CottyGee

Greetings from Sunny Phoenix! I'm a homeowner and a cheap bastid on top of that. Oh - and I'm long winded. BACKGROUND Over the years, there have been various incidents of vandalism - nothing major - but I'm interested in catching the vandals. Most recently, some neighborhood teenaged twit has taken to "egging" my beater car that's parked in the driveway.... So, my main interest at this point is being able to get enough "evidence" to identify someone in my driveway at night with our "coach lights" on (two 75 watt lightbulbs to illuminate my 30'W x 20'D driveway). I'm thinking a frame rate of 7.5/sec is probably just fine for my purposes... But I'm concerned about the "crispness" and detail of recorded playback - it seems from what I've read that sometimes, a LOT is lost through compression, etc. I think I read somewhere that MJPEG would be the best compression for my type of application?? My neighbor does surveillance systems for hospitals and such, and he gave me an old camera/housing, transformer, some Siamese cable and an old time-lapse VCR and monitor - spare stuff he had laying around. I mounted the camera up about 15 feet up and 10 feet from the side of the driveway, looking down and hooked the rest of the system up, but unfortunately, the VCR is kaput - dead. I'm thinking I'd like to get a 4-camera DVR, and later on, pick up a few other cameras and run the cabling and so on. What DVR will allow me to identify someone standing maybe 20 feet from the camera, in the dark, partially illuminated (see Background)? That's all the resolution I really need, and I don't really need any fancy bells and whistles - just something with sufficient quality that when paired with the right camera, will give the desired results. Oh - and I'm thinking I want to just do a stand-alone DVR at this point, as opposed to a PC-based system. I just want something simple and straight forward. I've considered just buying a time-lapse VCR, but I like the idea of the motion activation. Oh - and I also like the like 5-second "buffer" that shows a few seconds of video before the triggering event - cool technology! Internet monitoring isn't so important, and "live" monitoring while at home isn't a big deal - just getting the person recorded is all I think I need... Eventually, I'd add maybe one interior camera and one at the back yard, and maybe a 2nd camera on the driveway from a different angle. But at this point, with one good quality camera (neighbor says it's worth $400) installed and wired, I'd like to get an idea of what I need to spend on a DVR... Is there a basic unit that's worth considering? $300 might be easy to justify to the wife. $500 will take a bit longer. $1,000 probably won't happen, given that I could do the VCR thing for a couple hundred... What say ye to this cheap bastid?? Thanks in advance, and thanks for putting up with my longwindedness!

I think it's more camera positioning than anything else. To get the quality you'd need to ID someone from the "bird's eye view" of what happened, you'd need HDTV quality. And that ain't happenin' on this guy's budget! Hope this helps. I think the quality is satisfactory - and I also think it's better than others at this price point. I'm talking about the playback quality, by the way.

Well, I caught someone at 11 minutes after midnight last night, running up my driveway. It was the neighbor 17 yr. old, and he was using my driveway to avoid his Dad's CCTV cameras! LOL Quality for IDing him wasn't great. But I had the kid's Mom take a look, and she instantly recognized him - in part due to his clothing and his gait while running (jogging). Anyhow, I tweaked the settings a bit - I set the "bitrate" at 2 MB/sec, which I'm hoping might increase quality. The documentation on the G4 is pretty basic and does a downright lousy job of explaining the purpose of the various settings, so the "bitrate" could have to do with output to a backup device. I'm not sure. Anyhow, while I wish the resolution were better, it's not bad, and it was good enough for Mom to ID her kid at the farthest reaches of my camera. Maybe with a 2nd camera, I can improve upon what I'm capturing... So, thanks to all who helped in my (ongoing) endeavor at DIY CCTV.

The unit arrived yesterday and is up and running now. Having some problems with the motion activation - getting it to not be triggered all the time. Guess I'll have to play with the activation areas a bit - tree motion reflecting off the windshields of the cars seems to be triggering it!

The focus is fine during the day. Probably not *quite* as crisp as before, but good enough. As for the DVR - yes, I bought it through Intellicam. I didn't find any prices that were less - they dropped the price on the 4ch by $50 a coupla weeks ago, which made them less than the cheapest eTailer I found in many, many Google searches... G4-LTA is what I bought w/ a 250GB hard drive and VGA output.

