RobAnsell

Essence25, I sent you a PM. Give me a call so I can see if I can help you out with this. This is not a typical situation, and I have a system with a Nvidia 250GTS with 196.21, and it does having this problem.

I always wondered if you needed a real copy of windows to get Parallels to run, if you were going to be on the up and up. Does it also degrade video performance, since it is virtualizing the hardware? I am going to load it up on my iMac and find out!

I am using the arecont 3130m cameras. originally advised not to use their software! Is it a sufficiently powerful DVR management system? You can not use the AXIS camera station to manage Arecont 3130s. Our software for the server runs on Windows and Linux, our clients run on windows, linux and Mac OSX. Hell, SSN did a blog post about it http://securitysystemsnews.com/blogs/2008/04/security-on-mac.html

We (exacq) are releasing a Mac client next week. You need OSX 10.4 or 10.5 and it has to be an Intel based processor. Let me know if you want a beta copy!

We just came out with our Mac Client at ISC West. You can see more here: http://www.exacq.com/blog/ Unfortunately, our server software will need to run on Windows or Linux. Would that be a possibility for you?

Exacq software can do that after export. Not sure about any of the others though.

I am actually impressed with the ACM4200. We have one in our lobby, and the image is great for the price. But the one thing that I don't really like about it is the housing, which reminds me of the AXIS 207 in that you can't put it inside an enclosure easily. How can you beat the price on it though? $200 for a 2 megapixel camera that does MPEG-4?

I REALLY don't like that... Every camera I have seen has horrible motion detection compared to DVRs I have used. Compressed or uncompressed the cameras right now aren't too smart and unless they get smarter you are limited. This also makes it tough to get unsupported cams to work, MJEPG we have now although not really standardized is at least reasonably easy to connect. I can possibly swing that with exaqc but tring to get the motion data is a whole different story. I totally understand having an option to rely on motion from the cam, it works and does fine for the basics. I do think a leader in software should have some advanced tools to reduce false positives or provide greater accuracy to the IO controls. Which exacq should have covered better then most as well as I believe you have a whole line of IO controls even offering analog capture. With our Analog board, we do the motion detection in the hardware. And you are right, some of the cameras have crap motion detection. We are looking in to doing our own motion detection on the server, but we are worried about the CPU cycles that would be needed for that. Right now you need a minimal cpu to do 24 cameras recording. That CPU will have to become a high end dual core or quad core for the same number of cameras. We are also investigating other means of doing the detection through hardware other than the CPU. I personally can't believe we (the industry) are letting these camera manufacturers off the hook. They need to improve their motion detection in the camera instead of having the user shoulder the burden by buying a more expensive CPU. Motion detection and analytics in general need to be done at the edge BEFORE the image gets altered by using compression. If you take a look at AXIS, they are starting to do this. But others are not. I will keep you updated on when we make the changes in our software. Thanks for the feedback!

We do our motion detection on the Camera. We think its more efficient and accurate that way as the motion detection is done BEFORE the video gets compressed. I am surprised LuxRiot is that inefficient. I heard some good things about them. If you want a demo copy of our software, send me a PM and I will hook you up. -Rob

Well the software running as a server is hyper efficient. I am recording 24 cameras at 30 fps D1 resolution MJPEG right now on a Celeron 1.8 GHz processor (a little test box I made). CPU is about 13-24%. Watching the cameras though takes more CPU. What frame rates, resolutions and formats you looking at doing?

I might need to talk to you about VoIP systems, we are thinking about upgrading here a the office. -Rob

Sounds like you need more cameras to me. If you can't cover the whole area with a single camera, why not go with a bunch of smaller cameras? -Rob

We have the ACM-4200 here at the office. Nice little megapixel camera for a nice price. I have been plugging it with people who ask for recommendations. Keep up the good work! -Rob

I would love to see it. This is something that a lot of people have a problem with, and I would love to hear how your experience was with the Wi-Spy. -Rob

I wish I could say we were the only ones that were doing this, but a majority of the higher end software manufacturers do this as well. You could always change the .EXE into something that the mail server could accept, but I agree that this is a PITA. You can also export it as a native .ps file, but the player would not be included. This would be difficult to do, as it would need to be implemented at the camera level. I believe AXIS is implementing security on their end that could enable something like this, but that is in the future and not released yet. It is something we will look in to later, but it won't be in the next release, as we are in beta testing for it already. Nice suggestion. Hmmm. It would require a program to be installed on their computer though. Let me talk to the Engineers and see if it is feasible. Looking forward to seeing you too! -Rob Ansell Product Manager at Exacq