Reasonably priced video surveillance

[Caster]

Guy three doors down was broken into last week. This morning, my next door neighbor lost all his guns and a few other things. The perp knows the area. I'm convinced I've met him, though I have no description. It's a tiny neighborhood of less than 30 close knit people with one access road. There's very little for the cops to go on. I've put this off long enough.

I'm looking for reasonably priced camera set up that I can put outside. Ideally, It'd be nice to get something that could work with my iMac. I have a great big computer here that does nothing but surf the web and hold my music. I've got lots of memory sitting here doing nothing. If i could set it up where I could store the video on this computer, that'd be great. Problem, I know precisely SQUAT about doing it. What would be involved and how much money would it take???

[Caster]

Also, Fellow Fairviewans, I will try to get a better description of the guns, but any craftsman tool sets, XD45, Savage bolt action in .223 and an AR of some sort should be looked upon with scrutiny. Seller could be driving either a silver or maroon Mitsubishi Gallant and there might be duct tape on the sunroof.

I lament the passing days of the west when thieves hung from a low branch.

[Glenn]

The only problem is if you get robbed they will take your computer.

Glenn

[Caster]

The only problem is if you get robbed they will take your computer.

Glenn

I'm not so much worried about us getting burgled so much as catching this clown. There are chains and a 80Lb pitbull around the back of our house, a security door that STAYS locked out front and me and my wife live here with her parents. The number one rule of the house is: If me and my wife go off, they stay here. If they go off WE stay here. NO EXCEPTIONS. Everyone here carries daily and I realize that doesn't save you from anything, but something bad will happen when/if they come here. It may be MY blood they use for forensic evidence, who knows, but I'm just saying. Obviously I am also severely pissed about this because I thought I was fairly vigilant and it's clear I am not. I accept a percentage of the blame for this happening and have apologized to my neighbor. He doesn't see it my way and said it was no big deal, but it's a VERY big deal to me. I'd rather been punched in the face. This just confirms my own incompetence for not paying more attention to my surrounding environment.

[UncleJak]

You can get a cam with an IP address that can be accessed via a wireless network. A lot of businesses use these b/c they can monitor them offsite.

[mikegideon]

I have some of these. Comes with software to monitor up to four cameras, and record continuously, or with motion sense. Don't know if it will work on a mac. Just stick them in the windows.

Linksys WVC80N Internet Home Monitoring Camera by Office Depot

[Caster]

You can get a cam with an IP address that can be accessed via a wireless network. A lot of businesses use these b/c they can monitor them offsite.

Yeah, that's what I'd like to do.

I have some of these. Comes with software to monitor up to four cameras, and record continuously, or with motion sense. Don't know if it will work on a mac. Just stick them in the windows.

Linksys WVC80N Internet Home Monitoring Camera by Office Depot

I might put one of these on the side of the house my bedroom window faces, but I'd like some weather proof ones I can put outside.

[mikegideon]

Yeah, that's what I'd like to do.

I might put one of these on the side of the house my bedroom window faces, but I'd like some weather proof ones I can put outside.

Don't have any personal experience with outdoor. At least, not the cheap ones.

[peejman]

I have some of these. Comes with software to monitor up to four cameras, and record continuously, or with motion sense. Don't know if it will work on a mac. Just stick them in the windows.

Linksys WVC80N Internet Home Monitoring Camera by Office Depot

A friend has a set-up similar to this at his house. I don't know the cameras are specifically "outdoor" or not, but they're tucked up inside the eave/soffit. They're nearly invisible and effectively out of the weather. They've been there for several years with no issues I'm aware of.

Recently he got images of his garbage man harassing his dogs. Dogs on one side of fence, trash cans on the other. He printed off a pic and taped it to the lid. The next time the guy picked up the trash he got pics of the guy looking all around for the camera, but couldn't find it. Subsequent pick-ups showed that the problem was solved.

[Caster]

A friend has a set-up similar to this at his house. I don't know the cameras are specifically "outdoor" or not, but they're tucked up inside the eave/soffit. They're nearly invisible and effectively out of the weather. They've been there for several years with no issues I'm aware of.

Recently he got images of his garbage man harassing his dogs. Dogs on one side of fence, trash cans on the other. He printed off a pic and taped it to the lid. The next time the guy picked up the trash he got pics of the guy looking all around for the camera, but couldn't find it. Subsequent pick-ups showed that the problem was solved.

HA! Justice, ninja style!

[jimic]

Check out Logitech security system.

Outdoor camera, indoor camera, internet based,monitor remote from any computer............

