Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: internet, video, surveillance | Themes: Digital Cameras
12. Wireless Security
If your house has complicated electrical wiring or you don’t want the hassle of having the WiLife receiver taking up a precious USB slot on your computer, you can use WiFi cameras and your wireless network to get the video to a computer. However, you’ll run the risk of the videos overwhelming your home’s wireless network, squeezing out bandwidth reserved for homework, Web surfing, and watching old episodes of “Batman” online.
Here are four of my favorites.
Rather than being a stationary camera that passively watches your home from a single viewpoint, the D-Link DCS5300G can automatically pivot and pan its camera to cover a wider field of view. It has a microphone to add audio into the mix. It costs about $400.
The $200 TRENDnet TV-IP410W is small, unobtrusive, and able to swivel up to 330-degrees to keep an eye on things, but it lacks the ability to automatically pan and tilt. In other words, you’ll have to remotely control the camera yourself through its interface window. Like the others, the camera can send video over the Internet.
Looking more like an alien invader in a space helmet than a security camera, Linksys’ $200 WVC210 can tilt and pan, either while you’re controlling it or automatically. It works with as little light as a burning candle and has a microphone so you can hear your kids screaming or crooks scheming.
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Priced at $75, the Hawking HNC 290G is the bargain WiFi camera of the bunch. It not only matches the others on resolution but offers the ability to plug in a high gain antenna to reach some of the nooks and crannies of your abode. On the downside, you can’t pan or tilt to get exactly the right shot.
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Zonemider FTW
While all this is certainly useful and true, there are other ways in which you can do it on more of a budget. You might also want to factor in the cost of a dedicated PC for this too since that software will probably use up a fair chunk of CPU cycles.
My security system is far more budget but nevertheless gets the job done. I've got a cheap old 17" Intel iMac with a broken screen hidden away in the garage. I then have a 10m USB extension cable (with a signal booster) going across the garage to a Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro that's beet waterproofed and has been installed in my front porch. I then run Periscope (http://www.freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=7002) on the iMac and have set it set up to take a camera shot every time movement is detected and save it to disk. You can set it to email you if movement is detected if you like or to ftp the shots up to a server but an outside camera detects soooo much movement that you'd quickly fill your inbox.
As an added security measure, when I go away, I run Periscope on my desktop machine as well although this time its set up to email me if movement is detected (which is fine, since its indoors).
This set up cost me $25 for the Periscope software per machine and about $100 for the outside webcam (although they're much cheaper in the states). The usb extension cable was about $15. My desktop machine already had a webcam so I didn't need anything there and the garage machine cost me $170.
So all in all, my setup cost a little over $300. I plan on adding an extra webcam to the back of the house via another USB extension cable or via a USB over CAT5 adapter, connected to the garage machine, which would cost me roughly an added $140.
I can also stream/record the video from the webcams by splitting the signals with CamTwist and by using QuickTime Broadcaster / YouStream. The novelty of that wore off pretty fast though and I choose to save the CPU time for other more useful things.
Of course, I'm sure there are similar camera motion monitoring software packages out there for Windows and Linux so you could easily build a cheap dual core garage computer for what I paid for my one and then the other components would cost roughly the same.
This is all too much effort for the results - check out the lowest price security DVRs, I saw a four camera input for $160 - spend the money on better cameras - http://www.gadspot.com/product_inf [...] cts_id=202