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I have a TCM7811 installed and setup as 640x480. The images are uploading to a website in 5sec intervals. I sent a PM to a couple forum members of the address already. The camera is not bad at all. To work with it's cumbersome because it's not easy to plug the cat cable into the tight corner they put connector at but the whole assembly comes apart with a couple screws to make things a little easier. The built in ir's can be turned off and they are in my case because they would have been useless anyhow. Send me a pm if you want the address. Not sure how long I'll have it setup but it should be up and running for at least another couple weeks. Don't get me wrong about the TCM3511, it's just that in low to zero light I find it very noisy but I heard the same about Vivotek (never tried it though). Using default settings the image is pretty nice but the shutter is too slow to make it usable for foot traffic identity unless the person stops for a brief second and looks right at the camera. The shutter can be set to a faster setting but there is a tremendous amount of noise on the screen and I find that the noise pulsates (I've complained about this with Acti). For the price I guess this is what you can expect and my customer is happy enough with them (most important part) but because of the noise on the screen the NVR records all the cameras all night long because of motion. There is no night time profile motion setting with the TCM cameras "yet" like with the ACM series but Acti is working on this and I can't wait for it to come available. Don't discount the camera totally just don't expect outstanding night time performance.

I second this, works great

I have no experience with the Vivotek camera you mention but I've installed many of the TCM3511's. Experience over all has been frustrating but could be because I expect too much. If using the default settings that Acti has with this camera the night time shot is pretty good however it is useless. Someone walking by the camera at night will be a blur and this is due to the 1/5 shutter that is default. If you are simply looking for monitoring then ok but for identification forget it. Now set the shutter to 1/30 and you will get a ton less motion blur but a lot more noise as the gain needs to be pumped up in order to get that visual. I haven't found the ultimate night time cmos ip cam yet but if this is important try something with a ccd chip instead but be prepared to pay...

Figured this would be a good place to post this one. I got an event I want to stream JPG images for the world to see. Camera does not have a built in FTP feature ACTi TCM7811 and I am running exacq which also does not have an ftp feature. I worked out the ftp issue by finding a third party app that can take a snap shot of the locally streaming camera and upload an ftp image every x amount of seconds. Now the issue at hand...... The streaming of images on the users PC is dependant on a small script that simply displays the jpg image every x seconds. Every person going to view the camera image will have a different time of displaying the image. Problem is every few images the window is blank because the image trying to be displayed is being over written by a new image at the time it is trying to display it. We can not find a better way of streaming the image to a hosting server. I do not want 100's of users trying to stream it from my office PC as it will choke to death. Best approach is to have the image pushed up to the hosting company and people can stream the jpg from there. Not sure if the issue is understood but I'm sure there are many knowledgable folks here that have done this time and again. I basically do not want a max user limit hit because people are accessing the camera directly and I don't want my network bogged to it's knees because everyone is accessing my business computer. Ideas? Solution? I would love to hear how I could get around this or maybe someone has a script they would not mind sharing to reliably stream a jpg images. Thanks So Much.

Our event went well this past weekend and folks loved the cam. Moving forward I gotta do something different as there are too many things that could go wrong. Maybe use an axis camera which seems friendlier with this type of project. I've read many of the solutions online with doing this with axis. It appears the is a max of 20 concurrent users if doing a server push method. If people sit on there PC during many of the events we have here locally we could easily go over that. In the 4 days we had the camera up we had over 5500 views. I still think the best way for this would be to FTP direct from the camera to the webserver. Next issue will be the current issue. A periodic blanking of the JPG image every so often. Is there a way to seemlessy refresh the image like when you pull direct from the camera? Pulling from the camera is clean and a refresh is clean with no flash in the image during a refresh. There is a flash in the image when doing the script based jpg refresh (ie...deletes the old image and refreshes with a new one). Not sure if there is a way to cache the existing image at the client level before the refresh takes place in order to elliminate that brief flash.

Thanks for the pics Wireguys. Typical Arecont scene. Contrast alway seems off out of the box as compared to other cams, I find. I always have to tone it down a bit because I find the picture too dark.

I don't doubt it. My fear was in the summer but being up here our summers don't get all that hot. So far we have not had any functional failures due to weather. I'm sure you run into the cold temps where you are also right? Although you may stay a bit milder on average than us here not sure. We're near the Maine, New Brunswick, Quebec borders.