[Guest gunnutt]

I live in your area and im thinking trail camera something beats nothing!!!

john

[E4 No More]

I live in your area and im thinking trail camera something beats nothing!!!

john

Unless they steal it.

[E4 No More]

Check out Logitech security system.

Outdoor camera, indoor camera, internet based,monitor remote from any computer............

Indoor master system runs about $300. The Outdoor master system runs about $350. Add-on cameras run $230 to $280 respectively.

[Dolomite_supafly]

Sam's has a very nice 4 camera setup for $400. It includes the cameras, seperate DVR and access to the internet for remote storage. The best part is the power for the cameras goes over the ethernet cables used to send the signal to the DVR. It can also be setup to send photos to your phone or email account when the motion detection goes off.

I am using USB web cameras at the moment with the Yaw Cam software. I plan on getting the setup above real soon.

Even with a USB camera you can use free software to setup motion detection and have photos emailed as well as stored locally or remotely. I have been using Yaw Cam software for a few years and it is easy to setup. It works well and has motion detection. It will send photos to anyone you want, even your phone when it is activated. I am happy with it and the only thing I do not like is it does not take full motion video. You can set it up to take as many pistures a second you want but not video. I have mine setup to take 6 pictures per second upon activation and do this every 10 seconds as long as motion is detected. It stores those locally and sends me a email every two minutes incase something causes a false continuous motion.

There is nothing that can be done to stop them unless they know there is a camera. That is why I let everyone I know I have cameras going all the time. My brother who is part of the nefarious crowd knows this and has no doubt told all his criminal friends. I can't think of any other reason why no one has tried to break in. Well that and two very aggressive dogs. Afterwards you will hopefully have decent photos to help investigators.

Yawcam - Yet Another Webcam Software

Like I said it works with USB web cameras and works well. It would make a good interim solution until you can get a more permanent one setup.

Here is the $400 system from Sam's:

Samsung Security System with 22" Monitor and 8Ch DVR - Sam's Club=

And like I said a ethernet cable is all you need to run, no seperate power cable.

Dolomite

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I'm not talking ultra-tech difficulties here, but the easiest install is all in the house with cameras peeking out windows. And if the house is not as big as a mansion, wireless works fine and isn't expensive.

With wireless in-house cams, all you have to do is mount the cameras and connect a wallwart from outlet to camera for power. Old dad has a 4 cam wireless system and the cams are not even screwed down and it works great. He gets good enough views of three sides of the house with the cams just sitting on window sills. Maybe a little duct tape, can't recall. He has another watching the back sitting on his deck under the awning, connected to the deck AC and taped down to a piece of styrofoam. That is his favorite because he gets to watch the coons, possums and stray cats sharing the catfood he leaves out after it gets dark.

Old Dad is a retired EE and has installed literally hundreds of microwave relays and cellphone towers and network installs and such. He could make a fancier system but the cheap no-install system fits his needs.

The indoor window cams don't do as good at night because the glass reflects the infrared illuminators.

If you put em under the eaves outside, you at least have to go to the (slight) trouble of routing power outside, unless your house already has plenty of outside outlets. But the cheap wireless cams can have reception trouble if you combine outside with a long throw, so POSSIBLY the most distant wireless cams would not send a strong enough signal from outside and you'd also be looking at either a short run to a transmitter on the other side of the wall, or a run all the way to the hub.

Mike Gideon earlier mentioned power over ethernet (in another thread), where a couple of connectors in the ethernet cable send power. Cutting it down to only one cable run per camera.

I'd like to put some in, but I stay home most of the time and can just look out a window or step outside to see most stuff. Would mainly like a couple of night vision cams out in the woods, both for security and curiosity what critters are out there at night. There is a fence on the woods and also a fence on the back yard so the dogs can't go out in the woods at night and wake the neighbors. But they can see stuff I can't out in the woods and get real excited sometimes. I'd like to see whatever they can see out there.

A long run of a hundred feet or more isn't a problem like a NASA launch, but its enough expense and trouble ain't got around to doing anything about it.

Edited January 20, 2012 by Lester Weevils

[Caster]

I can't think of any other reason why no one has tried to break in. Well that and two very aggressive dogs and some Supafly subsonic suppressed death from a distance.

Dolomite

Finished that out for ya;)

[Fourtyfive]

My daughter's home was broken into the other night , two TV's and a camera were stolen. The camera had pictures of a country music star that is a friend of mine. The law bought the camera in a sting then after viewing the pics called his manager and then the star called me. We are getting the camera back as well as one of the TV's they stole , strange how things work out.........the idiots that stole the stuff were arrested today. YEA !!!!!!

