peskypete

Ok, had a chance to view the video. Thanks for sharing! As far as the resolution goes, are you getting 800x500? That's .4 Mp equivalent right? Do you think that 1, 2 or even 3 Mp cameras are overkill for a ptz? If you are zoomed out, and you are worried about resolution, will a 3Mp camera really be much of an advantage? I suppose if you want to digitally zoom in to a video to, say, read a license plate, then the more Mp's the better. But if you are using a PTZ to id someone that may be 50 metres away, you are going to zoom in to them anyway and if you are filling most of the screen with their body, then more Mp's is not necessary. So my thought is that I could skip a higher (more expensive) camera, if the lower resolution one will suffice. A couple of q's: What are you using to input the video? A usb stick or PCI card? Has the camera been in tour mode continually for 2 yrs? Any problems? Thanks - I may have a couple more q's for ya later! Pete

Thanks - looks great, but I have to wait until later to watch - at work!!!

Good points. I was thinking to use the wiper for spider webs (or partial webs) that I've had over the front of lenses before. A domed surface would be less likely for them to be attracted too though. The camera would be mounted under an eave, so rain would not be a factor. I am leaning toward no wiper, based on that last thought. The IR leds seem ok through the dome on some models I have seem demo video from. It's going to be mounted up high and not that accessible, but if I only have to go up a ladder with a broom twice a year, then that's not too bad!

Hi All, Have seen some PTZ dome cameras with a small wiper blade that passes over the exposed lens. http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/1606789857/New_technology_1_3MP_1080P_outdoor/showimage.html Other cameras are enclosed in a perspex (clear plastic) dome. Is the enclosed style prone to crap (in a residential area), so much so that the wiper on an exposed lens style would be better? Or is the exposed style more prone to the elements and not a good choice? Thanks!

Thanks for the clarification. Yes I guess I need the schedule feature. But the video link shows the quality and adaptive features of that cam. So that's why I would like to see a similar video of this cam in action. A sample video showing the image quality under the different lighting conditions would be awesome! In a nutshell, if the Preset could save the IR power level, along with the position, that would be great. Blue Iris support would be the ultimate, because it does have options to create 'events' (They use that term instead of schedule and/or tour). I just looked at that and it can send IR (on, off, power level etc.) commands to the cam... IF it is supported

Thanks for all the detailed info! This looks like a great deal. I have a couple of questions, if you can answer, that would be great. Do you control the cam through a serial port? Can you use a USB adapter? (RS-485) Does the cam come with s/w to do that? What analog capture device are you using with it? PCI Card? USB stick? Or is it just plugged into a monitor? Can you program in a 'tour'? I would like it do do something like this: Default posn. = Preset 1. At 7:00am go to Preset 2, and put the IR's at power level 3. At 6:00pm, go to Preset 3 and put IR level at 8... etc. (I am assuming Presets will have position and zoom level set up as you want them). Is the cam supported in Blue Iris? What would be truly great is if you could put a video up on Youtube showing off the abilities like this one: (I know, that's a lot to ask) Thanks!

Ok, I think I know what the issue was. I had a Gigabit NIC card - PCI The GV-800 also runs on the PCI bus. I think that the card was/is such a PCI bus hog, that it was restricting the NIC. I decided to kill al birds with one stone and toss the MB! I put in an LGA775 with 5700 processor. The card has (of course!) on-board Gigabit LAN. I know am getting 20-30 MBits/Sec with Multicam running. Problem solved! It may have been that the single core P4 2.8GB was being consumed by Multicam too, but I think it was the PCI bus being over burdened. Now I can use this system as a file back-up system properly too! Yay!

It's running great on my Win7 system. Win7 is actually quite robost, it just has some 'quirks' when trying to do certain things. The issues are not critical things. It's my other system (or rather, IE8) that has a problem, when trying to view the webserver.

This actually worked! Thanks for this work-around. Hopefully, someone at Geovision will see this and figure out what the problem is. Just fyi, this is on a W7 64bit ver. and the server (Multicam) is running on a W7 32bit. I first tried on 'regular' I.E., got the error, then closed IE, Then ran as admin and it was able to view the webserver ok. Many thanks. There's a few things that kiss me off about W7, including this whole administrator crap. I mean, I AM the administrator, so why do I have to run things in admin mode???? Maybe this whole problem is a W7 issue and not Geovisions? Who knows...

Copying FROM the GV system (with GV off), I am getting a much better speed... about 20MB/sec. Still not up near 100 (1Gbit speeds), but good. Copying TO the GV system is still around 6MB/sec. Copying TO another computer is up around 80MB/sec.

Now I have a couple of different problems! Even though I have Start Monitor ticked, when Geovision starts (on re-boot), monitoring is off. Also, when I close GV, it restarts immediately again! The Exit Option: Auto Restart Windows is unchecked. Any suggestions?? Edit: Ok, after 3x of shutting down, with GV restarting , on it's own, it finally shut down without restarting... that was strange! Then, I restarted it and the monitoring is now enabled... Gremlins in the code? Edit again!: Ok, so I shut it down again, to troubleshoot network, and.... it just loaded up again on it's own! And, monitoring is....off! Back to square 1... Edit 3: Just got off the on-line support chat with GV and he was able to stop the restarting - You may have hardware watchdog enabled To disable this feature, click the Configure button , point to Tools, select Video Signal Diagnostic, and select Disable Video Signal Weak Watchdog. That worked! Now, back to network troubleshooting...

To trouble shoot, I stopped running Geovision, and am only able to get transfer speeds of 10MB/sec, instead of 80MB/sec, like the other 1 Gigabit computers, even though the task manager states it is running at 1Gb. So now that takes geovision out of the equation. As I mentioned before, the drive is a Sata (1TB). I have run a full (windows) disk check on it, with no errors. It is not fragmented and has lot's of space. All drivers are up to date (windows 7, fresh install) I am resigned to the fact that when Geovision is running, it is going to hog the network, so I am trying to network trouble shoot without it now. I KNOW that I should be getting better transfer speeds, since the TM shows it is now running at 1GB, so I am hitting a wall right now. Thanks

When I mention file transfer speed, I am using Megabytes as my units, so 10MB/sec is about 80 Megabits/sec I just checked the f/t speed to the suspect pc, and it now up from 1-2MB/sec to 10MB/sec, which is still only 10/100 lan speed. I am currently re-booting it to run chkdsk. The defrag test came back as 0% fragmented

Well, I am making some progress... After running task manager on all computers, it seems that one of my (2) network switches was NOT allowing 1Gb connectivity. So I swapped switches, so that the three computers now all show 1Gb/sec under the Networking tab (Link Speed). When I copy a test file between Main and Family room computer, I now get blazing speeds of 90Mb/sec!!! However, my speed to the security cam system is still very slow. In fact, since I did the switch swap, it's now down to 1Mb/sec (down from 2, and Geovision is NOT running). I did re-boot the router, and, since Task Manager SAYS I have a 1Gb link with little network utilization, I think my problem is hard drive related. Going to try and find out if that's the problem.

Well, for some unknown reason, the network speed is now back to normal, for 10/100, at least. I get file transfer speeds of around 10MB/sec from machine A to B, or C, (when Geovision is NOT running) so this is acceptable. When it is running, I can access security mpegs from my main system (not the security camera one) across the lan, without having to wait a while for caching, and the transfer speed is around 2MB/sec. Sata drives in all systems and fairly good ram and cpu's in all. Task manager: I am not sure how to enable "Show Kernel Times', but there is quite a bit of stuff in the PID column, which I am going to go through and figure out. Thanks for the suggestions!