If you could do it again

[rk899 0]

I just purchased my first home and am looking for some advice regarding surveillance systems. I've looked into the dropcam/foscam type cameras but would like something a bit more professional. A lot of the posts I have seen on here all have a budget associated with it. I do not necessarily have a budget set and am looking for the best bang for the buck. In other words, at what point do you see diminishing returns on your investment? Looking at a 4-6 indoor camera setup

 

List of priorities

Live remote monitoring is a must.

Some form of off site recording is also a must, even if limited.

Image quality & reliability are the next biggest factors followed by DVR/NAS storage.

Lower frame rates are fine.

Good IR/Night vision is a plus but necessary (looking into motion sensor lights).

Ease of setup does not top the list either, I am a tech support specialist by trade so I can work my way through most setups.

Size does not matter

 

 

If you were starting fresh and had the same list of priorities as the ones listed above, what would your wishlist be?

 

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[Boogieman 1]

Dropcam is a monthly service and you are locked into their system.

Foscam is junk, dont even consider it. If you want something decent at reasonable prices look at the hikvision or dahua 3mp cameras...Hikvision and dahua are also rebranded at costco as swann and qsee respectively.

There are tons of posts on these cams and systems...start reading...

[rk899 0]

Dropcam is a monthly service and you are locked into their system.

Foscam is junk, dont even consider it. If you want something decent at reasonable prices look at the hikvision or dahua 3mp cameras...Hikvision and dahua are also rebranded at costco as swann and qsee respectively.

There are tons of posts on these cams and systems...start reading...

 

Thank you, Hikvision seems very well regarded around here. I have read through the Ultimate sticky prior to posting but I don't see any information listed for pros and cons between brand/models. I have a pretty good idea of what I want but I'm looking for comparisons between cameras. All my searches return mostly dropcam reviews.

[Boogieman 1]

Are you searching this forum? Or google..look through the posts here. Forget about dropcam unless you want a very basic camera and monthly fees....a camera with a dummy tax built in.

[rk899 0]

Are you searching this forum? Or google..look through the posts here. Forget about dropcam unless you want a very basic camera and monthly fees....a camera with a dummy tax built in.

 

I agree, as stated in the OP I am not planning on purchasing Foscam or Dropcam. I am leaning towards Axis M1054 cameras but also looking at Hikvision & Dahua. Would love to hear from people who have had hands on experience with both.

[Boogieman 1]

Are you searching this forum? Or google..look through the posts here. Forget about dropcam unless you want a very basic camera and monthly fees....a camera with a dummy tax built in.

 

I agree, as stated in the OP I am not planning on purchasing Foscam or Dropcam. I am leaning towards Axis M1054 cameras but also looking at Hikvision & Dahua. Would love to hear from people who have had hands on experience with both.

.. Hikvision has a comparable 2432 cube camera, that is 3mp vs the 720p on the 1054. The hikvision also has and sd card slot which the axis does not have. The axis uses a white led for nightvision, when it detects motion the led illuminates vs IR on the hikvision...there are pros and cons to both...

The 1054 also does not support wireless..although i would not run the hikvision on wifi either if you want to use full resolution. Finally the hikvision can be had for 1/3 the price of the axis...its a no brainer...

[Digiscan 0]

I have a lot of experience with Dropcam. For a simple setup you want working quickly without any hassle there is just no better solution, period. They are very easy to setup and very reliable. Among the caveats:

 

1) No realistic way to get it to work outside (there are enclosures you can make, but this becomes a hassle and wifi sucks outside in particular)

2) Image quality inferior to similarly priced IP cameras

3) Monthly cost

4) Uses bandwidth

 

I recently dropped my Dropcam setup and went with some Hikvisions, though. Much steeper learning curve and various issues to deal with, but all of the caveats above are no longer in the picture.

 

As far as this requirement is concerned:

Some form of off site recording is also a must, even if limited.

