Can You Help Me Choose a Better DVR Card?

[gaz_0001 0]

Hi People,

 

This is my first time on the site, but it will not be the last, as we have just got some cameras and a DVR Card.

 

I have spent the last two hours reading the latest threads and to be honest i am a little confused.

 

OK, heres what i want to do. My Dad is running 4 cameras on a DVR Card and the FPS is a little bit flakey, so for christmas i wanted to get him a better one. The thing is the card he bought did not come in a branded box or anything so to be honest i dont know what it is or how to find out the specs on it. It came with Software called PICO and is running on Windows XP. Within the software under the settings bit for each camera there is 25 FPS selected, which tells me that the card is 100 FPS!!?? However upon reading this site, 25 FPS for each camera would mean Real Time and perfectly smooth as we would see it, but the recordings that this setup is making is not perfectly smooth, and when someone is coming up the drive, you can only tell who it is because you actually know them - the picture is stuttery.

 

This card cost £60, but i have been on a website and a GeoVision GV-250 only does 12 FPS and is £105 - why is this?? Would this GeoVision card that is almost twice as much be better or worse??

 

I am looking to spend around £70 -£80 on a new card for him for christmas and i figured that if he bought one for £60 from a shop, then one for £70 or £80 off Ebay would be better as ebay has all that cheap but cheerful crap from taiwan, that is.... well pretty crap, but you know its all made from more or less the same stuff and it all comes from Taiwan and alike anyway! Please dont shoot me down for mentioning ebay, i know you guys do not like it on here as i have read, but the card is not for a bank or anything just our driveway and garden.

 

One that i have seen on ebay says 8 Channels, 200 FPS, 352 * 288 (PAL). Surely with 4 cameras on it this one has to be significantly better than the one he has already??

 

OK, now i am baffling myself, i dont really know what i am talking about, or where i am trying to go with this!!

 

Can anyone point me in the right direction for a noticibly imroved video quality for £70-£80?? If not can anyone suggest a nice aftershave for chrismas!!!!

 

 

Many Thanks for taking the time to read this.

 

Gaz

[gaz_0001 0]

Anyone?

[Helheim 0]

I'm pretty new so I'm not 100% sure but I don't think you can get a decent card for that price.

[kensplace 0]

Hi, welcome to the forum.

 

PICO is software that comes with many of the ebay cards, I had one in the past it was not very good..... Those cards are usually clones, and the software is ripped off from another manufacturer.

 

Geo cards have much better software, support, and general quality than a pico card. But they do cost more.

 

If you purchase one on ebay, you will not get a warranty from the manufacturer, even if the seller claims you will - dont believe them.

 

If warranty is not a problem, then you can pick up a second hand geo card for about the same price you want to spend on ebay, just be careful you get a 'real' geo card, there are counterfeit cards out there.

 

Personally I would avoid the cctv stuff that comes from taiwan etc, you know the ones, cheap buy it now or opening bid price, but massive postage costs (so they avoid ebay fees.). Its pretty much all junk, nice looking, nice sounding, nicely marketed junk.

 

Just to make that clear, avoid the foreign rip off high postage cost sellers in the cctv sections. Avoid the too good to be true looking ones, search for uk only, and even then, some uk sellers are importing the junk and listing it from the UK, so if you recognise a item from a uk seller that is mainly sold from one of those foreign sellers, be wary.

 

Second hand stuff professional is usually better than the new no-name foreign imports.

 

Look for decent stuff, good brand names, there are good quality bargains on ebay if you keep looking and dont mind the risk that it may arrive faulty, not as advertised etc. The way I look at it, even if occasionally a purchase isnt ok and I lose on that one, I still have save bucketfuls of cash on other purchases, so still winning!

 

It can work out expensive though, learning cctv via ebay, so avoid starting out with the low end stuff, and just get something good to start with, it will save money upgrading countless times.

 

Another thing to consider, even if you get a good dvr card, the PC has to be able to handle it. To slow a processor, or to slow a hard drive, wrong motherboard/chipset, insuffient ram etc can all cripple a system and reduce its frame rate.

[Doug 0]

I hear Brut is making a come back, splash it on all over

 

Doug

[Thomas 0]

 

I am looking to spend around £70 -£80 on a new card for him for christmas and i figured that if he bought one for £60 from a shop, then one for £70 or £80 off Ebay would be better as ebay has all that cheap but cheerful crap from taiwan, that is.... well pretty crap, but you know its all made from more or less the same stuff and it all comes from Taiwan and alike anyway! Please dont shoot me down for mentioning ebay, i know you guys do not like it on here as i have read, but the card is not for a bank or anything just our driveway and garden.

 

Sounds like common sense but yet at the same time is about as far from reality as you can get. Differant factories and manufactors have differant QC standards and use differant suppliers.

[kangtree 0]

Now in the market there are many kinds of DVR cards.

so how can we judge who is the best one for us and choose one who meet our requirements?

now we can judge it from the below features:

1.Compression format:

H.264 is the most advance compression format now.

MPEG4 is 2nd advanced.

MJPEG is 3rd class

2.Resolutions:

D1(704*576,pal;640*480,ntsc)

half-D1(704*288)

CIF(352*288)

3.Hardware or software compression

Normally,hardware compression is expensive than others.and can do more channels in one PC system.

