant SAN switches. Right now, we are DAS with 8-12TB per server. We are just crossing our fingers that we don't fail a RAID set between now and then.

What good would they do when A-D encoders are not capable of greater than D1?

We are using WD5000YS 500GB Enterprise drives in Infortrend 24-bay arrays. Are you saying initial or long-term failure rates? In actuality, our initial failure rates were much lower than expected. In the last 6 months, the failure rates have nearly tripled from the first 6 months. That is for drives that are only 26 months old. We are now replacing an average of 4 drives every 2-3 weeks out of approximately 800 in production. Even "Recertified" drives that WD sends to replace our failed drives have the same high failure rate. Of the 60 or so Recertified drives we have installed in the last 2 years, at least 6 have failed; making the failure rate approximately 5% per year - nearly the same as the original drives. This is in a temperature and humidity controlled server room. WD did a failure analysis of the last 39 drives we had returned as of November 11. Failure Analysis drives from Deluxe Digital Drive type: WD5000YS-01MPB1 Number of drives returned: 39 Number of drives tested: 31 Date Code of drives returned: May – June 2006 10% - Drive Not Ready 80% - Passed all Tests 10% - Faulty PCBA After that, we started testing all drives that our RAIDs failed using WD's DLG Diagnostics with a desktop computer. Of the 20 or so drives we tested, only one passed and was returned to our replacement pool. Most of the rest were either not recognized by the test computer's BIOS (indicating total failure) or failed the test with one or another error code. That means either WD's testing of our first 39 returns is suspect or DLG Diagnostics and our RAIDs both are not properly testing each drive. I suspect the former.

100 years? I only wish we could get even 5 years out of ours. At this point, we have replaced nearly 10% of our drives and they were new in late 2006. MTBF figures are, if not outright lies, at least fairy tales. Here is an excellent article on hard disk failure rates and MTTF/MTBF: http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html Here's another by David Morgenstern at eWeek.com: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Hard-Disk-MTBF-Wheres-the-Reliable-Reliability-Data/ "As I mentioned in a recent column on mean time between failure, a couple of papers presented at FAST 07 (the USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies) showed that annual disk replacement rates are much higher than predicted, the well-held belief in a burn-in phase for hard disk life cycle was wrong, and the SMART (self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology) code in hard drives and storage management software—long touted by the industry as the best predictor of disk failure—was mostly a security blanket for IT managers. "

We've had many cameras, both indoor and outdoor, operating for over 7 years. We use mostly Pelco, Ganz and Ikegami. By the way, Ikegami warranties many of their cameras for 10 years.

This is what I've used in the past: Radio Shack 2-Conductor Automotive DC Accessory Cable Model: 270-026 If you want them to be weatherproof, assemble them with a dab of silicone dielectric grease. I dislike Molex connectors. They tend to oxidize and the females tend to loosen up, causing poor contact.

True, but in other respects, they do make excellent cameras. Just another case of engineers being uncoupled from the real world!

Unfortunately, the Dallmeiers are not cheap. In fact they are relatively expensive compared to many.

Many cameras use terminals for each wire, rather than coaxial power connectors. With those, you can use any type of quick connect if you choose. Or you can just attach the power wires directly to the terminals.

In the case of 24VAC supplies, 29 volts usually doesn't affect the cameras negatively, probably because most, if not all, 24VAC cameras have internal rectifiers, filters and regulators. I would agree with you for DC cameras, though. In fact, some manufacturers (Dallmeier for one) specify 12VDC +/- 5%. Personally, I think that is stupid on their part. I burned one of their cameras out because the supply I used was actually 13.8VDC. How do camera manufacturers expect the installer to maintain regulation that tight? If you have relatively long power cable runs, you would need to adjust the voltage under load and keep anything that varies the load (IR LED's, heater/blowers, etc.) on a separate power circuit. STUPID! In that regard, I would put as much blame on the camera manufacturers as I would on the installers. There are a number of ways to regulate or limit the voltage within the camera and the cost to add these is piddling. In quantity, voltage regulator circuits should not add more than $1.00 to production cost of a camera and a simple "crowbar" zener and fuse would be even cheaper. The same applies to DC polarity protection. A full-wave rectifier bridge costs maybe 10¢, yet many manufacturers don't bother to incorporate them into their cameras. All of this makes an installer's job more difficult than necessary. If you really want to be consciencious with DC cameras, in many installations you would have to use either separate power supplies for each camera or supplies with separately adjustable regulators for each camera. Then you would have to carefully connect each camera to the supply and jump through hoops trying to adjust each supply so that each camera receives the proper voltage. Not an easy task! That is a prime reason why we almost never use DC cameras.

What would you consider to be among the best license plate capture cameras? These would need to capture, but not "read" the rear license plates of vehicles going in and out of gates at a gated community. We would prefer to record the result in analog since we already have analog DVR's and will have to feed the video approximately 1000 ft. from the gates to a guard shack. Our supplier is recommending the Extreme CCTV or Messoa cameras and we have no experience with either. Any help would be appreciated.

Obviously, you've never worked with the Honeywell Enterprise NVR system! For viewing the original data stream, yes. For transcoding, not necessarily.

