Recommendations for Digital Security Systems? 235
An Anonymous Coward asks: "My company has an ailing analog security
system, (you know the types: 16 position multi-plexer etc, 24hour VHS
tape, and so on). We're in the market for a 21st century solution,
and was hunting around for a computer/hard drive solution, being able
to store up to 8 weeks of video, from 8am to 10pm, 7 days a week at
multiple frame rates (up to 30, but we'll settle for 3 to 5 frames
per second, with motion detection...) and preferably at a resolution
where you can tell if that's a nose on the persons face or not!"
It's a reasonable enough question. Just for fun, how difficult would
it be to build such a system using consumer-level-off-the-shelf
parts?
"Some of the ones we're looking at have in the order of 480gb of storage. Windows or Linux based, it does not matter, but the ability to schedule recordings, export the pictures (water-marking for possible criminal and court proceedings...), backup options to dat/cd-r/dvd-r, always on, ability to view previous footage AND record live from multiple camera's (8/16 or better), possible remote network access, motion recording, and ability to use both digital or analog cameras (significant previous investment in these, would like to re-use the colour newer models...) and newer digital higher resolution camera's are some of the features I would like. Any ideas from the very knowledgeable Slashdot crew?"
Run, don't walk, to x10.com (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Run, don't walk, to x10.com (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Run, don't walk, to x10.com (Score:2)
But being assholes doesn't imply the uselessness of their product, right? I can understand if you won't support them for moral reasons, but don't condemn their products' technical merits because of the company's behavior.
the ideal analogue security system... (Score:3, Funny)
The almost ideal digital security system... (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall either 8 or 16 cameras per rack-mounted machine, but I imagine they've gotten bigger / better / faster in the last five years. A higher number of simultaneous inputs reduces the frame rates, so we chose the maximum number of inputs that could give us the frame rates we desired (3.5 frames/sec, I think.)
They have digital tape jukeboxes parked next to the racks, and even our largest site keeps at least 90 days of video.
They provide client software that allows us to remotely access the video stream via our internal network, and they modified their system to include a SQL database of a journal of the accompanying financial transactions being performed. They identify each computer with a camera, and upon request deliver this journal synchronized with the video stream. We also have some public safety cameras feeding the system that are not tied to the transaction system.
It's elegant for the investigators, who are non-techies. They have search capabilities on that data, and can speed right to the relevant transactions. They can also simply click a button and burn a CD with the selected video stream and it even comes with the required digitally-signed proprietary viewer.
Another thing it has that you maybe haven't yet considered is that their company has experts who will testify in court on our behalf that their system is valid, and that the images haven't been tampered with. We have used their imagery as evidence in many successful prosecutions. IANAL, but having a built-in Trusted Third Party strikes me as a strong benefit.
So, with a wonderful system like this, what are the drawbacks? Money, plain and simple. You have to be willing to invest money (and people) to get a top notch system, but the cost-avoidance was definitely worth it for us.
Oh, and before anyone goes off about Big Brother, you should know that the transactions we are recording are financial in nature, and cash is involved. The computers are ours, and the users know they are being recorded. Just that knowledge provides a huge fraud deterrent. We honestly much prefer deterring theft up front than prosecuting our own employees after the fact. And armed with this system, we have no problem prosecuting thieves.
Disclaimer: I do not have any financial investment in Loronix, I am just a very satisfied customer.
Data difficult to recover from wreck (Score:2)
Phillip.
note to self: (Score:5, Funny)
dangers (Score:5, Interesting)
At the company I work for, our security system one day decided to change all the codes, so nobody could get in or out of the building. It turns out that something triggered a complet reset, erasing everything and restoring the default settings.
It's funny now, we all laugh about it, but craving a smoke while locked inside can be very stressful. I don't know how many times I was tempted to break a window and escape....
Fire Codes (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fire Codes (Score:4, Informative)
You are allowed to be locked into a building until someone pulls a fire alarm. Many of the doors at my old University had magnetic locks that would open if the power failed or the fire alarm went off.