[BPE]

Look into a product line called QSee that can be purchased at most any place. Generally the best prices for these items are at TigerDirect.com. I'm not affiliated with either. These are perfect home systems with standalone DVR you can hide anywhere. Plus the user interface allows connections to iPhone and Android with minimal setup. Not to be offensive but it is made for people who know nothing about Tech but want a good deal for the money. They are not PoE like the one suggested at Sam's but come with all appropriate cable. Additional cable can be easily picked up at Bluff City Electronics off Elm Hill Pike or GrayBar off 8th Ave in Nashville. I think this will suite your needs and get images as required for conviction without breaking the bank or putting on a low line that LinkSys is going to provide. USB cameras will not do you justice when you desire justice. They mainly offer a false sense of security. I may get burned for those last statements but each man is entitled to his own opinion. But you decide whether to pay $70 for a decent single webcam or 3x that for a decent system that will last, have 4 cameras, independent and reliable DVR, great support and offer IR lights on the cameras for night time.

[dralarms]

go to 1saleaday.com they have some pretty good deal from time to time . the other day thay had 4 cameras and a dvr for 199.99 but you had to add the harddrive.

[Guest WyattEarp]

i wanna know how the video imagery is stored, and how one reviews it? a 2 hour movie in avi or mpg format is well over several gigabytes in file size, I can't imagine what 24 hours of video surveillance would amount to. and how do you go back and review all that data? just fast forward till you see something suspicious? if you see nothing you just erase it?

[BPE]

i wanna know how the video imagery is stored, and how one reviews it? a 2 hour movie in avi or mpg format is well over several gigabytes in file size, I can't imagine what 24 hours of video surveillance would amount to. and how do you go back and review all that data? just fast forward till you see something suspicious? if you see nothing you just erase it?

I'm going to attempt not to thread-steal and/or turn this forum into a geek's wet dream but whenever I start to look into buying a product of substantial cost I like to know everything I possibly can about it. I have experience in this field so I intend to share what I know in order to help others.

The quick answer, Wyatt, is that the video is compressed heavily. In most systems, the H.264 codec is utilized being the one of the best and most common compressors out there now. With the ability to also load this compressor onto hardware for implementation instead of using a software based codec for compression it keeps costs down, as they're mass produced, high on reliability and it's easier for manufacturers to use as it requires less programming.

Wyatt, since I understand you to be a video/graphics guy from your other posts here, don't think of the AVI being in a standard you would expect regarding resolution. You typically deal with SD or HD video in common formats of 720x480(SD), 1080x720(720p) or 1920x1080(1080i). For some those may just be numbers so to explain the first number is the width, in pixels, of the video and the second the height, again in pixels. The more pixels, the greater quality the image. Compare it to digital cameras you would have bought back in early 2001-2002 to cameras purchased within the last few years. The quality is much better and once the still image you take is saved you can zoom in better on the newer digital image. The older cameras were grainy at best and look horrible printed on a 4"x3" photo. Specifically, 1080i HD, what most TVs today are made to show, is similar to the quality of a 3MP camera.

When it comes to digital video surveillance, video formats are not called SD or HD but are generally referred by CIF and D1. Now that you've seen the numbers for SD and HD signals, compare those to CIF and D1 formats.

CIF: 352x240

2CIF: 704x240

4CIF: 704x480

D1: 720x480

Those are extremely small!! In fact, D1 video resolution which is not support by all manufacturers is the best of the list and it is only even with SD video. Most manufacturers support 1/2 CIF, CIF, 1/2 D1, 2CIF. Any time there is a 1/2 preceding the video standard, take the numbers and divide by two. This means you're getting crappy video snapshots of whatever it is you're capturing. This is why I don't recommend webcams as security cameras as most models only support CIF for recording.

When it comes to storing these videos for usage later one needs to examine the compression used. Don't worry about the codec, such as H.264, so much as the bit rate of the video stored. The bit rate of the video directly correlates to how compressed the video will be. And no, compression is not some magical thing a computer does. It is a process in which patterns are found in the data and instead of storing 40 0's back to back they will store the number 40 and then 0. So compared the space stored to hold 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 versus 40/0. That may seem great but the next step the compressor does is to take and throw away data if the size of the resulting pattern finder is not enough to meet the needs of the bit rate. It will go through and take a square of 4 pixels and instead of showing each color on each pixel it will take and find the median color for the 4 pixels. It will replace the individual pixel colors with the new median color it calculated. It just made its own pattern so it can then compress the video further. So - the lower the bit rate supported the more often the compressor used is going to replace the video you're taking with a median of colors found within the picture.