Older thread I know.... We've used both Tranzeo and Ubiquiti products and mainly chose Tranzeo because of it's cold operating temp. This past year we've installed many Ubiquiti products ignoring the fact that they were not rated as cold. Well we've hit -26F just last night and everything is running great. Wireless especially generates a lot of heat with a camera constantly hammering it. Gee we even have the Ubiquiti POE and an ACTi power supply in a plastic enclosure on a roof thinking it may die in the cold temps we've had recently but nope...all is good so far. We even installed (2 years ago) 4 port residential netgear switches in a plastic outdoor enclosure not knowing if it would run all winter and so far we've had zero failures. What we've learned.....take some of these specs with a grain of salt. Gotta get out there and test the stuff for yourself and ask others in the same environment what there experiences have been. OK...I know this thread was not about environmental specs but that's my experience with these manufacturers. None have failed us in the field but why pay tripple when you don't have to.

Thanks A ton guys. I have a lot to digest here and it's all awesome. Right now the image being played back alternates between 10 images starting at image 1 when you request the page. We have reduced some of the issues with empty images but they still do happen. With the information you have provided we have a lot to digest to see if we can make the next webcam project more successful. Hopefully we can get the server push or mushers idea of the 2 alternating images working more successfully.

Because of the time of this. I can't change anything and will just have to write this one off as an experiment of sorts but in a few weeks we have another big event coming about and I would really like to get this working smoother. How does the Axis one work? Sounds like it is through there server software or is it done at the camera level. A client javascript would have to call back to the server to refresh the image? How is this handled with 100's of users logged in at the same time. All these queries back to the server will just hammer it on my Time Warner connection. My images are 640x480 streamed and the image run around 40k.

Hey Soundy, ultimately everyone would like to see a stream but we don't think we can handle the throughput. We had a company here trying to stream an event a couple years back and the amount of hits on there server choked the site so bad it was unusable. We are trying to prevent that from happening. We were able to pull a stream out of our exacq server and have that stream viewable. But each user would require there own stream from our server and we can't have that. If you feel if we done it a better way then we should not have an issue I would really like to speak with you. Sending you a PM.

Tried this as well. Issue is each user access the stream at difference times so that means that the javascript executes at different times on each users PC. The file being viewed by one may not be the same file being viewed by the other. Issue sounds easy but it seems to become much more complicated than thought. BTW: Your nic is Musher so I'm curious if you travel around participating in mushing events? We have a large one here every year and it's coming up in a month from now with participants from all over the world. There is a 30 mile, 60 mile and 250 mile course. We want to use the camera for this event also.

Hmm check this out http://www.justin.tv/ Ya thought of that one and also of ustream.tv but they're full of advertising junk and not what we wanted to show. Thx for the idea. I'm still searching for a solution, if not for this project then for a long term solution.

Ya and this is the issue. There are times when half the image loads on the screen because it started being over written half way through being displayed. It's not easy to get to the camera and it needs to be running tomorrow so changing nvr at this point may be difficult. Need to figure something else with what I have available.

No. They said it can be done that way. I have no idea how to get that done when the server is located someplace else and I don't have much control over it. Not sure how to get a hosted server to do this.

Believe it or not. I had exacq working on this for the past few days. eventually they said the server was not meant to do this in the first place but are still trying to help. I was able to get a PHP script made that can pull the stream displayed in the simple view. Issue is for every user requesting the stream it will create a new link back to my server for the stream. I have time warner here and not a commercial service than handle a load of hundreds of stream connections. Need a way of doing this at the hosting server level I think so it is pulling the image somehow but it would still have to refresh the image and I think we would still run into the same problem.

I got one here at the office. I played around with it a bit but was not overly impressed with the whole low light Supreme thing. I have not set it up permanently outside yet but the playing around I did was during a windy night and there was a flag across the street and the motion was pretty good compared to an ACTi TCM 7411 which had considerable motion blur in low light. It was better than the ACTi's I have but I have not tried the CCD version of Acti yet. I really hate this low lux rating specification. They don't tell you that the low light visibility is with a frame rate so slow that anything moving faster than snail pace will be useless but if no one is in the frame moving the static image is beautiful! Not impressed with any IR IP cameras either because of the same issue. I haven't found any yet that I can confidently suggest to a customer. I tell the customer the way it is and at least they should hopefully be able to count how many intruders there were, maybe what they were driving so long as they stop in front of the camera, and what time it was.....LOL! It is what it is at moment I guess.

