Is it possible to build a ~better~ DVR system

[Dee_Ann 0]

Hi,

 

I need some advice to build up a DVR system.

 

I have put up multiple cameras around my place because of harassment and death threats from psychotic neighbor.

 

I have three really old DVR recorders. One is a 4 channel clunker with very poor capabilities, it's an "ICatch US411ZS" (I'm not using this one)

Another is an old "Eyemax HX08" (8 channel) that was given to me, it too has really poor capabilities. (in use)

And a slightly better "Q-See QS558-1" (8 channel) (also in use)

 

The problem with these are many. For one, the HX08 saves videos as EXE files. Um, NO. I'm not going to go to the police station with a DVD full of EXE files and tell them "trust me, run these EXE files on your computers, it's OK, really." I don't trust the EXE files it creates and I don't expect the police to trust them either. I doubt they would even open them at all and well they shouldn't.

 

On all the machines the recording quality is pretty bad. I've tried to set them up for the highest quality possible but it seems that they have a maximum capability that has to be divided between however many channels you are recording and in this case, it's all 8 channels. I guess it's 240 FPS. The Q-See will record all 8 channels in D1 but the Eyemax won't, it records in CIF which is bloody awful. And the motion sensing feature is completely broken, it's never worked right and Q-See never issued a fix for it.

 

On both machines I've added after market microphones so I can record audio because the harassment, threats and intimidation from my BAD neighbor is mostly verbal and is usually accompanied by middle finger gestures, crotch grabbing, mooning and displays of guns, all while he hurls vulgarities and threats at me.

 

Another thing I hate about these machines is that they are slug slow and navigating them is a painful, miserable experience. The PTZ interface is dreadful and you can't program them to execute PTZ commands according to time schedules. You can have it do stuff like tilt & pan on events but I can't program the iris and focus to adjust per a time schedule such as open iris (N2) steps and adjust focus to (N2) at 9pm and at 6am revert iris and focus to (N1). That's extremely annoying.

 

The Eyemax won't allow me to change the screen layout and won't let me move the time/date stamps to different spots where they won't cover over what the camera sees. So I end up having to disable the time date stamp. But then it won't let me remove or move it from the main display even though I remove it from the recordings.

 

Blah blah blah... These machines are horrible and I need something much better. But after shopping around it seems that ALL the machines out there have the same 240fps limitations and the usual HORRIBLE Engrish interface and very probably can't be trusted after it was found that almost all DVR systems are infected with malware and or backdoors and or phone home to servers in China which I am NOT OK with. http://news.softpedia.com/news/remote-code-execution-flaw-found-in-firmware-of-70-different-cctv-dvr-vendors-502096.shtml

 

I don't see that buying another Chinese DVR is going to help me at all. It'll just be more of the same problems and complaints I have now.

 

So what I would like to do is build my own system from scratch. It can not be microsoft based. I do not and will not use windows. I don't own a copy of windows and I never will.

I only use OS X, BSD and Linux. I have three Macs, one is an actual iMac and two are hackintoshes I built from scratch.

I have another machine with an older motherboard in it running PC-BSD w/ZFS (32tb) as a NAS for my Macs.

 

I doubt that there is really any way I can use the hackintosh macs as DVR's since real Macs don't really allow you to put random 3rd party PC cards in them so I would expect there's not even any DVR security apps for OS X.

 

I have heard that there is software for Linux to run a DVR system so I'm thinking it might be available on BSD? But, I don't know if the old motherboard I'm using in the BSD machine is powerful enough to handle 20-30+ incoming videos. I want to have the capability to record up to 32 video channels, possibly more. I have quite a few outdoor cameras and I would like to put cameras indoors as well. I don't have indoors cameras now because I don't trust the Chinese DVR's I'm using now plus they are already maxed out, I can't add any more cameras to the two 8 channel DVRs.

 

As of now I'm using old analog type (eyemax) dome cameras and a few OLD AD/Computar camera/lens with rs485 decoders to let me Z/I/F them. The AD cameras don't work worth a flip at night. I removed the IR filters and put up IR lights but that still doesn't help much and in the daytime everything has a horrible reddish hue. And one of the lenses broke and won't focus anymore. You can't buy parts to fix it so I would have to spend $100 to buy another OLD lens with the same drawbacks.

 

Another problem with the analog cameras is the very poor quality Chinese video cables typical Amazon junk, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZDXC9Z8/r

The wires are extremely inferior and substandard. On a 100 foot run the voltage drops so much due to the very thin wires that it's down to just a little over 8 volts which is not enough to run a camera and it's IR lights.