Well, I bought a DVR. Got the Intellicam G4-LTA w/ the H.264 compression and upgraded to a 250 GB HDD, which was a less-than-$50 add on. It should arrive toward the end of next week... Thanks to everyone for their help.

I'm curious what you picked for your D1 Realtime. (I didn't reply because I didn't have any idea what to suggest! )

Thanks, UMDRanger. I appreciate your suggestion. Two cameras for the driveway is, in fact, what I had planned - though I'm not at all confident of really being able to get a "choke point". The nature of a 3-car wide driveway is such that there are multiple paths of approach... So, my thought was that I would install one camera in plain view (in an enclosure) and the 2nd camera looking down and concealed - in the attic looking through a louvered gable vent. I'm not sure what else I can do, given that there are 4 approaches to the house, 3 of which are likely paths for vandals or burglars... But what do I know? I'm a homeowner, so heck - you guys might have some brilliant idea that's never occurred to me... Which of course is what I'm here! So keep those ideas comin'!

Well, that's certainly possible. Well, I've been assuming that what I've been viewing has been highest resolution/framerate... At least w/ stuff from sites offering units for sale. I have no objection to brief storage times. I don't anticipate actually recording much, since I plan on using motion activation. I could probably record a month of motion activated uncompressed video on the smallest HDD that would come with any unit... It's just my driveway and back yard I want to capture. Even if I could only retain for a WEEK, that wouldn't kill me... Retaining a week's video at a high quality setting would be just fine with me! What I want to be able to do is recognize a known person walking on my driveway (3 cars wide). So that's what - maybe their entire body taking up maybe 1/3rd of the screen? Probably an unrealistic hope that I'll get that... Probably need one of those IP cameras or something ultra-high res.

No, but I need to do something soon. Recording on the time lapse VCR sucks! I haven't been very impressed with image quality from the movie files I've watched of different machines. So far I haven't seen anything where you'd have a prayer of identifying a person without a shot that is pretty close - like a from-the-waist-up type shot, where the person's body more than fills the frame. I have seen the G4-LTA, and to me, I couldn't really say it's any better or worse than the other machines I viewed.

Man alive... I'm really struggling with this. Picking a DVR, I mean. What can I post that will get me the help I need/want?? The most helpful things so far are me seeing screen shots of, or "movie" files of, actual playback, and viewing a machine's playback. I've still got some I need to watch that are on YouTube.... Overall, I'm finding image quality to be surprisingly less than I expected... I suppose lots of concessions have been made regarding image quality to reduce file size for transmission over the 'Net. Anyhow, I'm definitely on the very low end of the DVR market, price-wise. And so far, I haven't found anything with an image quality that "WOW"s me that I can afford... Budget is $500 or under, and the quality of the image that can be retrieved from the hard drive is the most important thing to me. So far, there are maybe 3 machines I'm considering: Avermedia 1304 + Net G4-LTA H.264 DVR (whose brand IS this, anyhow??) AVTech AVC761 (CPcam CPD561) / I have yet to find something stunning... I was *hoping* the G4-LTA would be impressive, but it didn't seem a whole lot better or worse than others I've seen. Is there a clear winner for recorded image quality in my price point, or are these machines going to stack up fairly close? Any help appreciated. I've got to do something soon. The time-lapse VCR sucks!

Oops! I think I knew that... I edited my original post.

Thanks for the reply. I don't see network performance being much of an issue. Backup isn't an issue - as a homeowner, the only time I'd need to "keep" something would be on the rare occasion that something "happens". For the AVTech AVC760, is network the only way to get video off the machine, or can it dump video to a thumbdrive or something??

Wow! I had to check to be sure I didn't write your first post! LOL That's pretty much my situation. I live in a cul-de-sac, and a neighborhood kid is egging one of my cars (and throwing raw hamburger on it and writing obscenities on the car w/shaving creme, etc.). I've been told who it is, but I'd like to have "proof" before I go making accusations. (Plus, I promised to protect the source, who would be identified immediately if I confronted this kid and his parents.) I've currently got a camera installed and a time-lapse VCR recording - 24 hrs/day (one T-120 tape, so maybe a frame/sec??). Oh - and it's just my ~30'X25' driveway I'm recording, using the "coach lights" for night. Anyhow, I'll keep an eye on this to see what's recommended. Your situation sounds harder than mine, in terms of the solution - i.e., you need AMAZING resolution, like what you'd get from an 8 megapixel photo or something... (Wish somebody made something as simple as a high-resolution digital camera that would fire off ~3-4 shots/sec for a few minutes when triggered by motion...)