Re:dangers (Score:1)
Re:dangers (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.silent-witness.com/
Forget about Tivo's and other consumer dvr's --- most of them are based on linux so they crash more often than QNX/vxworks-based systems. Also you are paying a lot of money on useless things like on-screen tv guide/vcr plus royalties.
Re:dangers (Score:4, Funny)
dont tell me they dont, because by law they have to, no matter where in the US it is... other countries? they could care less about your personal safety, so it might just do nothing but make loud noises.
NOTE: i learned this first hand... when trying to get beck in the locked office, my boss said, "watch this" started hot-boxing his cigar and blowing it in the mail slot.... smoke alarm went off and the doors unlocked. he calmly opened the door and called the alarm company to let them know it was a false alarm.
Re:dangers (Score:3, Funny)
Hot-boxing the cigar? That sounds like part of what Clinton got in trouble for...
Re:dangers (Score:3, Funny)
Or, use your brain and quit smoking!
Close (Score:2)
Unfortunately, it's a lot harder than I ever imagined. (Actually, the problem is that it's a lot different than I ever imagined.)
Why people live... (Score:2, Insightful)
1TB Array (Score:4, Insightful)
We did it cheap... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We did it cheap... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We did it cheap... (Score:2)
Here's a silly idea: (Score:2)
Re:Here's a silly idea: (Score:2, Funny)
Has anyone done this for a home system? (Score:3)
The motion detection software is commonly available and could be used to drop the frame rate to almost nothing in areas without a lot of traffic.
I'd also like to set up a periodic uploading of the pictures to an off site server in case someone were to steal the computer taking the pictures...
computernerd (Score:4, Informative)
Could you imagine... (Score:1)
Could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of Tivos?
On a more serious note, a similar question [slashdot.org] was asked some time ago, however on a much larger scale. Some of the suggestions posted in the comments might be relevant to your case.
Re:Could you imagine... (Score:1)
Try this out... (Score:1, Redundant)
It's a one terabyte disk array for under $5k. This should get you started.
worked for me (Score:5, Interesting)
the story is here [homepc.org]
Security AND Fun! (Score:4, Troll)
Re:Security AND Fun! (Score:3, Funny)
100 X10? Wouldn't that be 1000?
OT: X10 ads? (Score:2)
This functionality works better on Mozilla because it only turns off popups that happen when pages load, not *all* popups. Some sites use popup links, and Konq breaks that....
-Vic
Is it just me... (Score:1)
No Troll Intended (Score:1)
Do it yourself? (Score:3, Interesting)
National Control Devices has been offering a video switcher [controlanything.com] for a few years now that will handle up to video 16 inputs, for only $150. It looks really impressive. I've been considering getting one for ages, just to play around with. It's controllable through an RS232 serial port.
Here's a cheap solution (Score:5, Informative)
Their network cams use multipart jpegs over HTTP. You can simply save off the growing jpeg file on a disk, or you can also set the camera to automatically upload a incrementally-numbered file onto an FTP server every n seconds, or you can write a small script that'll pull the file from HTTP every n seconds ...
What's more, you can also use third-party free software such as VNCCam [sourceforge.net] that will allow you to customize and view your camera's display over VNC.
That's what I use for an indoors security solution : I have one of these cameras bolted on a ceiling (it comes with the hardware) of a room that has expensive equipment. For indoor use, these little cameras work great, they're reliable, they only cost between $500 and $1000, and they're a no-brainer to get going. However, if you plan on outdoors security, an Axis camera is definitely not what you want.
My EUR 0.03.
Re:Here's a cheap solution (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you can buy outdoor enclosures and mounting systems like the ones from Pelco [pelco.com] for the Axis cameras. If you don't want to do it yourself, there are many retailers who build complete packages of cameras, enclosures, and accessories.
Also, ThinkGeek sells the Axis 2100 [thinkgeek.com] and the Axis 2120 [thinkgeek.com]. And to make it even cooler, the cameras run Linux [axis.com].