 

The resolution of the cameras is VHS quality. It's awful. People, look like pixels moving around on a 1991 Nintendo games. You can see them, you can tell they are people and ~ I ~ know who they are usually but they aren't readily identifiable enough to use in court for prosecution purposes. But for now I have to stick with the analog cameras because I have a lot of them and I can't afford to replace them all at once. I'll have to do it a few at a time over a year or two as my budget allows. I want to end up replacing them with HD megapixel cameras so I suppose that will mean I'll need POE/IP cameras and I need them to have audio. Excellent HD night vision is a must. I need to see at might like it's daytime. (BW night vision is fine). Also I need them to be hard wired, I won't even consider WIFI at all. My house is about to be clad in new aluminum siding with foil backed foam board which will kill my WIFI (which is already awful as it is). I don't know anything about POE/IP cameras and it's wiring but I'm assuming CAT6 or CAT7 wiring? I'll dedicate a switch just to the cameras so that they won't interfere with my LAN. I can feed them into a 48 port gigabit switch and connect that directly the DVR machine which I plan to put four gigabit ports into. I put four gigabit ports in all my machines anyway. But I will want the cameras to operate on a physically separate LAN from everything else.

 

Does the Linux (or BSD) software allow a mixture of analog and IP cameras? And as for the analog cameras that I have to continue to use until I can eventually replace them, I need to find some sort of capture cards. I've looked at all the assorted capture cards and they all seem to have the 240fps limitation of the ready built DVRs. An 8 or 16 port card will still have to divide it's 240fps between however many cameras are connected to it. So I'm thinking that I would be better off just using a bunch of 4 channel cards instead? Would that be a feasible option? OR, my math tells me that I could get 30fps on 8 channels but would I be able to record 8 channels of D1 at 30fps? I don't even want to waste my time on it if it will be CIF. If I could get 4 or 5, 8 channel cards to record 30fps D1 that would be acceptable, but is it feasible? And of course I have to have the ability to record audio as well, from multiple sources.

 

I've put up several microphones but they pick up too much background noise to be very helpful unless the guy is yelling at me. He's somehow figured out at what level he can talk where his voice becomes muddied from auto traffic noise, lawn mowers, birds chirping, etc.. He'll often times make his verbal assaults on me with his voice low enough that I can hear him but the microphones have trouble. So I need to somehow make the microphones work like shotgun mics do. I have a shotgun mic for my DSLR but there's no way I can put it outside, it's not even remotely weather resistant in any manner. So, homemade shotgun mics? Or does anyone make such a thing already for surveillance systems?

I'm kind of hoping that when I switch to IP cameras that with them each having a microphone that they can somehow work together to do noise canceling. Isn't that why an iPhone has several microphones, so it can do noise canceling ? Even if it can't do it in real time maybe it could be done in Adobe Premiere or some third party app? On my Mac, in iMovie there is an option to enhance voice and it does a decent job of it but it's pretty lame for processing DVR recordings, that's not what it was really designed to do.

 

Surely there must be a way to build a good HD, non-windows DVR system that's better than the crummy, un-trustable, Chinese junk that Amazon & Ebay is flooded with.

It would be nice to be able to record HD video and keep it indefinitely plus have the ability to easily dump clips to DVD in high quality x264 or x265 mkv files that I can hand over to the police when need be. The CIF quality avi and exe (WTF?!) files that I have a miserable time extracting by thumb drives are really not acceptable. It's slow and cumbersome and just really poor quality. I don't have an endless supply of cash I can dump into a whole new system so I have to do it a little bit here and a little bit there over a long time, the ability to deal with analog and IP cameras at the same time would be extremely helpful. In my house I have several monitors setup so I can watch the cameras including one at the foot of my bed that I leave on while I sleep so I can wake up and everything going on around my house then go back to sleep without having to get up. But I can only view 8 cameras this way so it's not very practical. I would like to be able to see all of them at once and it would be nice if it could do PIP for spot when there are events such as motion detection. 32" HDTVs are cheap now and I've already got a few 50 foot HDMI cables to carry DVR output from the Q-See DVR to my desk and to my bedroom. I need to add a third monitor in my kitchen where I spend a LOT of time, that's fairly trivial to do. I guess that the machine I build just needs to have HDMI output as well as DVI, there should be plenty of video cards like that on Amazon or Newegg still, as far as I know they haven't totally phased out DVI and HDMI on pc cards just yet. A $100 or so should get me a really decent Nvidia card that will run in Linux or BSD.

