What is a good DVR card in your opinion ?

[vincenttor 0]

Where to begin,

 

well i started with a cheap DVR stand alone system that i got from a friend with the standard cameras and those were a dissater.

also used Cat5 cables but i had a big spindle with 200 meter left ( found out that this was bad quality)

 

Then after the dvr system suddenly stopped i stumbled on ebay on the DVR Cards

bought a 4 channel card for the holiday residence in France and a 8 channel for the residence in the netherlands.

 

the 4 chan card has a techwell chip on it TW 6816 if im correct

4CH-D1-Realtime-DVR-Card%2C-Face-%26-Missing-Object-Detect%2C-Windows-Server

 

the software that came with this card is just terrible, does not work user friendly if you ask me.

also with the remote viewing, it says upnp ( auto sets everything)

i do not read anyhing in the manual about port forwarding or anything else to use it over the internet.

the client software is working locally but over the internet , well you guess it, not .

 

one funny thing with this card is that it shows up into windows as a 4 port video in card

so i am using this with webcam Xp now in france

This allows me to view the camera's much easyer online without running any special software and saves bandwith

 

 

also changed the connection cables there with Cat 5e FTP cables and the image quality was amazing compared to the unshielded cat5e cable.

this system is working pretty good now, except the motion detection part is not really working like i was hoping but well its just for fun

that's that.

 

 

 

Then the 8 channel card that supposed to support D1 recording comes with software thats also crashing allot and has some errors when you have lots of motion recordings

 

the files are also in a strange format that allmost no player can play like VLC or any other.

The card also has a Techwell Chip the TW 6868

 

this is a screenshot of the software thats given, except of the crash it does sometimes when viewing the records you can configure allot.

i have in my system per accident a few NTSC camera's and also PAL and you can set it per channel.

 

 

The thing that shocked me is that when its recording the CPU load is allmost 100% constant, even the normal load is about 30 - 40 %

This was running on:

dualcore 3.16 ghz

asus pq 5

4gig ram

 

 

 

the first card is also getting the cpu to 65 % of load btw.

 

my question is , are there any nice cards with good software and that the card compresses the video file ?

i have tried to look on google but most of the cards i have found are so high in price this is not much fun anymore for a hobby.

 

any brands/types/opinions that are affordable or do i have to much demands for to little money ?