Image motion sensing (Score:1)
DNA Lounge may be able to help... (Score:2, Informative)
check it out: DNA Lounge tools [dnalounge.com]
also of interest: DNA Lounge: Video Webcast [dnalounge.com]
Slashdot Revisited (Score:3, Interesting)
Big non technical problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you build it yourself you have to prove that you didn't tamper with the evidence (should you ever charge someone with a crime based on the recordings...or fire them and then they contest it).
If someone else builds it a large part of their business plan is how they defend the thing in court. Plus that is something they would pay for.
That's not to say a system you make yourself is significantly more prone to tampering, but it is likely to be perceived as such (esp. if you build one for your home).
Re:Big non technical problem... (Score:1)
Of course, these days if the "video tape" was an
Re:Big non technical problem... (Score:2)
That is pretty much exactly what I was thinking...except I had a small perl script an pnmtext in mind (plus pnm-some-other-stuff), but that's because I have the script for some time lapse stuff I did last year..or maybe two years ago.
Er, not just I, but I did do the time stamping part, a friend did a lot of other stuff, including building a box for one of the cameras...and having the good idea of making a video of the building they were making just outside our office window...
Visilinx (Score:5, Informative)
It also interfaces with point of sale systems, captures images at predefined events (such as NO SALE's or lottery winnings etc). It does timelapse video with retention as far back as 13 months. It does sales reporting as well as many other reports.
I could go into more detail but I'll just direct you to the website.
http://www.visilinx.com
Check it out...
Off the shelf parts. (Score:4, Informative)
is practically any security camera. If you don't
mind investing in a card for each camera, multiplexing becomes trivial. Since they're PCI,
4-5 per computer is as good as you're going to get, but you can use low end pentium systems for the capturing easily enough.
Then you can do several frame captures per second easily enough if you want to store frames, or you can do realtime mpeg encoding. At 5 fps, with full color/sound, you're talking a little under 100 megs an hour per source when recording at 320x240. And this is without scaling down the quality any.
-Restil
Re:Off the shelf parts. (Score:1)
Easy fix! (Score:2)
Re:Off the shelf parts. (Score:2)
Switching video inputs on a bt848 doesn't work so well anyhow, it takes the card 200ms or more to sync the new signal so for four cameras you're limited to about 1 frame per second.
On my crappy overloaded p233 I can manage about 6 frames per minute at 640x480 from 4 cams after I timestamp, jpeg compress and archive them. Good enough for me considering that I don't really own anything valuable. Plus I scale down and upload every third frame here [themall.co.nz] because I'm a cam geek.
Re:Off the shelf parts. (Score:3, Informative)
Panasonic WJ-HD500AV - Digital Hard Drive Recorder with Built-in 16 CH Multiplexer
here's a link: http://cctv.panasonic.com/showcase.asp
Sony HSR2
here's a link: http://bpgprod.sel.sony.com/bpcnav/app/99999/16/1
Both units provide built in 16 camera multiplexor with the record/live monitoring features, water marking, schedules, motion detection, etc.
Afer getting a good recorder you probably also will want to get decent camera's that are appropriate for your lighting conditions, or get better lighting. It's hard to say which is more cost effective but having good images is the point of the whole exercise and 'doing it cheap' could be as effective as not doing it at all.
I would point out that the two recorder's are merely two that I have hands on experience with and from companies that have been around in CCTV for some time. These two are by no means the only choices, as some others have posted, there are a number of choices for equipment designed specifically to meet your needs and are well worth the price.
Re:Off the shelf parts. (Score:2)
-Restil
Check out Patapsco Designs (Score:3, Informative)
(Plus they are using embedded Linux for thier newer camera-network interface)
http://www.patapsco.com/pdi/featured_product.ht
or
http://www.digitaldatacatch.com
~Sean
Re:Check out Patapsco Designs (Score:1)
All of this data is being sent back to an Oracle database in our data center and is later used when the client wants to do sales reporting or analysis.
We can currently connect up to 16 Cameras and 6 registers at each location. You can also control PTZ (Pan/Tilt/Zoom) cameras and monitor gas pumps etc.
Time lapse video is constantly being archived for however many cameras are in the location. You can then seek back to a specific date and time and play back video from that time for all cameras or a specific camera of your choice. Saturation, Contrast and brightness can all be controlled from the web interface to expose details that may not immediately be seen. When you are watching the archived video you can also at any time pull up the transactions that were occuring at that point in time and see the actual receipt contents.
Really cool stuff...
http://www.visilinx.com [visilinx.com]
A Simple Cheap Solution (Score:1, Offtopic)
I started off with a Logitech QuickCam. The camera I had was of horrible quality, but enough to make out whats going on. Next I downloaded the SDK from Logitechs website and within 30 minutes or so, read up on their documentation for the SDK and created a very very simple security system program.
Esentailly all it did was monitor the camera using a built in function in the SDK for movment, once X amount of moment was detected over Y amount of time, the camera switched on and started filming until the movment stopped for a specied amount of time. The files were avi files stored on the local hard drive, and didn't take up much space at all. Now I would suppose you want a much higher quality system, so go out and buy a bit nice digital camera. At 5-10 fps you can fit quite a bit of compressed video on a computer. The only downside was that it performed very poorly in the dark.
And your budget is...? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm actually thinking of wiring my house for security too. This is what I'm looking at:
- A bunch of motion sensors, installed at all entry points (actually, pointing to the entry point), including windows and fireplace.
- A few micro camera, pointing to those entry points (I can save a few cameras, if I figure out how to control the head of the camera from the computer)
- An old computer (P166) with a large HD.
- A few cron tasks to activate the system, when we are not at home, or activate only certain areas while we are sleeping.
- Motion sensor signals are sent to the computer for processing.
- Cameras are controlled by computer remotely.
- In order to save disk space, the cameras are activated and start taking video, only when a motion signal is received by the computer. Cameras are turned off 3 hours after last motion signal.
I'm also considering to have 802.11b on my palm, so I can remotely de/activate the system.
I haven't done the total cost estimate yet. But a motion sensor cost around $29, an 80GB HD around $250. Camera's price varies, depends on whether you want b/w or color. I think the wiring part is going to be the most expensive, as I'm no electician.
Re:And your budget is...? (Score:3, Informative)
Just search google for "panasonic web camera".
Think about the requirements (Score:3, Informative)
8am to 10pm is 14 hours/day. That's 14 * 3600 = 50400 seconds/day.
8 weeks * 7 days = 56 days storage required.
56 days * 50400 secs = 2,822,400 seconds storage
at 30 frames/sec, or 30 * 2822400 = 84,672,000 frames total storage.
A 100Gb hard disk stores 100*10^9 bytes (NB: not 100*2^30). Divide that by the number of frames:
100*10^9 / 84672000 = 1181 bytes per frame. This seems a little low, although I'm not sure exactly how much you can compress the data. DVD -> DivX compresses about 10x...
A DivX movie uses about 200 megs/hour, so if you want that quality, you'd go through 160 Gb in 56 days. That doesn't sound too bad, because you don't need DivX quality -- if you push the compression up a bit (and the quality down a bit) you should be able to fit 56 days of fairly good data in 80 Gb.
This could be reasonable. If you want 8 or 16 cameras, multiply that by 8 or 16 -- 640-1280 Gb total storage, so 4-8 of the new Maxtor 160Gb drives will keep you going nicely.
I think I'm obliged to link to the $5K terabyte disk array [slashdot.org] now, but that's not really such a big thing -- if you've got 2 free IDE channels (buy a new controller card if required, they're cheap), you can plug 4 160Gb drives into the PC that's running the thing. Don't worry about RAID if you don't want to, just plug in the drives and set the software to swap drives when one gets full.
great advice (not) (Score:2)
that is, unless you give a shit about what you're recording. something about the use of the word security in conjunction with camera leads me to believe you might, however.
if you're not using RAID, you're gamlbing with your data. it's very unlikely, but I've had two drives (in an array) fail catastrophically in the period of 1 hour. at 50-100gb/drive, without RAID, that's a lot of lost data.
