Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: internet, video, surveillance | Themes: Digital Cameras
5. Recording Setup
The next step in the setup routine is to allocate part of your hard drive for storing these video clips. I allotted 466 MB of data space on my system’s 300 GB drive by typing it into the box (that’s about 1%). I could have used the slider at the bottom to allocate more or less space to the videos.
It’s very important to adjust each camera’s sensitivity to motion. Set the threshold too high and you won’t record anything at all. Set it too low and you could end up with thousands of clips of Rover waddling by or chewing on your favorite furniture.
I suggest starting at around 30 on the zero to 100 scale on the control’s slider scale. If you find that you’re getting lots of spurious recordings or missing important things, lower or raise its sensitivity.
If you know you want constant video, rather than just clips of action, go to the bottom of the Recording tab and click on Schedule Recording Time, which lets you decide when the cameras are active. Pick a block of time or fill in the whole day and the cameras will record everything the camera sees.
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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