4.Real time or Un-real time in recording

 

Not the more advanced ones ,the more best.u shall choose the right one who can meet ur requirements.

[Thomas in BP 0]

C'mon kangtree, gimme a break!

 

I recognize that you want to sell as many of your H.264 video boards as possible and that you may be very proud of your product, but what happened to honesty in marketing and the principle about that advice should be based on the needs of the customer?

 

I am sure your four steps are the best way to choose your product, but I do find your categorization of codecs crude and biased. I know it is very popular to pretend that H.264 is not MPEG-4, but in many cases that is just marketing hype in order to sell H.264 as a better mouse trap to people who already use MPEG-4 Part 2. I am not saying that MPEG-4 (part 2 & part 10/H.264) is bad per se, but it is definitely not God's gift to mankind and claiming that MJPEG is '3rd class' is just outrageous!

 

If a customer's needs is given higher priority than a manufacturer's needs to sell a particular technology, then the choice of codec should be among the final conclusions of the analysis of the customer's needs, because MPEG-4, MJPEG, and JPEG2000 can each claim 'superiority' in different customer scenarios.

 

You and I are not competing for the same customer segments, but I still would like to ask for a bit more sober product promotion from your side as my partners and I have to waste our time 'cleaning up' after a lot of the H.264 hype on a regular basis - even in our segments!

[cctv_down_under 0]

I agree with Thomas, but not entirely, each compression does have its own benefits but I will say that MPEG4 and H264 are leading the development race, it could be argued that it depends largely on the actual compression and also the situation, for example if using a PTZ then the benifits found in H264 are rendered mostly useless...each compression has differing benefits so compression should not be the only concern...for an end user things like:

 

1/ Warranty

2/ Support

3/ Ease of Use

 

Should be considered long before the 4 choices above are even considered...for my two cents..your budget is not enough to buy a reasonable system as a good PC Card solution, now I know we all do this for a living so we are very biased against cheap stuff, but consider that no one in here is trying to sell to you so you should know that there is a large level of experience with dealing with cheaper products.

 

The fact is that in life these days you really can buy some things quite cheap mfrom Asia and indeed of Ebay but becasue Security requires you to provide a result (evidence) it is not a place that you can afford to skimp on.

 

The long and short is that you probably are better getting a quality brand product second hand with some form of warrantyand you certainly have a better chance getting support in here for it, or my suggestion is buy a cheap 4ch BOX (standalone) if you want to from Ebay, but stay away from the cheap PC cards.

 

If you bought a chaep DVR player the difference to you might be negligable, you migt not need top sound and for it to last forever or crystal clear reproduction but security is not as standardised as the DVD market is so buying cheap can ofte render you without a system that works "fit for purpose"

[Thomas in BP 0]

G'day down under, mate!

 

I will go so far as to agree that MPEG-4 is a sophisticated codec family, but we cannot agree that it is leading the development race unless we decide which race we are talking about.

 

If we talk about the preparedness for compression of megapixel video streams that will be a viable alternative to today's CCTV cameras some time in the future, then MPEG-4 needs a serious redesign in order to beat the performance of JPEG2000 on large resolution images when the race goes into the megapixel range.

 

In most European countries you cannot get MPEG-4 certified for use in banks because they have very high requirements for the quality of individual images and lossless is often explicitly specified in the guidelines they have to follow. MPEG-4 has an edge in compression of high fps motion video by using P-frames, but if the race is to up the fps in banks and still meet their strict requirements, then MPEG-4 is incapable of winning. In some applications using P-frames is acceptable, but not in many other, so if the development race if for higher fps with complete images (I-frames in MPEG-4 jargon) then MPEG-4 will clearly loose to JPEG2000 and also to MJPEG though with less of a margin.

 

I have nothing against MPEG-4 (Part 2 & Part 10/H.264) if it is in the hands of professional CCTV installers who know the technology and are aware of its limitations, but all the marketing hype and misrepresentations combined with the ability of any Tom, Dick, and Harry to buy a cheap MPEG-4 chip and set themselves up as a manufacturer of video boards has mislead a lot of IT people with experience in DVD ripping to believe that they are equipped to be professional CCTV installers and therefore a lot of CCTV customers end up with video recordings that are completely useless the day they have to document a crime - a quite important reason for installing a CCTV system to begin with.

[cctv_down_under 0]

I tend to agree with you JPEG 2000 is pretty exciting stuff I must say, it is midnight here so not going into detail about compression comparisons or I could be here all night, all I might add is that the MPEG variety offers more flexibility than JPEG does at this point...point taken with the banks, hell I should know I have done 16 of them, also casinos will not accept anything other than MPEG2, The way MPEG does work lends itself to issues, however it is very flexible with network infrastructure and especially video content analysis, which in my opinion will be the next big thing.

 

I did a fair bit of research on compressions a while back and each has its own benefits and witht he size of storage growing MPEG does loose some of them, you are right to say that any Manu can claim to be great becasue of the MPEG already made chips, I was reading something the other day on a brand new compression but I cant seem to find it, if i do find it I will post here...mark my words JPEG2000 will be very interesting indeed once it is fully developed becasue it incorporates some of the best ideas in all compressions.

 

The cheap ready made MPEG4 chips makes it more popular and therefore it gets a hype becasue more people manufacture it, therefore more sales hype due to volume, but it has been developing at a rather fast pace compared to others