Re:Think about the requirements (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure most people would be happy to have better quality video, it's just that it hasn't been feasible until now. If you could build something which stored at 30fps (and it does look feasible now) then it might be quite popular
If you're triggering it off motion sensors, that will further relax the disk space requirements, because it won't be recording very much. You might not need motion sensors at all though, if you have a good compression algorithm, because with no motion, successive frames should be identical (except for a bit of random noise), so won't need much disk space to store at all.
admissible in court (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing against open source, but the integrity of the video has to be proven in court or the guy who stole those laptops walks.
Re:admissible in court (Score:2)
Paul.
Activity level in Secure location? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you are securing a room that people rarely enter, MPEG compression will see one frame as very similar to the previous frame, and record very little information for the frame.
Also, a feature you may not have thought of, if an alarm is triggered, the recording should go into overdrive, and record high resolution colour at 30fps. There's no excuse for the grainy out-of-focus stop-start security camera images we see on the news!
Re:Activity level in Secure location? (Score:2, Funny)
You don't want one of the PHB's to be caught stealing office supplies do you?!?
Required storage (Score:2)
21st Century Systems (Score:2, Interesting)
Like traditional systems, these systems pretty much record 24/7 whatever is going on. However, most of this data is useless. Unlike in traditional systems, all the data is not stored. The system can analyze when there was motion and then save what happened 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after motion occurred. At the end of the day, you are storing much less data that happens to be much more usable.
Try this... (Score:1)
Digital Video Audit System from SAIC (Score:1)
Here's a software I came across on freshmeat.net (Score:1)
I work for a company that produces such things... (Score:2, Informative)
Looks simple enough... (Score:1)
There is always the issue though - how much is your time worth?
Can you afford the time to develop (and debug) something like this from scratch, or would it be simpler
(& cheaper in the long run) to use a commercial, turnkey solution?
If you figure it _is_ worth developing from scratch - here's what I'd use:
Linux, with a fairly recent kernel (nice BT8x8 vidcap drivers), an el cheapo video capture card (or more),
'streamer' frame capture software (infinitely configurable for framerate, size, etc),
'XawTV' for live viewing, and a whole bunch of 'glue' code (my preference is Tcl/TK),
-- and Bob's yer uncle.
check out the edr1600 from everfocus..its a linux (Score:1, Informative)
it's cool...and sounds just like what you are looking for I think it's about 3K maybe less for 16 cams....it's cool
Big Dog (Score:1)
Look at March Networks (Score:1)
cheap solution (Score:5, Funny)
I don't really know how you would get the correct images back if you need them. Hmmm, maybe a promotion for somebody to win something if they have images with a certain timestamp. Perhaps a date with the cute secretary. Or money, if you have to stoop that low.
Re:cheap solution (Score:2)
If his female cow-orkers look anything like mine, I'd stay as far away from this as possible. The term "RCH" makes my stomach turn over now.
Re:cheap solution (Score:2)
I can't guarantee that any of them will save all the images but, as we programmers like to say, that's an implementation detail. RCH?
VSOC (Score:1)
Disclaimer: I'm somewhat affiliated with that company since they're a wholly-owned subsidiary of my parent company, but that's about it. And I speak for myself not on behalf of any of these companies :P .
Excellent System (Score:2, Informative)
For Security AND Fun!!! (Score:1)
Re:For Security AND Fun!!! (Score:1)
tape (Score:2)
Hi data rate, you can buy terra-byte tape libraries. If there is a piece of footage you need, you can view it on tape or pull it to a Harddrive to run other apps against?
For long term storage(years)you want hi credibilty, putting it on glass is the way to go.