 

I don't really know where to start because the Amazon reviews are, well, I just don't really think they are accurate or truthful in many cases. And Amazon tends to blend reviews from many similar items together so you don't know if you're really reading a review about the exact items you are considering for purchase.

 

If this can't be done in PC-BSD I would have no problem building a dedicated Linux machine for the DVR. I haven't used Linux much in a few years but I think they have a fairly decent integration of ZFS for it now if you're willing to overlook the licensing issues (which I am). I'm not a huge fan of Ubuntu after some of the shenanigans they pulled (which is a big part of why I switched to BSD). When my photography hobby became more and more of a profession I ended up switching to OS X and when I outgrew my iMac I had to build much bigger, much faster hackontoshes. I would love to have an OS X native DVR system but I just don't believe there is such a thing since a hackintosh isn't officially supported by anyone and factory made Apple Macs don't play well with hardware built for the PC world.

 

So, DVR software for PC-BSD ~ OR ~ if not then for Linux. If it can handle analog AND IP cameras at the same time that would be very awesome.

HD cameras with audio that have very good night vision and are megapixel and POE/IP but NOT WIFI. No WIFI. Hardwired only.

Analog capture cards that will work in a PC-BSD / Linux machine to give me the very best recordings possible for the analog cameras. A bunch of 4 channel cards? Or 8 channel?

I found some OLD capture cards in a box of junk but they are really old and I don't if they even work or not and the motherboard I have might not even have slots these will fit into. So I'm guessing I should plan on buying new PCIe cards anyway, yes? I'm really unsure about spending hundred of dollars on video cards that *may not even work* on non-windows systems. And I'm having trouble sorting through the specs on most of them, the Engrish is always lacking in accuracy and detail and often times seems to be circular and misleading if not flat out dishonest.

 

I see lots of capture cards on Ebay but they ALL say they are for windows. None of them say if they will work under *nix systems. I know their software won't and I don't care about their software at all, it would go straight to the circular file anyway. As long as the *nix apps can use the hardware, that's all I care about. I think Zoneminder is the software for *nix but maybe there is something else? Something newer or better? I don't know. I need a surveillance system for 2017, not this clunky junk that's all based on 1990's technology and cameras based on 1950's technology. But until I get everything completely updated I'll have to suffer through a mix of old and new tech.

 

I know what I want this to end up doing but I'm not really sure how to get there. I can put all the stuff together and make it work but my concern is getting the right stuff to begin with. I can't afford to spend money on stuff just to find out it won't work or it is woefully inadequate. Many times in the past I have been tricked into buying substandard stuff because of false / misleading / misrepresented specifications. If you guys could point me towards the right stuff I would really appreciate it a lot. I really need a much better surveillance system because things are getting out of hand with this psycho neighbor. I need to be able to not only monitor my premises inside and out 24/7 but I need to be able to pull high quality recordings from it quickly when it's time to call the police.

 

Thanks much!

[GREGRUSH 0]

Wow, you really spent quite a bit of time painting a very accurate picture of your situation, what you got in hand and what you want to accomplish!

I will tell you a system that will work for you and will get you what you want:

Get Geovision DVR based on PC. These are PCI-E cards that come with 4,8 and 16 channels. you can expand your system just buying more cards, inserting them on your PCI-E slot and interconnecting each one. They come for Windows and Linux systems. Have enough FPS to handle 30FPS for each channel, integrated sound channels, awesome motion detection configuration, video analytics (missing object detection, unattented object detection, traffic counting, etc.) it can activate alarms, control PTZ cameras with ease and have a really easy to use interface (windows-like).

 

HOWEVER, you need to have a powerful PC to get the most out of such cards. Google "Geovision" and see what they have.

 

Yes, you will get low quality on any analog system out there. If you want good quality footage you gotta go with IP or HD systems (HDCVI, HDSDI or HDTVI) make sure cameras and DVR are compatible, coz you cant mix technologies. HDCVI is usually a good choice: not too expensive and it does the job. IP is good, but consumes a lot of your bandwith (which may not be an issue on a home-based system)

 

True, bad wires are an issue. best for CCTV is RG6 cable that 100% copper and 100% mesh shield. But most of us use for convenience UTP cable. If you use UTP, best is to use UTP CAT5e stranded cable and make sure the twist is tight (not loose).

Dont forget to make your system burglar-deterrent: big camera housings for outside cameras, floodlights with motion sensors and signs that warn people that they are being watched / recorded

 

Placing microphones are always a big legal issue. Check out what you can/cant do according to local laws.