Let's say you have a budget for a DVR of max $500. Assuming the right cameras, cabling, etc. - what DVR would you buy and why if your only concern was the quality of the recorded image for evidence/identification purposes? Nothing else matters as much as the quality of the image.

Well, okay. Got me there. How 'bout 4 channels, and ability to record on motion detect, and hold say 10 hrs of motion detect content at maybe 7.5 frames/sec. LOL - take that machine, hook it up to a hard drive and give it the ability to record time-lapse and do motion detect, and that just might do it.

Thx, Mr.S. Did you look at any of the videos I mentioned, or is that just marketing bologna not worth considering? For what it's worth, I'm not imagining much in the way of remote playback. Would a JPEG 2000 provide better pic quality than H.264 for the same $$$? What I'm asking is, would a JPEG 2000 machine provide more resolution as evidence for playback to police, etc. than a H.264? Or is that a dumb question?

Don't know about DVRs, but in computer servers, our tech geeks here at work swear by nothing other than Seagate. I personally have sworn off Western Digital, due to the Click of Death...

That is exactly my concern. The Intelicam G4-LTA looks good to me just reading the marketing info, and the price is within my budget. But I've hesitated to buy because of exactly what you said above, kensplace... They've got 3 video clips that they claim to be "worst case" quality. If I trust those videos to in fact BE worst case, then I think I'm okay with the unit... (Sorry - it won't let me post those sites as links for another 3 days. ) But they're at intellicamusa dot com... www(dot)intellicamusa(dot)com/video/ptz.wmv www(dot)intellicamusa(dot)com/video/indoor.wmv www(dot)intellicamusa(dot)com/video/IR.wmv Any opinions? How does this quality compare with the lower-end residential 4-channel systems using the MPEG4 compression technology like the AVTech/CPCam or AverMedia? Oh - and who exactly IS "Intellicam"? Are they the manufacturer? Or is this a generic Chinese unit they've slapped their label on? Oh - one more! They really tout the Texas Instruments DaVinci Technology DSP chip. Is this chip really all that they make it out to be? Seems reasonable to me that hardware based compression would be superior or more efficient or cheaper (or all three) than perhaps other compression methods... Help! Thanks in advance. Hope I haven't violated any rules... Just tryin' to get info...

Howdy. I'm a homeowner from Phoenix. I've got some "spare parts" my neighbor gave me - he does commercial surveillance maintenance & upgrades. I've been having a car get "egged" by neighborhood teens. So this past weekend, I put up a single camera overlooking my driveway this weekend, which looks good - except that the timelapse VCR my neighbor gave me to use is dead, it seems. Oh well! Anyhow, so I have this budding DIY video system. I'm liking what I'm seeing, and thinking I might like to expand this to a DVR and maybe 4 cameras - 3 outside and 1 inside, I'm thinking... Anyhow, I started a thread in the DVR forum, but I thought I should stop by here and say "hi". Oh - in addition to being a cheap bastid (i.e., DIY rather than spend the $6,000 I was quoted by my security company), I'm also an avid cigar smoker. I'm active on a cigar discussion forum, and smoke mostly strong Honduran cigars.

Hello. I am posting this to increase my post count so I can send a PM. Damned spammers...

I adjusted the focus last night, in the dark. Picture is MUCH better. I think I've probably got the video quality I need, even with VHS playback, tho a bit more detail would obviously be better! So far, I'm most intrigued by the G4-LTA mr.surveillance suggested. Sure would like some feedback on that unit tho!

Camera's a PELCO. The only markings I could find were: ICS-2CRV4A

That's a valid point. I get it - the whole "weakest link" thing... I've gotta get back up there and tweak the focus on the camera - it looks nice and sharp during the day but at night when the iris opens, it's blurry as hell! So I'll see what I can find for markings... I *DO* know it's a variable focal length auto-iris camera that came out of a professional install. I'm not all that concerned about cameras, since I've only got the one, which didn't cost me anything. If I'm not happy with its performance, I'll replace it and use it somewhere else. I'm actually thinking that I'll prolly eventually put the existing camera inside the house, and put a day/night IR camera in its place...