scottj

To answer Rory, YES.....much quieter. PATA drives tend to have that high pitch squealing sound after they wear. I agree with Griffon. WD SATA drives have been the most successful for us with video storage. Maxtor has proven to be horrible, Seagate is "OK", the Hitachi drives are also very stable and offer up to a 5 yr manufacturer warranty depending on the model. We used 100+ 250GB drives for a large video storage array, all WD, and had one failure in the past 17 months. That is pretty good, although the RAID arrays are also high quality and offer the proper cooling.

Im not Rory, but I can throw in a few comments here: Primary Advantage: COST From the perspective of a manufacturer, SATA will make it easier and less costly to design and deliver storage subsystems and computers with internal storage. This, in turn, may result in lower prices for you, the user. Removable Storage is very popular in the DVR market today. When it comes to enterprise storage systems, SATA has one big advantage over PATA: Its specs provide for hot-plugging. SATA offers standardized support for tagged command queuing, a performance enhancement typically found on SCSI and Fibre Channel drives. Overall, both work fine and it is primarily a preference. scottj

you would need (4) Hybrid cards used in conjunction with the GV-1240 assuming it is a 16 channel. And no, you should not experience 100% CPU usage if the system is built and configured correctly providing the board is not faulty. This means no cheap components. You generally get what you pay for, so use good quality parts and you will achieve the best performance. The Hybrid cards are not worth the added expense. We tested them and basically what they do is allow for a higher frame rate at a higher resolution ex: 720x480.

The GV-1480 is not hardware compression, all the Geo boards still use software compression except the Hybrid. If you send GeoVision a tech support question, don't be surprised if you get better answers out of this forum. Many of the tech support staff has left the company and the "new" guys are not trained up to speed yet. scottj

Only windows based.....

Stevesurf, can you post a link to these cameras? I would be very interested to see these.

Its a good concept, but how many owners do you know that will be willing to pull out a ladder in order to reach the camera to obtain the card? scottj

wow, ok..... Go with a low cost 4 channel embedded DVR, a cheap 25" Color monitor(TV), and 2 "average to decent" cameras with the proper lens specifications. You might be able to stay close to it, but it certainly won't be perfect. scottj.

obviously.....

1500.00 for the camera, or the entire system? Also, how many pump islands? Let us know a little about the DVR etc. that you are using in your specification. That can help us point you in a cost effective direction. scottj

its too large to email (23MB), but Rory or I will setup an upload area so you can get ahold of it.

Patt, If your current plan is going to be charging you based on actual bandwidth usage or KB totals, I would not be surprised if you exceed the usage limit very rapidly with video. You might find yourself going far past your included plan allowance and wind up with a very expensive bill. Just use caution as video will eat up the bandwidth and KB of passed data. scottj

Spend the extra 5 bucks a month and get regular DSL.

What is really important is that your VGA board supports DirectX 9 when using the 1420 Geo board.

Assign the DVR a local IP address (ex: 192.168.0.120, depends on your Router Gateway address). Configure the Router to maintain and hold your ADSL connection. There is generally a section in the Router that will ask "Never Timeout" or something of this nature. If your router supports DDNS Management, then you can choice a service for which it supports. (ex: www.dyndns.org) You will need to go and setup an account for this service which is free for Dynamic DNS service. Enter the account information into your Router under the DDNS section under Advanced Features. Refer to your DVR manual and verify which ports are needed to be opened through the router to allow for data, video, audio, etc. for remote viewing. Now go back into the Router and either Port Forward these to the DVR address, or create a Virtual Server to the DVR address. This will open those ports to the DVR for WAN remote viewing etc. Some ISP services have been know to block certain ports. You may run into that problem, especially over port 80 (http:). You should be able to utilize another available port redirection such as 8080, 8081, or 81 for example instead. Give this a try and let me know ifit was helpful. scottj

What brand/model DVR are you connecting? What brand Router, etc.? Once we know these things, we can walk you through it fairly easily. scottj

Jasper, Add a standard alarm system motion sensor to activate the lights and begin recording on the Geo machine. If you rely on just the motion detection in a dark environment from the camera, you may miss out on something. Add a DI/DO board and use one of the contacts to the motion sensor. Very easy to do. scottj

How much capacity are you looking for?

yep, works OK...but not designed for the US market and plate types. I have a demo of it if you want I can email it to you. scottj

krcctv has a unit on their website which I know they do not manufacturer. A DVR unit. I know because I can buy it at half the price they sell it for from a much larger company in Korea. They could make the cams, but these days its so difficult to tell without pulling a full profile (financial, etc) on the company and possibly even getting them to provide the proper documentation for certificates.

The only thing that comes to mind is....Comart scottj

Sunkwang...........They us the same camera scottj

C7 in CA, DataAve.....Those guys work with fiber often, may want to look up their info and contact them in PM. scottj

You were misinformed PizzaHemi, but most analog cameras with integrated mic are low end quality. There are IP cams out there that offer ADPCM (100:1) audio onboard that work very well. The audio portion utlilizes 32kb bandwidth and the quality is excellent. Another option for adding audio is using a analog camera setup is the Crown PZM-11LL Pressure Zone Microphone (line Level). We use these in Govt. applications and they work very well. Obtaining crystal clear audio takes mixers/amplifiers and expensive equipment, so most people will not want to budget for that. scottj

Pay no attention to that price online, that is an MSRP. If you need a unit, I can work something out with you at a much more desirable cost. scottj