 

The issue you mentioned with Chinese DVRs recording on chinese servers is due to CCTV technicians that do not have a clue on networking and how to setup a system to be viewed remotely... so the guys who sell DVRs (the chinese) now sell DVRs where all you have to do is log the serial number of the DVR and they will host the videos on their server for you. This is easily solved: Dont use their service! just get a router, forward the DVR port, set up a DNS account and view your cameras remotely on the internet or on your smartphone. Not a big deal (if you know what you are doing)

 

Hope this was of help

 

Good luck with your system!

[Dee_Ann 0]

Wow, you really spent quite a bit of time painting a very accurate picture of your situation, what you got in hand and what you want to accomplish!

I will tell you a system that will work for you and will get you what you want:

Get Geovision DVR based on PC. These are PCI-E cards that come with 4,8 and 16 channels. you can expand your system just buying more cards, inserting them on your PCI-E slot and interconnecting each one. They come for Windows and Linux systems. Have enough FPS to handle 30FPS for each channel, integrated sound channels, awesome motion detection configuration, video analytics (missing object detection, unattented object detection, traffic counting, etc.) it can activate alarms, control PTZ cameras with ease and have a really easy to use interface (windows-like).

 

HOWEVER, you need to have a powerful PC to get the most out of such cards. Google "Geovision" and see what they have.

 

Yes, you will get low quality on any analog system out there. If you want good quality footage you gotta go with IP or HD systems (HDCVI, HDSDI or HDTVI) make sure cameras and DVR are compatible, coz you cant mix technologies. HDCVI is usually a good choice: not too expensive and it does the job. IP is good, but consumes a lot of your bandwith (which may not be an issue on a home-based system)

 

True, bad wires are an issue. best for CCTV is RG6 cable that 100% copper and 100% mesh shield. But most of us use for convenience UTP cable. If you use UTP, best is to use UTP CAT5e stranded cable and make sure the twist is tight (not loose).

Dont forget to make your system burglar-deterrent: big camera housings for outside cameras, floodlights with motion sensors and signs that warn people that they are being watched / recorded

 

Placing microphones are always a big legal issue. Check out what you can/cant do according to local laws.

 

The issue you mentioned with Chinese DVRs recording on chinese servers is due to CCTV technicians that do not have a clue on networking and how to setup a system to be viewed remotely... so the guys who sell DVRs (the chinese) now sell DVRs where all you have to do is log the serial number of the DVR and they will host the videos on their server for you. This is easily solved: Dont use their service! just get a router, forward the DVR port, set up a DNS account and view your cameras remotely on the internet or on your smartphone. Not a big deal (if you know what you are doing)

 

Hope this was of help

 

Good luck with your system!

 

Wow! Good stuff! Thank you!

 

Linux will be the route for me since I don't do windows at all. I see Ubuntu has ZFS integrated into it now. Not a huge Ubuntu fan but if it works, well...

 

As for making it available outside of my home, I really would rather not do that at all in the first place. I simply do not trust the world. Waaaaay too many bad actors out there.

I've read some pretty frightening things people can do if they want to. And not much you can do to stop them. Even disconnected systems are at risk if someone wants in.

 

The varios HD type cameras you mentioned are unfamiliar to me so I have some homework to do. I've been using old analog stuff for about 7-8 years now.

After the economy went to pot during the previous administration I scooped up oodles of old analog cameras and gear for pennies on the dollar. But It's time to move on now and get with the new century.

 

As for audio recording I'm doing it already and I don't care what the consequences are. All the neighbors know I do it and the police know I do it.

The psychotic barbarian living straight across the street from me makes death threats against me, frequently harasses me (daily), curses and calls me many vulgar things, sits on his porch with a gun, drinking beer and shooting the finger at me and yells "F**KING BULL D*KE WH*** B***H!" and "F*** YOU B***H!" constantly. He tries to taunt me into coming outside by yelling "COME OUTSIDE B***H !!", rips his shirt off and stomps around at the edge of my yard, daring me to come outside of my own house. He and his wife and his kids shine Q-beam lights into my windows and cameras at night and try to damage my cameras with lasers. The Q-beams are them trying to disrupt me from sleeping and to try to damage the cameras. He stood in the street and was talking loudly on speakerphone with a friend and told him "That b***h had me thrown in jail, she don't know who she's f***ing with, I'll straight up get a sniper rifle". And the other night him and his wife stood in the front facing my house, he handed her his beer then dropped his pants to the ground and stood there naked from the waist down for at least 30 seconds, then he pulled his pants part way up and stood there some more and yelled "F***ING BULL D*KE C*** WH*** !"..

