General DVR Card Questions

[kaysadeya 0]

I have two general questions on DVR cards:

 

Manufacturers, like Geovision, indicate certain system requirements such as CPU speed and RAM size. I assume these are the minimum, so would there be any advantage to using a faster CPU and more RAM?

 

Are there any well-known cards that run on Linux? I'd rather not base a security system on a Windows OS, if you know what I mean.

 

Thanks!

[Thomas 0]

Generally it helps to go above the min specs. Now with some companies the min specs are a joke (try installing Win2k on it's min specs.) and with others it's reasonable.

[kaysadeya 0]

Let's take the system requirements for the Geovision GV-650 as an example:

 

-Pentium4 1.2ghz Processor

-Motherboard with an Intel845 Chipset

-256mb ram

-80gb Hard Drive

-32mb Nvidia Graphics card

-Windows XP Operating System

 

What would I gain from using, say, a 2.80GHz CPU and 512MB RAM? Also, what about a beefier graphics card? Any practical advantages or would it be overkill?

[Thomas 0]

Don't know, I don't do Geovision.

[Powertelecomm 0]

Typically, XP systems has a minimum 256MB memory requirement for even standard Windows apps such as Word, Excel or Internet. Once you start running video applications, memory and CPU power become more critical.

 

My customers that use 16-ch GeoVision cards typically use at least 1GB RAM with high speed P4 or Xeon CPU. I'm not sure if GeoVision cards use software or hardware compression, but I believe software compression based boards tend to be more resource intensive which leads me to believe that GeoVision cards use software-based compression. Can someone confirm?

[Thomas 0]

You can drop that down alot if you kill unneeded services. Quick test on my demo machine can get it down to 96 mb of ram. Office on it gets me up to 130 or so.

[kaysadeya 0]

This is a good segue to my second question: Is there a good Linux-based DVR card anywhere?

[rory 0]

im running 128MB DDRRAM with Shared 16MB fior video, 2.2 Ghz Celleron - now im not using it as a DVR - but i do everything else with it you can name. NOW, it is very slow alot of the time, certain apps make a difference, Firefox being one of them. PSP is fast, Word is okay, Front page is rather slow, Windows Media Player is soo slow. Notepad flies! Norton Antivirus, slooowwwwwwwwww, Outlook express, flies. Kazaa lite - slowwwwwww.

 

And this is with a whole bunch of included services disabled and or turned off.

 

I couldnt imaging using it as a DVR!

 

Rory

[Thomas 0]

See part of your problem is using Front page....

[kaysadeya 0]

If I go the DVR card route (rather than stand-alone DVR), the entire computer would be a dedicated video server, so I wouldn't even load most of those types of apps. The only app other than the DVR app I can think I'd want to install is Firefox for downloading software updates.

 

The more I research the DVR card vs. stand-alone DVR question, the more I like the idea of a DVR card. If something goes wrong, you only have to mail the card for service; or in the worse case, buy a new card.

[rory 0]

See part of your problem is using Front page....

 

whats wrong with FP??.... actually the IIS web server slows it down a lot, I have to turn that off when i want to do some heavy stuff.

[Thomas 0]

Front page spits out the most god awful html ever.

[rory 0]

the old versions did, new is ok, besides its very useful when writing scripts, especially for tables and design, just copy paste. Ofcourse I always edit it as some of the HTML is not needed.

 

Sure, if all you are looking for is an HTML editor, then it may not be the best, but for what I use it for, it is the quickest and easiest. I still have to edit raw HTML anyway for my own needs, but any little time saved is money earned. Trust me, HTML is the least of my worries, i may spend less than 1% of development time on HTML, the rest is on the subs and functions and making the thing work.

[Thomas 0]

Bah, notepad or vim.

[rory 0]

what to write HTML? know how long that will take away from writing actual script to spend the time in notepad writing html tables from scratch ..way too long, plus when im done i just hit publish and wham its online without any FTP stuff needed. I do the design in Front Page's normal view, then copy what i want into the HTML source of my script page, edit it for scripting and change what I need such as getting rid of the DIVs where they arent required, border colalpses, all that stuff..double all quotes... etc etc.. saves a ton of time.

 

the script im on write now is 2670 lines of code, its a vbscript class with functions and subs. Uses templates in HTML predesigned for future changes of some design, and everything comes from a database, even the dimensions of the web design, colors, images, etc. Its only 1 main page also, default.asp. And what it displays is determined by the varibale pased called "go". uses cacheing for fast loading. It actually includes several other scripts i wrote individually then just place in the class file. That way I can reuse them for other sites, or put them online for download. Another thing, ever tried writing long scripts in notepad, mixed with HTML etc, there are no color codes for the different forms of code, as are in programs like FP.

[kaysadeya 0]

Found this greate website with all sorts of useful information on Geovision PC requirements:

 

http://www.remote-security.com/gvrequirements.htm

 

Why can't Geovision provide this information on their website?