I know what you're trying to do, but it's not realistic. Let's say you're taking images (forget off site video) every 3 seconds from your 4 cameras. With a 3 MP cam you can see even at low quality the jpegs up to as high as 500k in size. That's 666k/sec or about 7 mbps, which is way above what the huge majority of residential connections can tolerate. You could go for motion only, and lower this quite a bit, but the math just isn't in your favor. A better idea is to either hide the PC/NVR that is managing the cameras, or have a secondary location somewhere in the house (e.g. small FTP server) to which you're sending images. Hide that, now you'll end up with footage even if somebody steals your main stuff.

 

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boogieman is right not to rely on wifi. I have a hikvision cube and it works great and the wifi is good, but it will never be as great as wired. For a super simple setup, though, if you got cubes and gave them SD cards, you could forget the NVR entirely and just record everything to those (since it's local wifi/wired is irrelevant), then just use the wifi connection to transmit images via FTP to an FTP server somewhere on premises. Even though wifi is sloppy for 24/7 video it should be okay for FTP images.

 

Personally I find more value in exterior cams. If you think about it, indoor only come into play for monitoring pets and burglaries. The latter rarely happen, but people stealing packages, breaking into your car, etc. are far more likely to happen.

 

These cubes can be concealed quite well with a little intelligence, though, and you can more or less remove the need for offsite storage, depending on what you're trying to do. Hide one in the kitchen up high within a fake plant, hide one in a hollowed out hard cover book with just the lens showing through, etc. You don't necessarily need a pinhole camera, and even just having a hidden one that captures the main area in your house would cover you.

[rk899 0]

Obviously I am still learning but here is what I was thinking. If I get a couple Hikvision cubes and connect them to a PC using a VMS like blue iris, can I store continuous footage on the SD cards and then save short clips or images to a cloud storage like dropbox or google drive for triggered events?

 

There has got to be some way to store the full resolution footage locally but still be able to send short clips/images to the cloud. In the event that someone did break it, I would feel much better knowing that I have a few good pictures of them if they did end up stealing the local storage.

[Boogieman 1]

You can upload to a remote ftp server if you wanted...but realistically no one is looking all over your house for your network drive...just set up a network drive in a remote room or in a closet and you are done..cloud its just bogs down your connection...You can also get a cheap hikvision NVR for a couple hundred and hide that and set it to record 24/7 as a backup if you really wanted. Burglars dont spend an hour in your house looking for NVR's...

[alpine0000 0]

If budget was no issue, like you say, then get Avigilon VMS and a handful of either Avigilon or Axis cameras... They cost a lot, but you get a lot in quality and VMS features, too. I think the point of diminishing returns would be anything more expensive than that.

 

If there is any technical reason why you can't use Avigilon (for example, if you HAVE to have a Mac client with no exceptions, or you HAVE to be able to trigger digital output triggers from the smartphone app, or you HAVE to use Vivotek cameras and also need the motion-sensing to work, or you HAVE to export as a .MOV file type), exacq is another great option that fills those voids. But exacq's search isn't as good as Avigilon's.

 

I'd love to move to Avigilon, but I'm tied to exacq for the time being due to the reasons above, plus a few other minor reasons too.

 

But yea, if there is no budget, that's what I'd do... Avigilon VMS and Avigilon or Axis cameras. You could spend approx $4-8k (depending on the exact cameras you buy, and the server cost to run the VMS) and have a great system. I think I spent around $7k for everything, including the Dell server, a couple 2TB hard drives, Windows 7 pro, five Axis and one Vivotek IP camera, the exacq licenses, the Netgear router, CAT6 cabling, etc...

[bike_rider 0]

Obviously I am still learning but here is what I was thinking. If I get a couple Hikvision cubes and connect them to a PC using a VMS like blue iris, can I store continuous footage on the SD cards and then save short clips or images to a cloud storage like dropbox or google drive for triggered events?

 

There has got to be some way to store the full resolution footage locally but still be able to send short clips/images to the cloud. In the event that someone did break it, I would feel much better knowing that I have a few good pictures of them if they did end up stealing the local storage.

 

Yes. You can write to the SD card and have video stored on a PC running Blue Iris, and record to a NAS and record to off site as needed. You left out - "get an email on my phone with images" and yes you can do that too.

