sportster

Hello all! First of all I should congratulate you on running and participating in a very informative forum. There is some very professional information available around here! That's why I'm hoping that you can assist me in my current situation. I am a somewhat adept computer guy but don't know much about CCTV. My associate has a business with 16 camera providing surveillance 24/7. I have some very basic information about it which I will be posting at this time, but I can certainly provide more precise and detailed info including models, configuration, etc. as required. Right now each of the 16 cameras is set on approx. one monochrome frame every 5 seconds, feeding through a multiplexer and then into a Sony tape deck. He can control the multiplexer to show all 16 cams at once on his monitor or have only one cam showing. What we want to do is eliminate the tape deck, convert the signal into digital, record it on a 250GB Hard Drive (or RAID array if necessary) and also allow my associate to review this stream and stored frames from his home over broadband. I have no problem setting up a computer running Win XP Pro on ADSL with the HD and/or RAID and having him access it via Remote Control from his home. The part that has me stumped is how to get the multiplexer to act as an input to the Hard Drive. He is not interested specifically in controlling the multiplexer from home, but if he could get from his home PC: a) the full 16 cam composite view whenever he wanted b) access to the archived frames on the HD ...then he would be a very happy boy! Any and all assistance would be profoundly appreciated. Thanks again in advance for your cooperation!

Thanks for the help, Rory (and all). However, the multiplexer after ten years of loyal service seems to have given up the ghost. It might help that it got soaked with water, but let's just leave that alone for now! So now we get to reconfigure the system. Let's try this one on for size. There's 14 monochrome cams. Why don't we have them feeding into a single PC with a couple of 8 input video cards and writing to a RAID array? Maybe we can set them up so that once the RAID is full it starts rewriting it. Let's assume that it takes 3 weeks to fill up the HDs with data. Then at the end of the third week, it rewrites the day at the beginning of the HD, and continues that way. In this manner we will always have the last three weeks on disc (which is more than we need for this application as permanent archiving is not necessary). Several questions arise here. First of all, how many KB/MB of data will a single monochrome 525x450 pixel (approx.) camera on 6 fps generate per second/minute, etc. That calculation will allow me to determine how big the RAID array should be. Then, can we go immediately to any cam and any date/time on the disc? There may be a requirement to take a couple of minutes of archived video from the past few days and burn it onto a CD, but that doesn't seem too difficult. The most important question is: Is there a set up like this that can be purchased off the shelf, or can it just be codged together using commercially available software? Again, one more time, thanks for all your help!

Hi, thanks to all who replied! First of all let me amend something I had placed in my original post. Right now the multiplexer for the 14 cameras is set on approx. one monochrome frame OF FIVE EVERY second, not as I specified earlier of 16 cams with 5fps each. In other words, when you are watching the main monitor showing all 14 cams, each cam updates on the average of one every two seconds, however the multiplexer has a motion sensor function so it will increase the fps rate on cams where there is activity and decrease it on cams where there is not. So generally, we can speak of approx 5-6 fps total. Realtime viewing and recording is not an issue but budget is. The cams as currently viewed are jerky motion and that is just fine for the current application. The multiplexer is the Robot Multivision Pro MV16p B&W. It is set up for 256 grays at 512x464 pixels. The rear of the unit has SVHS in and out; VCR in and out; RJ11 remote in and out; BNC composite cam in and out; BNC composite call monitor out and BNC composite main monitor out. From what I understand I agree with Rory that a single channel DVR with LAN will do the trick, but I'd really appreciate some more advice on this. Thanks again! Al