fields_g

I'm still seeking a solution for this. Does anyone have any solutions? Any ideas of other places to look?

I started working on a system that records training encounters of medical students with standardized patients. We have 12 rooms with 2 cameras. These 24 cameras are encoded with vbricks to mpeg4 and multicasted on the local LAN. Our current setup takes BNC before the encoders and routes it into an AVITECH system to handle arrangement on the display. This system is antequated and needs to go away. I was curious if someone might make some suggestions about software (windows or linux) that can use multicast mpeg4 streams as camera imputs and arrange a digital matrix view of all 24 feeds simultaneously to be outputted to our 16:9 display device (1080p preferred). There isn't a requirement to capture, analyze or anything else. Got any inexpensive options?

It generally works, but still has speed and distance issues that can be very limiting. You may consider it for a couple of hard to get to places, but should not be your primary means of traffic.

I know that many CCTV capture equipment hasn't moved to PCI Express, but I would seriously consider that you use a modern computer with PCI Express card slots for your video selection. PCI bus shares a limited amount of bandwidth. PCI Express not only increases that bandwidth, but each slot had dedicated bandwidth also. You can find computers that have both PCI Express and PCI, and this will help you in the event that you have PCI cards also because you displays won't be battling you other devices for time to "talk". Besides, you will most likely get a more modern, powerful, and efficient videocard in the process.

Yes, separation is important for both data security and performance, but it can be rather simple if you have the right network equipment. There has been talk in this thread about physical separation of networks. The same can be done with implementing VLANs in the network hardware. In layman's terms, you can tell your switch that port #1,5,7, and 9 are to be separated from the rest of the network. There is to be no communication between the two sets. This makes sure unauthorized people don't see data coming from cameras as well as separates broadcast/multicast traffic from the rest of the network. Just choose the ports that contain your cameras, DVRs, monitoring clients, etc. and separtate them. If you need network/internet connection, you need to configure a router or have a computer with 2 network cards connected to both networks, that can act as a router. Most institutions have VLANSs setup already for management of network equipment, separating server farms, separating sensitive offices (security), and/or VOIP telephones. If this seems a bit complicated, the exact same result can be achieved by installing a new switch and moving the cables that run to your cameras to that switch. This approach doesn't work so well if you have multiple cable closets. Either way, if you have enough jacks on walls already, you do not need to pull new wire, but just organize how they interface with the network. BTW.... I am a networking professional.

We would like to use a large format 1080p display. Even though the images right now are being pushed at CIF and could be bumped to 4CIF, with 24 images simultaneous images on one display, you do utilize the displays resolution. For example in a 6x4 matrix of 320x240, you have saturated the resolution of an 1080p display (1920x960). Maybe a more clear statement of what I am seeking.... a way to send 24 channels (BNC or MPEG4 via IP) to an HD display in a 6x4 matrix setup. Another option would be dual 16:9 displays with 4x3 matrix setups.