 

Frankly, the firmware on the Hikvisions is so far ahead of what was available just a couple of years ago from most companies, if I had to do it again I don't think I would even bother with an NVR or PC for home. Get some cameras with SD storage (and maybe PIR on a couple), a NAS to hide in the house and go with that. Live with it for 3 months to see if you really need to have a central station (aka NVR or PC)

[rk899 0]

Obviously I am still learning but here is what I was thinking. If I get a couple Hikvision cubes and connect them to a PC using a VMS like blue iris, can I store continuous footage on the SD cards and then save short clips or images to a cloud storage like dropbox or google drive for triggered events?

 

There has got to be some way to store the full resolution footage locally but still be able to send short clips/images to the cloud. In the event that someone did break it, I would feel much better knowing that I have a few good pictures of them if they did end up stealing the local storage.

 

Yes. You can write to the SD card and have video stored on a PC running Blue Iris, and record to a NAS and record to off site as needed. You left out - "get an email on my phone with images" and yes you can do that too.

 

Frankly, the firmware on the Hikvisions is so far ahead of what was available just a couple of years ago from most companies, if I had to do it again I don't think I would even bother with an NVR or PC for home. Get some cameras with SD storage (and maybe PIR on a couple), a NAS to hide in the house and go with that. Live with it for 3 months to see if you really need to have a central station (aka NVR or PC)

 

I think this is what I am going to do. I was considering building a dedicated NVR PC but if the camera can do most of what I want by itself, I'll keep the initial cost to a minimum until I have a better idea what I'm doing and what I want/need. Really appreciate all the help guys! Should have the first cam by the end of the week and can start having some fun.

[Digiscan 0]

The hikvisions can do a lot. I have three going and I only require my PC running because I don't have a NAS and it is exposing several windows shares, to which the cameras are recording 24/7. I then have the secondary FTP server onsite, and quite difficult to find to which they are also recording some events (one I have recording 24/7 images, the other just images on motion detection). This is all using the hikvision native firmware.

 

You can certainly have cams send motion images to an FTP site and using FTP software on a PC you could have them deposit to a folder which is also the same as, say, a dropbox folder, then you get real-time syncing online. You'll need to create a powershell script to delete older files before it fills up. I recommend against google drive for this because deleting files from google drive folder locally puts them in the GD "trash" and unless you explicitly delete those (the client app does not do this) you'll hit your space limit. I doubt you want to create your own software that taps the GD API to do this programmatically. Dropbox works better, IMO; when you delete files from your dropbox, they disappear as you probably would want.

 

It's worth noting that this is not a good approach for indoor cams because if somebody cuts your internet line before entering your house now your images are not going up, so if your cameras are taken you're SOL. Contrast with a local FTP site (mine runs on my router because it has a USB port), any lines cut don't affect anything (my router and switch are on a UPS, and the router is on a different floor and through a wall than the UPS and switch, so it is still difficult to find despite being powered by that UPS, so even if my power is cut (a decent number of burglars do this, though most don't because they are stupid) I'm still running.

[rk899 0]

Very good point. I'll get outdoor cameras going ASAP. A lot of the ones I have been looking at do not have on board storage so now I'm back to the NVR, PC or NAS decision. I'm thinking I might go with a barebones PC and a separate NAS hidden away. I love how many options you have using ip cameras

[Digiscan 0]

Very good point. I'll get outdoor cameras going ASAP. A lot of the ones I have been looking at do not have on board storage so now I'm back to the NVR, PC or NAS decision. I'm thinking I might go with a barebones PC and a separate NAS hidden away. I love how many options you have using ip cameras

Yep, you do lose options with external needing SD, and although they exist, if you get a few it goes far toward a PC anyway.

 

I know the NUC line of PCs is good because they are very small and once you get it configured all you need is a network cable and a power supply (you could login remotely to manage), but I'm of half a mind to host everything on a laptop. My network is already on a UPS and a laptop has that built in. An entry level one could be given a 1 TB hard drive and comes with Windows 8. All out of pocket would be $350 and that's enough space for a few cameras.

 

A NAS is probably ideal, though, and you could install Free NAS onto something like those NUC PCs, put a 2 TB hard drive in there and you're good to go for a long while with a good number of cameras.