Surveillance Camera's

[aglennon]

Is anyone using Sage Recorder as a security camera recording device? I would like to setup 4-6 wired camera's around my home/property and record them 24x7 to disk for several days using at least 640x480 30fps. Does anyone see any problems with doing this?

Thanks,

P.S. I am already use Sage TV with Dual PVR250's for TV recording and it is great.

[Wheemer]

You need some pretty serious HD space to capture Mpeg2 24x7...

I recommend something more tailored to sercurity cameras if your think of going with 4-6.

You can map a channel in sage for one or two, but I really think you'd probably need a seperate machine with a good processor and adequate ram to do what you need. To keep costs down you can get a 4 or 8 channel CCTV software encoder board for cheap. Then capture to avi to keep the file sizes down.

A good security camera program will be able to do things like only capture if there is motion, and label each feed, and other things that sage just can't do.

I really like Active Webcam for this job.

[Menehune]

You could run the cameras into a "quad splitter" first to reduce the number of capture cards (inputs). Run four cameras into the quad, then run the output of the quad into a composite input on a capture card.

[aglennon]

Originally Posted by Wheemer

You need some pretty serious HD space to capture Mpeg2 24x7...

I recommend something more tailored to sercurity cameras if your think of going with 4-6.

You can map a channel in sage for one or two, but I really think you'd probably need a seperate machine with a good processor and adequate ram to do what you need. To keep costs down you can get a 4 or 8 channel CCTV software encoder board for cheap. Then capture to avi to keep the file sizes down.

A good security camera program will be able to do things like only capture if there is motion, and label each feed, and other things that sage just can't do.

I really like Active Webcam for this job.

All of the HW based 8 port (640x480(240fps) security cards I have found cost $1,500+. I have a spare PC and a few 300 or 400 gb drives don't cost that much. But if this is not the app for this I will look into one of security cards and the SW they come with.

Thanks.

[aglennon]

Originally Posted by Menehune

You could run the cameras into a "quad splitter" first to reduce the number of capture cards (inputs). Run four cameras into the quad, then run the output of the quad into a composite input on a capture card.

Would this reduce my recorded resolution by a factor of 4?

[spike5884]

If you still want to do this in SageTV, check this post: Universial Network Encoder

For 24x7, you would need to dedicate an encoder card to each camera. Plus have lots of HD space. If you didn't want to truly record 24x7, you could hook up motion detectors and have an app tell SageTV to start recording when motion is detected. This way, you could cut down on encoder cards and HD space. I started down this path using USB cameras, Meedio HouseBot , and X10 motion detectors. Roughly got it working, but did not get a chance to work all the bugs out.

[Menehune]

Originally Posted by aglennon

Would this reduce my recorded resolution by a factor of 4?

Typically, yes. You could get a device that sequences the cameras as well as "splits" the video. Cam 1 would show for 5 seconds, cam2 for 5, cam 3, cam 4, cam 1, etc. Each of those cameras would be a full screen, full resolution picture.

You would only need to install one capture card instead of four. You would also take the money that you would've installed on the capture cards and apply it to the quad splitter. You would save configuration time for one card vs four and have a simpler process to go thru to manually record the cameras. Instead of setting up each card to record (four times) you would only have one manual record to setup. It just depends upon how much your time is worth to you and how convoluted a process you want to go thru to record all the cameras.

Depending upon the camera and the lens FOV, you may not have much detail in the picture anyway. Plus the sage recording quality, drive space and recording time (duration) will also reduce the PQ as well.

Many trade offs and decisions will need to be made.