jonmedlock 0 Posted November 6, 2011 Afternoon guys. Recentlly purchased a Vivotek camera which came recommended from a previous thread I posted, it's working perfectly and really happy with it. I've currently got it setup as I intended to use it, recording 6-7pm daily and being stored on my laptop. However, a friend of mine had an idea (can't divulge into at this moment in time) which needed him to be able to view footage I have taken from his pc or any PC in the world. I know that, if he was to download a copy of the same NVR software, then we could set it up so that he could watch footage back that way, however we were wondering if there is any possible way to achieve this with him not having access to the same software? IE, if Joe Bloggs in Australia wanted to view one of the videos (e.g. 6-7pm from the previous Wednesday), then could he do this? The files on my laptop (which I never turn off, it just acts as a permanent NVR now) are setup to be over-written after 7 days. There will only be one video uploaded per day, so there will only ever be a maximum of 7 videos available to view. It's quite hard to try and explain what we're trying to achieve. For example, in an ideal world, I could sync the videos with a site like YouTube, where they were uploaded as soon as they were recorded then they stayed online for people to view, until the 8th day where the first file would be deleted to make room for the loop to start again. I know this is impossible to setup so I was wondering if anyone knew of any alternatives to what we're trying to achieve? The ideal outcome would be that, in 6 months time (for example) and having not even touched the camera or the setup in ages, I could view one of the videos from any computer anywhere in the world without needing software installed. Oh and it may be helpful to forget the whole concept of CCTV as a means of security. We'd only be using CCTV because of the automatic functions and the software/storage available. Recording the sucject manually with a video camera would have the same result but I was hoping a CCTV camera may be setup to record automatically (which I've already done) and upload somewhere automatically (which I'm trying to do now!). I could do the whole process on my own everyday but it would become very time consuming, as I said I'm looking for a setup that I can go months without touching and for it to still be working fine. Hope that made sense! Just trying to get an idea really, I've spoken with some people who say it must be possible so I thought where better to ask than on here! Cheers guys. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Soundy 1 Posted November 6, 2011 What sort of space are these video clips using? You could possible install something like Dropbox and then point the software at the Dropbox folder as its record destination... then your friend could install Dropbox to have the video sync to his machine automatically, or view it from anywhere from the Dropbox website. Dropbox gives you 2GB for free, or 50GB for $100/year. (https://www.dropbox.com/plans) There are several other similar services but I don't know if any of them would work as efficiently as this. You could set up a schedule with the Windows Scheduled Tasks service as well, and write a batch file or script that would upload the latest file to an FTP server at 7:05 every day. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
hardwired 0 Posted November 6, 2011 Depending on the amount of video you are trying to move, you may easily exceed your ISP's monthly data transfer limits, and find yourself with large overage fees. This is why (along with ISP bandwidth limitations) that hosted video for security applications hasn't really taken off. (I have customers that utilize 1TB or more of storage per day. There's simply no way to economically make something like that work offsite.) ISP's typically oversell their bandwidth at a 10:1 ratio, or more. To get a dedicated network connection to effectively transfer large amounts of video, you are looking at connections that can run into the thousands of dollars per month. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jonmedlock 0 Posted November 7, 2011 Cheers guys, all useful stuff. Soundy, looked into the dropbox setup. Worked quite well, managed to get a video link out of it as such: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/48421234/53_2011-11-03_175950.3gp That said, we'd eventually be looking at creating some sort of website which would (somehow) be linked to these videos, the idea being that, using a dropdown bar or something, you click the day/time and are taken to a new page within the same website which plays the video. Gets a bit technical all that so not expecting any advice but any you do have would be invaluable! The hard bit would appear to be automating the process. You says that it might be possible to set up a schedule with the Windows Scheduled Tasks and write a batch file or script that would upload the latest file to an FTP server, what is an FTP server? This sounds promising, but then I'd also have to somehow link my website to the videos that are stored in the dropbox, ie. embed videos using http links like the one above but automaticall rather than manually. Hardwired, thanks for the concern but bandwidth is not a problem for us at the moment, just in the experimenting phase. If we stumbled across a setup that worked then we wouldn't mind paying for a dedicated network connection, perhaps even a dedicated fibre optics connection if we were to look at a higher quality image and therefore larger file sizes. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bike_rider 0 Posted November 7, 2011 Download an eval of Blue Iris software. It has a way to stitch a series of videos form a camera into a single video. It can post videos to an ftp server (that's just a server setup to get files via the file transfer protocol). If you can open your router to make the laptop accessible from the web (or better still, make secure way to get to the network), BI can give you what you want. BTW, it looks like Dropbox does not support ftp. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites