Hi,

I am looking for advice or personal experience for fitting cctv systems, I
have done some research and it seems I can spend anything from £40.00 to
£4,000.00.

All I am looking for is maybe 1 or 2 cameras to keep an eye on the car.

Thanks

Andy

"Andrew" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I am looking for advice or personal experience for fitting cctv systems, I
have done some research and it seems I can spend anything from £40.00 to
£4,000.00.

All I am looking for is maybe 1 or 2 cameras to keep an eye on the car.

Thanks

Andy


Ebay is a good idea for this. But it is recording devices that take up most
of the expense on a good CCTv system, so if you don't want to record the
cameras, then any cheap and cheerful system will do you. It's still also a
good idea to choose Black & White (Monochrome) Cameras for their very low
light level attributes and detail, and it also cuts cost of lighting the
area you want to survey.

Andrew wrote:
Hi,

I am looking for advice or personal experience for fitting cctv
systems, I have done some research and it seems I can spend anything
from £40.00 to £4,000.00.

All I am looking for is maybe 1 or 2 cameras to keep an eye on the
car.

Thanks

Andy

Try ebay

Cameras proffesional. I have seen colour models with console going dirt
cheap.

One thing though colour cameras in low light(night time) are virtually
useless unless you have the system wired to a passive infared outside light.

Andrew wrote:
Hi,

I am looking for advice or personal experience for fitting cctv systems, I
have done some research and it seems I can spend anything from ?40.00 to
?4,000.00.

All I am looking for is maybe 1 or 2 cameras to keep an eye on the car.

Thanks


I've found http://www.rfconcepts.co.uk/ both speedy, and have
a reasonable range.

Andrew wrote:

Hi,

I am looking for advice or personal experience for fitting cctv systems, I
have done some research and it seems I can spend anything from £40.00 to
£4,000.00.

All I am looking for is maybe 1 or 2 cameras to keep an eye on the car.

Thanks

Andy

I have found the cheap and cheerful Micromark B/W cameras to be
reliable, Argos 883/0801 and quite good a low light levels. (Index were
better) The thing to watch out for is the lens as this determines the
field of view. If you want super deluxe night vision, then you will need
"Starlight" cameras, but be prepared to pay for them. The resolution of
all the cheap cameras is pretty poor, so you need to be quite close to
what you are watching if you want meaningful pictures of people. The
colour cameras are really only good in daylight, but can indicate to you
what colours somebody was wearing. It is possible to fit one or two of
the small 2.4GHz cameras into the car itself, if you are prepared to
accept the battery drain, but the windows will normally fog slightly
from time to time. They are quite low powered and run from 6V. CPC do
these. Recording IME is best done with continuous recording on a
dedicated hard disc recorder. Again, CPC do these for about £350 or
less--120GB (but no audio). If you are keen to avoid failures, then a
UPS is essential, a small 500W unit will normally run cameras and
recorder for quite a few hours. 2.4GHz systems usually reset to channel
1 if the power is disconnected-- very inconvenient. I find that I can
get 40 days continuous recording @ 2fps on to a 120GB hard disc, with
four cameras at nominal high definition(relatively crap!).

Avoid automatic video starting, IME, it only works with some VCRs and
then not very well. Historically, Micromark cameras with pir sensing
were somewhat erratic in range performance. ie worked at 20' in the
morning and at 10' in the evening. This may have improved in the last
two years since I measured it.

Beware of any location which has lots of spiders, these love to spin
webs around cameras and the pictures can be very confusing. They will
trip motion sensing if fitted IME. I now don't use motion sensing.
South facing seems worst for this problem.

Strangely enough, the best feature of the cheap cameras is the audio.
The sensitivity IME is excellent and a much better event trigger than
motion sensing.

If you take the output of the recorder, then you can drive a modulator
with this and get all cameras up on any tv in the house. Quite useful
when she is expecting visitors and getting tarted up, for seeing who has
arrived. If the recorder output is video only, it is not difficult to
take an audio feed from one of the cameras and adding it into the
modulator. It may also be worth considering feeding the audio into the
living room audio system, so that any unusual loud noises can be heard
as background in the room-I've never bothered with this.

Hope this helps

Regards
Capitol

In message , Capitol
writes


Andrew wrote:

Hi,
I am looking for advice or personal experience for fitting cctv
systems, I
have done some research and it seems I can spend anything from £40.00 to
£4,000.00.
All I am looking for is maybe 1 or 2 cameras to keep an eye on the
car.
Thanks
Andy

I have found the cheap and cheerful Micromark B/W cameras to be
reliable,


BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software to
work over the internet ?


--
geoff

"Andrew" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I am looking for advice or personal experience for fitting cctv systems, I
have done some research and it seems I can spend anything from £40.00 to
£4,000.00.