When you are watching video through Comcast, Charter or any other cable company, they are compressing the video on their side before sending it to your cable box to keep down the bandwidth that the video takes up. Typically, you're watching video between 5-10Mb/s or Megabits per second. This is considered by the industry to be called Broadcast compression. Step it down a notch to 3Mb/s to get to industrial compression and that's where most moderately priced security DVRs reside. Wyatt, I assume you're used to either 50Mb/s compressed or 300Mb/s uncompressed in your projects. Now knowing the compression rate we can easily do some math to figure out how much space is required for a video you are recording for security.

Key:

MB = 8Mb

GB = 1,024MB

TB = 1,024GB or 1,048,576MB

MegaBytes per second: 3Mb/s = 0.375MB/s = 9MB for every 24 seconds

MegaBytes per day: 86,400 (seconds in a day) / 8 seconds = 3,600 * 9MB = 32,400MB = 31.6GB per day

4 Cameras: 31.6GB a day * 4 = 126.5GB per day for 4 cameras

You can see how much data will be stored per day, per camera and how much data is required for a full system of 4 cameras per day. Yes - this is quite a bit of data. But with prices on 1TB drives being what they are it's really not that bad. Also, don't forget to consider that most everyone will turn the cameras to only record during motion which generally eliminates 65% of dead time or more. That reduces your storage load to 44.3GB a day for a 4 camera system. Take that and save it to a 1TB drive and now you get ~23 days of storage for video. Perfect for most homes! Better if the motion isn't occurring more often than 35% of the time or you set the compression down lower. Also - the compression could be higher (meaning a lower Mb number and less space) on a lower cost system to save that all important storage space.

Wyatt, you asked how a person would possibly comb through all of this video. The answer is rather simple. You're not going to watch the video until you realize you need it. For instance, you now have a clean spot surrounded by dust where your TV used to be, your guns are all missing and you don't recall posting them for sale on TGO, you're wife's acting a bit strange and the sheets are all a mess, that sort of thing. And when you do go to review the "tape" you generally will know about what time of day you're looking for so that cuts down a lot of the searching. Now, you fast forward.

Some systems, including the one I have at my office, records all day long and marks events of motion for you. So when you go back to review you can easily click through the multiple events captured of motion and get to what you're looking for in under 2-3 minutes. Not bad considering all of the video I have on my security system. Which by the way is a 16 channel system with 8 cameras at the moment that records all day and night around the clock. I've put enough storage in the machine that it has been recording since November 1st and has only recently filled the drives to 85% capacity. I'm comfortable in knowing if something happens within my office, we have video of it and we have it for a long time.

I hope this has been helpful and not too off topic. Just do your research when looking at products. Always click to review the specs and look at those instead of the marketing and flash that is attached with the unit.

[Caster]

Wow, that's a lot to think about. Thanks to everyone. Me and the wife are shopping around now.

[Guest gunnutt]

Unless they steal it.

good point,the little jerks have been stealing lawnmowers and everything in between!!!!

john

[Guest Lester Weevils]

BPE did good explaining compression.

A couple of silly random additions--

- A video of your living room when you are not there could theoretically be compressed crazy small. Being as there is no motion in the scene, if the compression is smart enough to ignore the noise in your camera then theoretically 8 hours of video wouldn't have to be substantially bigger than 1 second of video.

- Most codecs exploit some method of avoiding repeatedly encoding parts of the image which do not change. So if your camera was recording your living room and the only motion (other than camera noise) is your pet parrot on his perch, then the codec would only have to record the changes in that small part of the frame.

- Some specialized codecs get remarkable clarity and tiny file sizes. Some of the screen cam softwares (for capturing computer demo videos) make ridiculously small file sizes crystal clear, where a conventional generic video codec might be 100 times as big and fuzzy to add icing on the cake. They strongly exploit the characteristic that on a computer screen running many kinds of programs, most of the pixels do not change very often. If a guy is making a video explaining a program's operation and mousing around the screen, the codec only has to encode the tiny parts of each frame where the mouse changed position.

- Trivia-- It is still commonplace that file systems and operating systems do not elegantly handle files bigger than about 2 GB. That restriction is fading, but it is commonplace for long-duration recording softwares up to now, to break files into 2 GB or smaller pieces. Even if you happen to be recording on a computer that is not so limited, it is useful to have the data in a form easily portable to equipment that does have the limitation.