That's exactly what the Honeywell Enterprise and many other enterprise systems do. If it's done well, there are no perceivable problems with the video. There are, however, other downsides to using transcoders: * The cpu power requirements of transcoding limit the number of IP (especially megapixel) cameras per server. * In some cases, the transcoders limit frame rates. * Transcoders must be custom-designed for each IP camera. * Transcoding is, in effect, image manipulation and could be challenged in court.

Define the two. In our casino, with 900+ analog cameras, we have approximately 300TB of storage, running all cameras 7/24/365 at 30fps and mostly D1 resolution with 14 days retention using MPEG-2. If we add some megapixel cameras with MJPEG, we will easily have to expand to 0.5PB or more. That kind of storage necessitates RAID boxes; either DAS, NAS or SAN. The cost of empty 24-bay RAIDs is approximately $8,000 and 1TB enterprise drives (don't use desktop drives in RAID enclosures) are approximately $180 each x 24 = $4,320 so 24TB raw is approximately $12k. Net with a hot spare and RAID-6 striping would be 21TB. Add the cost of SAN switching and data path redundancy and the system can cost at least $1000 per TB. Most enterprise systems would cost in that range. We're not talking mom and pop store systems here, but there are many apps that require that kind of horsepower: prisons, airports, large corporate networks and, of course, casinos to name a few.

Are you sure the power supply output is 24VDC? If that is the case, no wonder the cameras are burning up. Use a multimeter to check the voltage at a camera. Most cameras will accept +/- 10%, so a camera rated at 12VDC should be fed a maximum of 13.2VDC.

Corrosion of the platters? I thought they were non-corrosive! Wikipedia: "Platters are typically made using an aluminium or glass substrate. In disk manufacturing, a thin coating is deposited on both sides of the substrate, mostly by a vacuum deposition process called magnetron sputtering. The coating has a complex layered structure consisting of various metallic (mostly non-magnetic) alloys as underlayers optimized control of crystallographic orientation and grain size of the actual magnetic media layer on top of them, i.e. the film storing the bits of information. On top of it a protective carbon-based overcoat is deposited in the same sputtering process. In post-processing a nanometer thin polymeric lubricant layer is deposited on top of the sputtered structure by dipping the disk into a solvent solution, after which the disk is buffed by various processes to eliminate small defects and verified by a special sensor on a flying head for absence of any remaining asperities or other defects (where the size of the bit given above roughly sets the scale for what constitutes a significant defect size). In the hard disk drive the hard drive heads fly and move radially over the surface of the spinning platters to read or write the data. Extreme smoothness, durability, and perfection of finish are required properties of a hard disk platter." In my experience with hundreds of drives, the most common failure is mechanical - voice coils, bearings, etc. The next most common failure is head crashes. The third most common failure is electronics. I suppose corrosion could be a factor in some of the above but I doubt it would be of the platters. I've talked in depth with Western Digital engineers about this since we have approximately 800 disks recording video in our system and experience about 1-2 failures a week now that the drives are two years old.

You can't hibernate a computer that is running an app or the app won't run.

If all cameras draw 4 watts, one of the variations of the basic ALTV2416 should do. The other versions are just slightly different in configuration. Example: ALTV2416 - 16 Fused Outputs CCTV Power Supply. 24VAC @ 8A or 28VAC @ 7A ALTV2416CB - 16 PTC Outputs CCTV Power Supply. 24VAC @ 8A or 28VAC @ 7A First determine your individual camera and total power requirements, then select the type of fusing you want (fuses or PTC's), then decide if you want 2-wire or 3-wire power cord and whether you want UL rated outputs or not. If you have trouble with ground loops, use one with isolated outputs. If you have PTZ's or outdoor cameras with heater/blowers, use the ALTV2416300 or the ALTV2416600. The difference is the power capabilities - the 2416 is approximately 1/2 amp per output (200VA total). The 2416300 is approximately 3/4 amp per output (300VA total) and the 2416600 is 1.5 amp per output (600VA total). Since PTZ's typically draw 20VA and heater/blowers typically draw 30-60VA, the 300 and 600 can drive a number of higher power cameras mixed in with lower power ones, but not 16 PTZ's with heater/blowers, which can draw up to 80VA each. Then you need either one of the isolated 28A units or a number of 4-8 camera high power supplies.

You did see the previous posts in this thread, didn't you?

You still have to enable Remote Desktop on the computer that you want to control or Remote Desktop will not find it. I usually put a shortcut for Remote Desktop on the controlling computer's desktop.

There are a number of ways to control one PC on a network from another PC on the same network. The easiest and cheapest method is to enable Remote Desktop on the PC you want to control. Do that by right-clicking on My Computer, click on Properties and click on Remote (in XP). Check "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer". At the computer that you want to control from, click Start - Run and type mmc . When the console pops up, click File - Add/Remove Snap-in, click on Computer Management, click Add, click Another Computer, type its name or IP Address, then click Finish. Here is a link to a Microsoft tech note that also shows another way to enable Remote Desktop: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/default.mspx You can also use a program like PCAnywhere and others.

They are only sold as part of a complete system which includes the monitor. The monitor itself provides the camera power in those types of systems and they typically use 2-pair twisted-pair cable to connect the camera to the monitor. One pair is for power and the second pair is for video. Here are the camera's specs: VCM7D130/00T, Eazeo Digital Color Camera 1/4-inch minidome camera with 3 mm integrated lens, PAL Here is a link to the systems that use those cameras: http://products.boschsecurity.asia/en/APR/products/bxp/SKUF.01U.020.959-P3