All I am looking for is maybe 1 or 2 cameras to keep an eye on the car.

Maplin do a special hard disc recorder with compression that handles up to 4
standard cameras simultaneously. You can buy camera from £15 to £1500
depending on what you want but any B/W camera with low light operation is
fine. Don't bother with USB cameras and a PC yet, though I think in a year
or so time this will become the best solution.

raden wrote:

BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software to
work over the internet ?


Not so far.

Regards
Capitol

In message , Capitol
writes


raden wrote:

BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software
to work over the internet ?

Not so far.

Have you tried ?

(I have, and can't)

--
geoff

raden wrote:
In message , Capitol
writes


raden wrote:

BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software
to work over the internet ?

Not so far.

Have you tried ?

(I have, and can't)

Any chance of the software? and I'll give it a go.

In message , ben
writes
raden wrote:
In message , Capitol
writes


raden wrote:

BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software
to work over the internet ?

Not so far.

Have you tried ?

(I have, and can't)

Any chance of the software? and I'll give it a go.

I think it needs the camera card, I'll check and see if it runs on the
laptop first

--
geoff

In message , Capitol
writes
Recording IME is best done with continuous recording on a dedicated
hard disc recorder. Again, CPC do these for about £350 or less--120GB
(but no audio).

Do these print a time and date on the recording? I understand that a
recording is worthless to the police without it.

--
Richard Faulkner

"Richard Faulkner" wrote in message
...
In message , Capitol
writes
Recording IME is best done with continuous recording on a dedicated
hard disc recorder. Again, CPC do these for about £350 or less--120GB
(but no audio).

Do these print a time and date on the recording? I understand that a
recording is worthless to the police without it.

Richard Faulkner

Not having the date and time isn't worthless, but it's more difficult to use
the images in a court if an offence has been recorded. The culprit can
easily say that the incident didn't happen on the day and time the recording
was made, and so the charges brought are void if the images don't show the
verified date and time. Weird but true.

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005 01:16:06 GMT, BigWallop wrote:

Not having the date and time isn't worthless, but it's more
difficult to use the images in a court if an offence has been
recorded. The culprit can easily say that the incident didn't
happen on the day and time the recording was made,

And any date/time stamp has to be correct for that reason. Not just
close as in +/- 5 min but correct within the granularity of the
display.

--
Cheers
Dave. pam is missing e-mail

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:57:49 UTC, Richard Faulkner
wrote:

In message , Capitol
writes
Recording IME is best done with continuous recording on a dedicated
hard disc recorder. Again, CPC do these for about £350 or less--120GB
(but no audio).

Do these print a time and date on the recording? I understand that a
recording is worthless to the police without it.

You can get boxes that sit between the camera and the recorder, that
will add tgis information.

In article , raden
wrote:

BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software to
work over the internet ?

Do you want a look at ours? I don't mind a selected few having temporary
access, but I'm not publishing it.

--
AJL Electronics (G6FGO) Ltd : Satellite and TV aerial systems
http://www.classicmicrocars.co.uk : http://www.ajlelectronics.co.uk

"Andrew" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I am looking for advice or personal experience for fitting cctv systems, I
have done some research and it seems I can spend anything from £40.00 to
£4,000.00.

All I am looking for is maybe 1 or 2 cameras to keep an eye on the car.



I've just setup a system I'm quite happy with. It's 4 IR cameras connecting
back to a dedicated PC (MPEG-4 encoding is quite CPU intensive)

I used a GV250 card, and the sofware that came with it which works well and
does far more than I need, and 4 outside colour IR cameras. I got the CCTV
stuff from Henry's electronics,
http://www.henrys.co.uk/ which gave me good service. CCTV bits were about
£400 and same again for a powerful PC.

I put in a dedicated 200GB drive for the recordings which can just about
cope with a months worth of motion detection recording, I have it set to
record a few seconds before the motion. The computer is in the loft near the
eves which is cool enough. It also keeps it out of the way, and should
anybody break in they hopefully won't steal that too! I access it using
remote desktop.

The software has the ability to publish still images (or a live stream) to a
website, and I publish still images to my website for no other reason than I
can...if you want the URL let me know.

Biggest problem I've noted is that the cameras are in the eves of my house
and spiders are using them to make webs - not a problem during the day but
they show up on IR. And one isn't working just now, but that's probably just
my dodgy BNC cabling (Tip: the L shaped BNC plugs in maplins are far better
to work with than the push on types). And one's been nudged whilst
painting..... now, where's the ladder ?


C

Colin Chaplin wrote:
[snipped this'n'that]
it set to record a few seconds before the motion. The computer is in
the loft near the eves which is cool enough. It also keeps it out of
the way, and should anybody break in they hopefully won't steal that
too! I access it using remote desktop.


