On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 9:52 AM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: > With the continuing annoyance from motion, my manager's asked me to go > looking again for a video surveillance appliance: basically, a > motion-detecting DVR and cameras. The big thing, of course, is a) price > (this is a US federal gov't agency, and being civilian, money is *tight*, > don't give me the libertarian/GOP line about how freely we spend, > thankyouverymuch), b) it has to be on the network, and c) we need to be > able to d/l to a server, and rm after we do that... and we want to script > or cron job that. > > Right now, I'm looking into Zmodo, R-Tech and CIB security. Anyone have a) > opinions on the quality of the hardware from any of those manufacturers > (yeah, I know, they're just branded hardware), and/or whether we can do > the ssh or telnet in to do what we need? > > *Extremely* frustrating, since they're all running embedded Linux, that so > many say IE and Active X.... I don't have specific recommendations for you, but here is some general info that you might find useful, as I've been looking into this myself. Obviously, there exist IP cameras, but, as you've noticed, you have to be careful that it supports an open standard, and not IE/ActiveX exclusively. Another approach is to just get an analog camera, along with a capture device. The capture devices come in USB or PCI(e) flavors (possibly more), and range in price from super cheap (10 USD) to crazy expensive. Just from reading about this stuff, it appears there's a tradeoff, the cheap hardware may require some wrestling to work reliably, and then may randomly die at some point. With a little research you can probably find a good balance. I've done a little searching on eBay, and it looks like there is no shortage of capture devices to be had there for cheap as well, if buying used is an option. As always, it depends on your application, but with an analog camera, you move the "smarts" to your PC or server. Consider if you have many cameras, do you want to have that many more "servers" to manage, or would you rather have one server with many purpose-built devices attached? Take a look at the ZoneMinder software package. It's the free/open source way to build a surveillance appliance. Again, I haven't used it. I currently have a Speco D4RS device (came with the house I just moved into), which is an off-the-shelf surveillance appliance. The viewer is IE-only, and the standalone apps are Windows-only (though they do have Android apps, so some quasi-Linux support)... it's half-way decent, although I've only just started playing with it in earnest. But I'm looking to ZoneMinder as a possible replacement, partially to get onto an open platform, but also to hopefully consolidate a standalone device into my existing home server. As for the cameras themselves, I don't know what model I have, and wasn't supplied documentation. My dad's been interested in getting some camera surveillance going at his house. But we both get discouraged when looking for cameras because there seems to be a million makes and models, but most are probably just re-branded OEM versions. The specs always seems to be unclear or inconsistent, and except for the crazy-expensive ones, they always seem to have lousy user reviews. So we always get discouraged trying to wade through the mess and give up. -Matt