Hey buellwinkle, Looking for my first all Vivotek install. Tons of Acti's have been installed but I have done no Vivotek yet. This install would require about 8 of the IP7361 cameras and you said they appear soft. Wondering if you could elaborate a bit on that. This install would be in a cold environment hitting as cold as -40 but most often -10 to -20 during winter evenings. The camera is rated to -4F but my experience with cameras has been as long as they are running they should be fine. In the past 4 years I have had zero camera failures even for cheapy $45 bullet cameras that rate to 32F. Not much cold experience that I havee found online so I hope the same holds true for this bullet cam. Has the over experience been OK with the Vivotek cam? I'm assuming you have used the bullet from Vivotek as well as the one from ACTi so which do you prefer for overall picture quality and night time performance? IF anyone can answer this I would appreciate it any review or feedback. Thanks

I thought about going but did not. Did I miss anything? Wondering how it turned out. Any good seminars or some cool new technologies. How about acti's new 4mp camera?

Anyone done this successfully? Got a customer looking to install an IR PTZ cam up on a hilltop because of vandalism at a small cabin. Since it's a ski slope we have power at the top. I want to wirelessly get the PTZ camera back down the hill and converted back to analog to hook to the DVR. Not worried about wireless, I've done a few now but I have not done an Analog PTZ to digital conversion and back to analog. Can find encoders that can get me there digitally but wireless back down to a decoder is where I hit a wall. Thanks

Thanks, I'll check with my Acti rep. Seems simple enough for sure. I've used both Ubiquiti and Tranzeo for my wireless installs. Tranzeo is rated down to like -45 or -50F so I used that but this year I decided to try out Ubiquiti which is not rated that low. For the cost difference I thought I would give it a shot and I typically don't have issues when temps drops as long as the equipment is operating. Time will tell and I figured the risk was minimal for the 6 CPE's and two AP's I installed recently.

There has got to be a better setting for these TCM-3511 cameras. Even when there is plenty of light the shutter seems to slow. There is lots of motion blur. Today I had to review video with the customer who was trying to find an incident and it was frustrating because they did buy megapixel cameras that provide a beautiful static picture but generate unusable video when being recorded. The only times these cameras seem to work well is when it is really bright. Even a brightly lit hallway is not enough to prevent the motion bluring. I just don't get it. I know they have thresh holds for day and night switching and you can define the shutter speed for each. Has anyone in this community used these cameras either the TCM or ACM series in a school or in hallways etc successfully? These hallways are not dim there is plenty of light, I either do not understand the mechanics of the shutter, AGC, the thresh holds or whatever but they gotta be able to be setup better than I got. If the cameras were this bad I can't imagine they would be selling. If anyone has been happy then can you please PM me what setting you have had luck with because the amount of time I spent so far don't make sense so maybe I'm going about it wrong. I have the latest firmware and the defaults are loaded. Of course max shutter is set to 1/5 and we know that is crazy slow and is the cause of this bluring. Thanks

TCM3511 with a max shutter at 1/5 is the only setting worthwhile in complete darkness. Even at 1/10 it darkens too much. Static picture beautiful but walk a normal pace by them and forget it. What the hell is the use of this. I agree that the 7411 has an improved night time picture now but walk past it LOL. Customer has some bright lights around so some areas I was able to set the night time to 1/30 but there is so much noise on the screen that it's hard to make out a walking person. I just want a clear day and night shot without all the blur for an economical price. I'm not asking for much LOL

These cameras are frustrating including the 7411. I got the night time picture looking nice and the customer is happy, of course now you can see a beautiful static shot but if something is walking by forget about it. I thought ok I'll try to increase shutter speed from 1/5 to 1/10 and reduce some of that blurring. At first it works fine, the pictures darkens for a moment and then brightens back up with a lot more noise in the picture but at least I can live with it a little easier. Now the crappy part is when the camera changes mode and then goes back to the night profile the picture is not the same. The picture is now dark again and the only way out is to toggle back to 1/5 shutter. Why the heck did it work ok before the mode change but after the mode change it goes back dark. These cameras are not friendly at all. I spend so much time trying to get them to work right and I mean hours and hours only to find that when the mode changed the picture is no longer the way it was so I then after to go back into all 34 cameras to change the shutter back to snail pace. ARGH!

I noticed that with my 3511's. If I set the max to 1/30 the picture would darkened and noise horrible, it records motion all night long, but the ghosting in very minimal. Not a pretty night time shot but I'd rather see the person then than a full blur. Even the day time setting shutter is wrong. They have 1/5 for max but if the lighting is low like in a dim hallway or when the sun is setting then I notice that motion blur starts to happen. I'm wondering if I should just set the day and night profile to a max of 1/30. Is that how you set yours? Thanks