Thanks I'll remember that when I break in. :-)

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005 01:16:06 GMT, "BigWallop"
wrote:


"Richard Faulkner" wrote in message
...
In message , Capitol
writes
Recording IME is best done with continuous recording on a dedicated
hard disc recorder. Again, CPC do these for about £350 or less--120GB
(but no audio).

Do these print a time and date on the recording? I understand that a
recording is worthless to the police without it.

Richard Faulkner

Not having the date and time isn't worthless, but it's more difficult to use
the images in a court if an offence has been recorded. The culprit can
easily say that the incident didn't happen on the day and time the recording
was made, and so the charges brought are void if the images don't show the
verified date and time. Weird but true.

But is hard a harddisk recording admissable anyway? I thought it had
to be tape. Also if he is recording a public area/ someonelse property
he could be done under the DPA, 15 grand fine I think!

In article ,
raden writes:
BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software to
work over the internet ?

A few weeks ago, I made the card work on Solaris.
Somewhere on the todo list, is making it work across
the net, but at the moment it is restricted to taking
stills and displaying realtime moving images on the
screen (although being an X application, you can
remote display it across a network, but that's far from
optimal for anything less than 10 or even 100Mbit ethernet
I suspect).

The pre-existing driver I hacked to make work presents
a video4linux interface, so there may already be suitable
applications to squirt this across the internet as an mpeg.

--
Andrew Gabriel

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005 09:29:36 UTC, madmax wrote:

But is hard a harddisk recording admissable anyway? I thought it had
to be tape. Also if he is recording a public area/ someonelse property
he could be done under the DPA, 15 grand fine I think!

There are exemptions in the DPA. I posted the link a few weeks ago. You
can record a public area as long as the camera isn't steerable (slight
simplification; read the notes at the ICO site).

Richard Faulkner wrote:
In message , Capitol
writes

Recording IME is best done with continuous recording on a dedicated
hard disc recorder. Again, CPC do these for about £350 or less--120GB
(but no audio).


Do these print a time and date on the recording? I understand that a
recording is worthless to the police without it.

Yes. Keep it to GMT, then you don't have to remember to adjust for BST.
Most government systems use GMT at all times.

Regards
Capitol

madmax wrote:

But is hard a harddisk recording admissable anyway?

Yes. It can be transferred to tape or another recording medium if
verified. You're not going to give away 120GB hard discs!

Regards
Capitol

Colin Chaplin wrote:


I've just setup a system I'm quite happy with. It's 4 IR cameras connecting
back to a dedicated PC (MPEG-4 encoding is quite CPU intensive)

I used a GV250 card, and the sofware that came with it which works well and
does far more than I need, and 4 outside colour IR cameras. I got the CCTV
stuff from Henry's electronics,
http://www.henrys.co.uk/ which gave me good service. CCTV bits were about
£400 and same again for a powerful PC.

I put in a dedicated 200GB drive for the recordings which can just about
cope with a months worth of motion detection recording, I have it set to
record a few seconds before the motion. The computer is in the loft near the
eves which is cool enough. It also keeps it out of the way, and should
anybody break in they hopefully won't steal that too! I access it using
remote desktop.

The software has the ability to publish still images (or a live stream) to a
website, and I publish still images to my website for no other reason than I
can...if you want the URL let me know.

Purely a comment. I did not use a pc, as the ability to keep recording
through our local perpetual power cuts, required a UPS of very large
capacity. Also, I would not like to rely on a Windows based system for
recording months at a time.

Regards
Capitol

In message , "Andy Luckman
(AJL Electronics)" writes
In article , raden
wrote:

BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software to
work over the internet ?

Do you want a look at ours? I don't mind a selected few having temporary
access, but I'm not publishing it.

I would be very interested

Is the email addy valid ?

I'll get in touch when I come out of hospital in a couple of days

--
geoff

In message , Andrew Gabriel
writes
In article ,
raden writes:
BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software to
work over the internet ?

A few weeks ago, I made the card work on Solaris.
Somewhere on the todo list, is making it work across
the net, but at the moment it is restricted to taking
stills and displaying realtime moving images on the
screen (although being an X application, you can
remote display it across a network, but that's far from
optimal for anything less than 10 or even 100Mbit ethernet
I suspect).

I can get it working over my home network, I think I have a problem with
the router firewall

I can see it over the internet using VNC, but that's not how it should
be working.


The pre-existing driver I hacked to make work presents
a video4linux interface, so there may already be suitable
applications to squirt this across the internet as an mpeg.


--
geoff

raden wrote:
In message , Andrew
Gabriel writes
In article ,
raden writes:
BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software
to work over the internet ?

A few weeks ago, I made the card work on Solaris.
Somewhere on the todo list, is making it work across
the net, but at the moment it is restricted to taking
stills and displaying realtime moving images on the
screen (although being an X application, you can
remote display it across a network, but that's far from
optimal for anything less than 10 or even 100Mbit ethernet
I suspect).

