General > General Technical Chat
Cameras for home monitoring
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LaserSteve:
Get a security grade rough service  hard drive,  My DVR burned  through two drives before I learned. In my case, I now use Western Digital's  "Purple" product. 

   Use enough gun, ie avoid four channel DVR boxes and buy an eight. Four channel DVR boxes tend to be short on memory, which hammers you during playback. 

Pay a few more Dollars for the hi res color cameras, which these days turn into a fantastic B/W camera at night. Experiment with camera BLC/AWB settings.  Some of Sony's chipsets rival Gen II nightvision.

For  DVRs, I use Amcrest, which  are a Linux box with added security and a sophisticated compression chip.

Write down your DVRs primary and secondary passwords some place secure.  You might not need to access it for months.

I hate motion sensing on outdoor cameras, trees move, cars pass by, spider webs,wind, insects, leaves, and the solar cycle cause constant false triggers.  Might as well just stream it all, and I do.

Don't leave the DVR where it is accessible, and do not use a WIFi. Do not let the offenders see the monitor, and do not share the video.

Pick your camera's field of view carefully. Choice of lens is important,  overlaping fields of view are important outdoors, and take care to not look into other's window's.

Amcrest and others have an option to turn off the visible pilot lights on their cameras, use it!

Hilarity insued when the local psych case neighbor hired a camera "expert" who told him my cameras were dummy cams. Trespassing the problem neighbor was priceless.  Caught his sexually explicit jestures on camera.

Overlap the camera fields of view. Problem neighbors will try to
destroy the cameras  or map out fields of view.
Video of problem neighbor trying to whack the camera, also priceless.

Don't call LE on the first offense, build up a pattern of videos showing the pattern of offenses. LE in most cases, if they have a pattern, can scare the problem neghbor enough to stop the problem without going to Court.

Buy one camera, evaluate with your laptop,
make sure you have facial recognition in your problem area. Then install.

I live in a nice neighborhood, one bozo is all it takes.

Cameras do not cure all problems, an offending act, even at 30 FPS, may only show in just a few frames. The camera may result in constraints on your families behavior as well.

Steve
nctnico:
I used a Foscam camera for this purpose which works together with a QNAP NAS (installed in a secured space) to create a motion based DVR system. The camera can be viewed through the cloud for free using the Foscam app, the NAS is only available locally. One of the features of the Foscam camera is that it also supports two way sound remotely so you can talk to somebody who is near the camera using a mobile phone app. Not required for my purpose but it is a nice touch. The Foscam camera has a mode to only detect moving people so it doesn't record other movements.
c64:

--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on December 25, 2023, 04:44:02 am ---You won't be able to beat ESP32 camera boards for lowest cost IP cameras that can easily run your own code.

--- End quote ---
How crappy is the picture quality on those?

I'm actually thinking to also add one or two wi-fi cameras as well. For remote locations.
c64:

--- Quote from: Halcyon on December 25, 2023, 05:22:53 am ---Really depends on how much you want to spend.

--- End quote ---
Not much  :D
wraper:

--- Quote from: c64 on December 25, 2023, 02:41:44 am ---Does it make sense to buy Network video recorder? Will NVR with 4 LAN inputs support 8 cameras like in my setup (with network switches in between)

--- End quote ---
There is very little relation between number of ports and how many cameras NVR supports. You can buy NVR with a single ethernet port that supports 16 cameras or NVR with 4 ports that supports just 4 cameras. As of dedicated PC, AFAIK Australia isn't known for cheap electricity, so even if you had a free PC, buying dedicated NVR can easily save more in electricity costs than its own cost in less than a year.
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