Ok, here goes nothing... (Score:5, Informative)
Let's use Tivo's basic quality as an example, but drop the framerate to 15fps. This should look acceptable considering the limited changes from a stationary camera.
A week's worth of data would use up 49 GB per camera. 16 cameras? 784GB.
I'd advise settling for something more realistic at this point. Perhaps lowering the resolution, or going grayscale. Either way, you've still got to address *sixteen* cameras, so they'll need to be Axis webcams or something else capable of talking IP. There's no way that you'll get away with USB cameras.
So, assuming that black and white reduces you to 33% of the previous number, that's still 262GB per week.
You'd need slightly over two *terabytes* of storage to handle 8 weeks of 15 fps, TV resolution, B&W footage from 16 cameras.
And you'd still need a way to encode the video feed to MPEG on the fly at the camera. And handle roughly 2.3 Mbit/sec per cam into your "server," which would have to reliably write 37 Mbit/sec to your 2 TB array. Without failing.
Now, considering the fact that this is all *WAY* under Fast Ethernet and ATA specs, it's doable. But a homegrown solution with 8 week rollback just isn't feasible. Drop the rollback by a bit, dump to tape (unless you've got a fiber line going to a remote site for backups,) and keep a lot of spare drives around. You can't afford to have a failure anywhere in this assembly.
Sorry if I've taken the wind out of anyone's sails through the judicious use of math, but I just wanted to make sure that no one does anything without being informed.
Consider the time range (Score:2)
Re:Ok, here goes nothing... (Score:2)
Generally 1 fps would be fine.
Let's assume you store 640x480 images (better than NTSC) in full color in "standard average" jpg compression. These usually are around 60K.
1 Minute would be 60 images 1 Hour would be 360 images 1 Day would be 8640 images 8640 images x 60K is about 518MB/day. Buy yourself a pair of 120GB drives. Interleave the images between the two (write even seconds to drive #1 and odd seconds to drive #2), and you can store a YEAR of data on about $400 worth of drives, for a single camera with 1FPS.
However, a better way to do this is to do a difference comparison between the two frames. I.E. snap a frame, compare it with the previous one and don't store it unless it is different enough from the previously stored one.
When a camera is idle you might store 1 per hour or something. I'd suspect that in a lot of cases quite a few of the 16 cameras would be mostly idle. If you were talking a typical convienence store for instance, during the day, store area and pump area cameras would be active most of the day, but only 1 or two would be active at night. Back room (cooler, storeroom, etc.) would generally be mostly idle.
For sake of argument let's say that you would be snapping an image every second on 8 cameras and the rest quiescent. This would bring your total to just over 4.1GB/day. A 120GB drive would hold just under a month of data. I still reccommend two or more in an interleaved fashion.
Most secuity cameras are NOT on a permanent retention basis. A month may be plenty. If this is the case, then 240GB would be fine. If longer retention is necessary, streaming these off to tape once a month doesn't sound too unreasonable. You could also further weed these down by being pickier on your difference stuff or just throwing away every other image.
Another note is that a 640x480 image jpeg compressed is roughly 600kbits. With reducing this down to 320x240 and cranking the jpeg compression ratio (reducing quality), you could conceivably reduce this down under 100kbits. This is definately in the realm of reason as far as pushing images to an off-site server via DSL. You may have to settle for 1/8 fps or less if all 16 cameras are active. If I was doing this, I would probably set it up so it would rotate through the cameras in order and send the most recent of each image (after being through the "difference" change procedure) unless it hadn't been updated. This would provide protection if the criminal stole the equipment storing the data.
If you have a PC and a webcam, and a burner..... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have PC, a webcam and a burner, you're set.. It doesn't even need to be a fast PC or a fast burner. A typical sysadmin could sit down in one afternoon and get Linux up and running on the box, and toss a few entries into the crontab for that box to build an ISO of all the collected images to a harddisk, and subsequently burn a tarball of the day's events onto a CD-R. Cheap, costs pennies on the dollar compared to most commercial security systems, and is vastly more reliable/configurable/upgradable/stable. All you'de have to do is pop a new CD-R in the tray at the start of business every morning, or hell, make the CD-R a CDRW, and swap the disc out every couple weeks.