I can get it working over my home network, I think I have a problem
with the router firewall

I can see it over the internet using VNC, but that's not how it should
be working.


The pre-existing driver I hacked to make work presents
a video4linux interface, so there may already be suitable
applications to squirt this across the internet as an mpeg.

Are you forwarding the port to allow the video through?

In message , ben
writes
raden wrote:
In message , Andrew
Gabriel writes
In article ,
raden writes:
BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard software
to work over the internet ?

I can get it working over my home network, I think I have a problem
with the router firewall

I can see it over the internet using VNC, but that's not how it should
be working.


The pre-existing driver I hacked to make work presents
a video4linux interface, so there may already be suitable
applications to squirt this across the internet as an mpeg.

Are you forwarding the port to allow the video through?

No, do I have to ?

I've just enabled the port, I have no idea how to enable it for video

--
geoff

raden wrote:
In message , ben
writes
raden wrote:
In message , Andrew
Gabriel writes
In article ,
raden writes:
BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard
software to work over the internet ?

I can get it working over my home network, I think I have a problem
with the router firewall

I can see it over the internet using VNC, but that's not how it
should be working.


The pre-existing driver I hacked to make work presents
a video4linux interface, so there may already be suitable
applications to squirt this across the internet as an mpeg.

Are you forwarding the port to allow the video through?

No, do I have to ?

I've just enabled the port, I have no idea how to enable it for video

Well you must have a site to upload it to?

Port forwarding is...From the routers internal ip address...To the
destination ip address

so for instance it would look like so..

Internal 192.168.0.0 External 100.67.210.20 ---blouse ip this will then
send the video over the net with the software that came with the camera,
thats why I asked for it to take a decko of setting it up.

raden wrote:
In message , ben
writes
raden wrote:
In message , Andrew
Gabriel writes
In article ,
raden writes:
BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard
software to work over the internet ?

I can get it working over my home network, I think I have a problem
with the router firewall

I can see it over the internet using VNC, but that's not how it
should be working.


The pre-existing driver I hacked to make work presents
a video4linux interface, so there may already be suitable
applications to squirt this across the internet as an mpeg.

Are you forwarding the port to allow the video through?

No, do I have to ?

I've just enabled the port, I have no idea how to enable it for video

Huh! cant see my latest post?

In message , ben
writes
raden wrote:
In message , ben
writes
raden wrote:
In message , Andrew
Gabriel writes
In article ,
raden writes:
BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard
software to work over the internet ?

I can get it working over my home network, I think I have a problem
with the router firewall

I can see it over the internet using VNC, but that's not how it
should be working.


The pre-existing driver I hacked to make work presents
a video4linux interface, so there may already be suitable
applications to squirt this across the internet as an mpeg.

Are you forwarding the port to allow the video through?

No, do I have to ?

I've just enabled the port, I have no idea how to enable it for video

Huh! cant see my latest post?


I just replied to it


--
geoff

In message , ben
writes
raden wrote:
In message , ben
writes
raden wrote:
In message , Andrew
Gabriel writes
In article ,
raden writes:
BTW, has anybody actually managed to get the Grand X Guard
software to work over the internet ?

I can get it working over my home network, I think I have a problem
with the router firewall

I can see it over the internet using VNC, but that's not how it
should be working.


The pre-existing driver I hacked to make work presents
a video4linux interface, so there may already be suitable
applications to squirt this across the internet as an mpeg.

Are you forwarding the port to allow the video through?

No, do I have to ?

I've just enabled the port, I have no idea how to enable it for video

Well you must have a site to upload it to?

Port forwarding is...From the routers internal ip address...To the
destination ip address

I'm fairly sure I did that (although the destination (home machine) has
a dynamic, not static IP)


so for instance it would look like so..

Internal 192.168.0.0 External 100.67.210.20 ---blouse ip this will then
send the video over the net with the software that came with the camera,
thats why I asked for it to take a decko of setting it up.

Let's pick this up again next week after I come out of hospital

--
geoff

Purely a comment. I did not use a pc, as the ability to keep recording
through our local perpetual power cuts, required a UPS of very large
capacity. Also, I would not like to rely on a Windows based system for
recording months at a time.

Regards
Capitol

You could use Linux and Zone Minder. Linux will run for years.

Dave

Purely a comment. I did not use a pc, as the ability to keep recording
through our local perpetual power cuts, required a UPS of very large
capacity. Also, I would not like to rely on a Windows based system for
recording months at a time.

Windows based systems are very stable these days and if properly configured
can run for months. I have configured the PC to autologin and run the
software on power-up. However, the capture card and software does allow for
a scheduled reboot. Cleverly, it can also hard reboot by wiring the soft
power switch through it.

Colin