Kiwi

I'm sure it's nothing to do with capacitors. Perhaps water has gotten inside the housing and when that is heated by the projector it steams-up the window. Certainly if the housing worked fine last year than that sounds likely. I suppose you could dry out the housing and seal it better. I've made an outdoor camera housings from PVC pipe. I sealed it completely and include some desiccant bags, and a bladder to compensate for temperature induced volume changes. It usually rains enough here that a standard housing would not work well. Another less-practical trick is to run a tube to the housing and purge it continuously with dry air.

So is the condensation on the outside surface of the housing window, or the inside?

I doubt the fdisk/format matters, I've never deleted any existing partition table. In my case I had installed an old 6GB laptop drive of dubious origin. It worked OK for months then started randomly rebooting the DVR every few days but seemed to record OK most of the time. Some playbacks had bad video and sound where none was actually recorded. I replaced it with another type of disk and no more problems. Perhaps the DVR's file system is less tolerant of unmarked disk errors than FAT or NTFS. In fact, almost without doubt that is the case.

You will not know where the problem is until you try another type of hard disk in the DVR. I've seen the same scenario in my DVR.

sounds like the disk is defective

If you go to the Milestone site they are generously offering the Xprotect Professional program free for one camera. Works great for me - I'm just in the evaluation stage also.

If I'm not mistaken, many routers do not respond to a ping from the WAN unless you disable that feature. I just put my AVC782 on DMZ and it works perfectly.

Is your router set first to respond to port 9000 and then connect that to the correct port on the DVR PC's LAN IP address?

To answer that question - Video Server E has a box for changing the password and adding accounts. Assuming no fault on the DVR side, it looks like this boils down to firewall-level issues on the PC. No doubt you have tried switching off any software firewalls and tried another PC, perhaps even with a crossover cable direct to the DVR? The PC's are running WinXP? Are you getting the message: "Login procedure failed" ? And the program version is 1.0.6.3 ? Have you tried a log-in with Internet Explorer? Lastly, I wonder if there is a hardware reset jumper inside the unit?

The password 0000 is for the local control panel, not the network login. If you can't login over the lan using "admin, admin," then perhaps you should "reset to defaults" and try again.

As pointed out, the unit is continuously encoding four channels of video - this is not a trivial computational task and I think you will find that the CPU already has a heat sink *and* expects at least light air flow. From an engineering perspective - in my opinion the forced cooling in the similar 782 is poorly designed and marginal anyway, and to disable it or reduce its effectiveness further with a resistor would be foolish unless you really know what you are doing.

Most ATA66 or higher drives should work, the list is just the ones they have tested. Buy a disk with the understanding that you can return it if it's not compatible, most likely it will work fine.

If it's anything like my AvTech 782 you have my sympathy. If it's designed the same you could move the fan to in-between the disk underside and CPU. I cut a suitable hole in the disk bracket and glued the fan with epoxy to the underside. It now cools the CPU and disk directly and is quieter. You could also place the DVR unit in a small cabinet to try and contain the noise somewhat.

There is no way you will not be able to hear the hard disk in a DVR in your bedroom, fan or no fan. In my case the standard cooling fan in my AVTech 782 was inadequate for cooling the enclosure. I had occasional hard disk errors until I replaced the original fan with a double-thick version and moved the original to in-between the CPU and hard disk underside. The DVR is in a closet in the next room and it is acceptably quiet that far away. FYI, fan noise is normally mostly from the blade tips not the bearings. Using a laptop hard disk would partly reduce the noise.

The middle screw is either a ground or a center tap, either way ignore it.

Yes, you're right - eventually I'll get it! Instead of Mon 00 - 06:00, make it M-F 00 - 06:00

OK, let me try again: M-F 22:00 - 24:00 SAT 00:00 - 06:00 SUN 00:00 - 24:00 MON 00:00 - 06:00 Nothing overlaps (not that it couldn't.)

If you bought cheap cameras you've answered your own question! I would suggest using a box camera with separate auto-iris lens wherever possible One that has impressed me recently is the JVC TK-C925U, a true day/night camera which I found for only US$209. You would have to add the cost of the lens but you are still close to budget.

Just set Sat 5:00 to 24:00, Sun 00:00 to 24:00, and Mon 00:00 to 6:00 On my Avtech 782 (which should be very similar) I also can select "Sat-Sun"

Good job. Having built a few outdoor housings myself I can't resist suggesting that a glass window will work better in the long term. The best source for this sort of thing is a cheap outdoor halogen light fitting which usually have high-quality tempered glass. Another issue is glare from direct sunlight. Some sort of "eyebrow" is useful and the right shape can also deflect rain from running down the window face. A good source of this item is a drawer "pull" from a cabinet hardware store. If your box cover has an O-ring seal there is a good chance it would work fine in direct weather. If water does get in the window will fog long before any damage is done to the camera.

I think you would have had to do a really crappy job splicing the joint to create this problem! Perhaps the (-) leg is disconnected and the camera is returning power via the shield?

Motion detection at night may not be reliable even with more sophisticated selection controls. You might be better off to design a more robust method of detecting entry such as an IR light beam. Even a PIR detector, strategically aimed and masked may work adequately. It's really hard to do this stuff on-the-cheap and expect good performance day and night, to say nothing of the time you will spend on it. The money might be better off being put into a fence and gate. As for your software install, I assumed you un-installed the previous version first?

You need to find out if your router supports DDNS (dynamic DNS). It probably does - my Dlink DSL-604T does but I had to upgrade the firmware. If you have a PC on the LAN running all the time you can alternatively use a windows DDNS client (or any other OS for that matter) to periodically report your internet IP and associate it with a subdomain such as yourname.dyndns.org Either way, get a free account on dyndns.com and configure the router or PC with the same login details. If it still doesn't work try assigning the DVR's LAN IP to "DMZ."

Just looked at the user manual - isn't there a "use IP server" box above the IP as an alternative.

Just an update to my last post - the DDNS works fine on my AVC782.