 

I had to have a gate opener installed so I can come and go without having to get out of my car to open/close/lock the gate by hand like I had been doing because I was vulnerable then. Now I can open the gate by remote, back out, close the gate and drive off without getting out of the car and the same when I come back. I had to put some faux ivy privacy panels over my gate because he would stand at the street and look through my gate and curse at me and make threats. Once I put the privacy stuff up and they couldn't see into my yard anymore him and his wife were FURIOUS and were cursing and telling their visiting friends that I put up "ghetto camouflage to hide behind". After that they would back a pickup truck right to the edge of the street and stand on the tailgate to try and see over my gate into my yard.

 

Just about 20 minutes ago he blasted my cameras with his Q-beam then stood on his porch with his arms raised and yelled "Come on. Do something about it b***h"...

 

I've got several DVD's full of all the harassment and threats he's made towards me and after getting almost no help from the police I'm going to go see the District Attorney next week and let them see all this stuff. I'm thinking the part where he exposed himself, that should get him a felony sex offender conviction. Plus I have two different recordings of him beating his wife and threatening her with a gun. That should get him some prison time.

 

Thing is, when the police finally goes after him for all this stuff he's going to go full tilt insane and I'm really going to be at extreme high risk. He'll kill me if he gets the chance, I have no doubt of it at all. I hope the police will take his guns from him when they arrest him for all this. Even if they do I'm sure he'll get another one or he'll find some other weapon to attack me with. In a million years I never would have thought something like this could ever happen to me, I have never had a problem with a neighbor in all my life until this white trash barbarian RENTED the house across from me. ALL the neighbors are terrified of him and now no one walks their dogs down the street anymore. This used to be a very nice neighborhood and everyone always was very safe here. Now everyone is terrified to leave their homes.

 

Every time this scumbag threatens me I put up another camera or two. And when he sees my cameras it infuriates him and he flies off into a rage. More rage? More cameras.

 

Anyway, so my goal is to begin replacing the old cameras and gear with new, high tech, high def cameras. I want my house and yard to be completely covered so that there is no way anyone can approach my house day or night without being recorded and me being alerted. One limitation I have to work with is that because of the style of my house, there are no eaves that I can put cameras under. My house is a French Provincial with a Mansard roof so in other words, it's a big square box. There's almost no way to mount cameras in a way that they would be discreet. I can't have a bunch of cameras bristling off of the house like a prison or Fort Knox because it would look awkward, odd and tacky. I have to get new siding on the second story soon so I think what I will do is have them install planter boxes under the windows then I can mount dome cameras (of the same color) under the planters so they won't be so obvious. I can see myself ending up with anywhere from 24-30 cameras outdoors and at least 8 cameras indoors for the downstairs. No need for cameras upstairs because it's unlikely he or anyone else would try to come through the windows up there. But downstairs, that could be a problem. I need to replace my doors with ones that can't be broken down and put cameras where I can see in all the rooms with windows downstairs. I've got three dogs (two German Shepherds and a barky brown dog) and I sleep with a display on at the foot of my bed and two handguns on the night stand. If he tries to break in my dogs will wake me and everything will be over once and for all shortly thereafter.

 

I'm really tired of this guy and I'm trying to get the videos all sorted out so I can show the DA what this guy has been doing. But even if they arrest him (again) and put him away for any length of time I KNOW he'll come after me. I can not and will not just sit blindly inside my house, unaware of the outside world, hoping that he doesn't come after me. I'm preparing for the inevitable. I'm not going to be a victim, I'm going to be the victor. You ever see one of those movies where some woman is terrorized and victimized by some low life then she has enough of the BS and she goes into kick a** mode? Yeah, that's where I am at now. I've had enough and I'm switching gears into kick a** mode.

 

Thanks again and I'll probably get back with more questions about cameras and stuff as I try to educate myself about the new tech...

[Dee_Ann 0]

Oh yeah, as for signs, I put up several so that everyone knows that there are cameras and that I am recording audio.

Besides, bad neighbor knows it and the cops know it. They had stood on my porch and I told them about the cameras and audio recording and they told me "People that are doing things they shouldn't be doing are the ones that complain the loudest about cameras."

 

Oh and I also put purple paint on all my gate posts and door frames. In Texas we have the "Purple paint law".

I've also studied up on our "Castle Doctrine" laws.

[dsmwookie 0]

What did you end up doing?

 

I'm looking at some PC based solutions.