Sawbones

" title="Applause" /> Well-played, Sir.

Video is probably all you need... a picture is worth a thousand words. Case in point: I caught some kids who were doing ring-and-runs in the neighborhood. Got a great picture of one of them on my front-door cam late one night. I recognized the ringer as a kid in my neighborhood... lives around the block from my home. My large dog went absolutely insane... hurling herself against the door... and they all took off. They only did it once, so I didn't dime out the kid to his dad. If they'd kept it up, I would have burned a CD of the video, taken it to his father and asked him if he wanted to take care of it himself, or if he wanted ME to take care of it... Get the video... that'll be enough.

I could have used that system any number of times. Including the time where an elderly lady ran a red light and t-boned my vehicle. I had no witnesses, and she had some elderly guy (turned out he went to her church) backing up her sweet-as-pie "I was the one with a green light, officer" story. I was dead in the water. I was had, and I knew it... Until a stranger came to my rescue. Luckily for me, there was an off-duty police officer on the other side of the intersection from her, and he witnessed the whole thing. He approached the investigating officer, introduced himself, showed ID, and basically said "umm... I'm a cop, saw the whole thing, and the old bag is lying." *points to me* "This guy is telling the truth." I could have kissed his feet. Video is like that... your very own umimpeachable witness. The video doesn't lie.

Search around... there are a few threads on this forum that tell you how to replace a hard drive in the DM units. I learned how to repair my unit on this very forum. Some newer units require you to send it back to dedicated micros, but some of the older ones can be replaced by the user (though it voids your warranty). If it's out of warranty, and you're sufficiently adept, you might take a crack at it yourself. I recently voided my warranty by messing around with my DS2... but I did manage to go from a single 160gb drive to two 320gb drives (for a total of 600+gb of storage, and the cost of two seagate DVR hard drives). It was better than paying DM >$1000 bucks for the same job. Don't get me wrong. I didn't WANT to void my warranty... I only did this after spending an incredible amount of time on the phone to DM attempting to find out where/how to send my DVR in for a hard drive upgrade. DM sent me to this dealer, who sent me to that dealer, who referred me to this service center (who said they couldn't do it, and directed me someplace else ) I finally was quoted about $1200 dollars for replacing the single drive, and I'd be without my DVR for about three weeks. Keep in mind, this DVR was an Ebay acquisition for about $1500 dollars. I couldn't see paying almost what I paid for it just to get a little more space. When you open up the DVR, you'll find that it takes a standard PATA hard drive. Unless you're feeling bold, you'd probably be best served by replacing the drive with a like brand and size. As I recall the basic procedure, you can pull the old drive, slap it into an external USB enclosure, and see if it can be read. If it can, you can copy the necessary files off of it, and copy them onto a formatted replacement drive. Some DM units keep the OS and some boot files on the hard drive itself, while other DM units have the OS on a flash disk that plugs into the main circuit board. If yours keeps required files on the disk, you can try to copy them. If the disk is corrupted and unreadable, you can download the files from DM's website, and copy them to your new drive yourself. As I say, this question has been asked here before... you might try the forum search function to see what you can find. Good luck.

Would the Bosch auto-tracking function (imperfect though it may be) work well enough to follow a person walking down the sidewalk 40 feet in front of a residence, or follow a vehicle driving about 20mph down the street that the sidewalk parallels? We've had a recent run of vandalism, auto theft, etc in my neighborhood, and I'm looking at expanding the capability of my home camera system (Dedicated Micros DS2, nine cameras). The camera currently covering the driveway, front walk, and front yard is a Speco Intensifier (I know... I know... you don't have to rub it in ). Needless to say, almost any good PTZ day/night camera would be better than that thing. I've also looked at the Panasonics, but they're huge, and would not fit in with the architecture of my home ("the boss" would veto those in a heartbeat). Small and discrete would be best. Suggestions?

Could wireless PIRs be used to trigger the camera to zoom into a certain area and follow any motion? I have to say... this stuff is fascinating

This place is truly a wealth of information. I like the features of the panasonic auto-tracking models... but (and I say this in the nicest way), they're dog ugly. I much prefer the appearance of the 10x mini speed domes that everyone here seems to like (and I might actually be able to persuade the wife to let me install one). Maybe I'm just being a little too metro, but appearance matters in residential installations... you don't want your camera to be an eyesore. That said, the mini speed dome doesn't have the auto-tracking features, WDR, or as much zoom as the panasonic. I'm torn... does anyone know a good auto-tracking camera that is small and discrete? Something without that huge, ugly goose-neck pendant mount?

I post videos on Youtube on the same name as here. Do a search - there's a bunch of videos of the install and the resulting video clips. Your Youtube channel is one of the most remarkable and interesting I've run across in some time. Thanks for that. BTW, the weather where you live looks uniformly miserable.