DIY or DIE, buddy.
Image Vault (Score:1)
If I needed to install a security system, this is where I would go.
http://www.image-vault.com/
Use a TiVo! (Score:3, Informative)
You would still need to get a time/date generator [eagle.co.za] to put in line with the video feed if you want to make the evidence court-admissible. Those are standard CCTV devices and may be built into CCTV cameras. DVRs [cctvusa.com] are used by CCTV and surveillance [spysite.com] professionals
Smart Cameras (Score:2)
I got your solution RIGHT HERE (Score:1)
x10 (Score:3, Interesting)
My boss recently asked me about implementing a video security system, and this is the way we're going.
If you're serious, DO NOT DIY. (Score:4, Insightful)
Forget all these "get yourself a bunch of webcams and X amount of diskspace".
No uncertified homebrew system will EVER produce footage that's admissable in court. Period.
Contact your local police department for a list of their approved equipment and vendors. The kind of solutions you're looking for do exist out of the box - the one I worked on had all the features you mention plus plenty of others - and you'll be able to use the footage in a "1st Evidence" capacity. Also consult with an attorney experienced in the field.
This is one time when you need to know the legal requirements as well as the technical ones, and as has been said many times before, Slashdot is a really bad place to go for legal advice.
Use an existing setup... Much easier (Score:2, Informative)
My somewhat home brew solution (Score:2)
Ninja for remote panning/tilting. You can remote control this with your computer, but I chose to not use this option yet - though I would like it controllable from the web.
Then, for the recording, I'm using a beta build of CoolCam X [evological.com] from the great folks
at Evological who implemented a few motion detection changes for me.
Currently, for every time the motion detector trips, it records a JPEG still shot, and it also appends it to a Quicktime movie (in Photo-JPEG format, which, xine and xmovie happily reads). Every nite, a crontab entry moves all of the JPEG's and the movie into a dated directory, for later review.
The Quicktime movie is kind of fun, watching life in motion lapse. I keep it all on the web, but since my link is small, I'm not going to link to any of the quicktime movies for now.. suffice to say, it's funny watching the street in the front of my house.
All running happily on my (now obsolete) G4 DP533 running MacOS X.1
get quotes (Score:2)
Call up some security firms.... ADT (http://www.adt.com [adt.com])although they are a huge company are good for doing walthroughs and recommendations. Going digital is pretty standard for security companies nowadays. good cameras are what will kill the budget however... look at spending about 750-1000 dollars each for a good security cam.... 'course, you can cheap out with usb webcams, but it'll break down the day whatever you're looking after gets stolen... Murphy's law and all that.
Get a quote from a security professional, then cut back what you can.
In case you're wondering, I'm a jeweller. I know a teensy bit about securing things. :)
Solution. . . . (Score:2)
Hell give a shout out to IndigoVision Here [indigovision.com] and ask them if any companies have released products based upon their hardware MPEG4 encoder.
Use a Swann Spycam [swann.com.au] to do your surveillance. Plugs into anything that takes composite input. Which is just about anything.
Hell that one digicam that came out awhile back that does real time MPEG4 encoding could even be used as a MPEG4 encoder in a pinch, it supports composite input as I recall.
Ooooor.
Just hop on over to Remote Security [remote-security.com] and buy some shtuff.
FirstLine products (Score:2, Informative)
Commercial System: Galaxy (Score:3, Informative)
High-resolution surveillance cameras (Score:3, Informative)
The online demo indicates that the resolution is great under good lighting, but lousy in dim light.
DPS Digital Detective (Score:3, Informative)
TiVO? (Score:2)
Re:probably wouldn't be difficult at all... (Score:2, Informative)
Jeroen