need hardware advice

vaineh · Post by **vaineh** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 9:08 am

am planning a setup for a shopfront and to cover the carpark.

will need about 9 cameras in total, all high res, whats the point if you cant make out peoples faces. some will need to be external so day/night infra red etc. open to suggestions for cameras, but i realise theres a lot out there. my main concern is whats going to be required on the server to handle all these feeds and provide a usable framerate. also for the record time, ideally id like to be able to store the recordings for the max time, 31days i believe for data protection act?.

any advice appreciated

vaineh · Post by **vaineh** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 2:47 pm

advice on server requirements anyone?

Lee Sharp · Post by **Lee Sharp** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 6:21 pm

So many variables here...

IP cams or composite cams? IP cams take more power at the CPU. So do some composite cards...

How many cams, and at what frame rate? Do all of them need to be high resolution and high frame rate? Are any able to be black and white?

How many clients will you need to stream? What kind of bandwidth?

vaineh · Post by **vaineh** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 12:43 pm

yeah sorry, lots of variables so i dont know where to start.

was thinking of using ip cams. all will need to be high quality as i plan to use it in a shop and so the recordings *could* be used as evidence in the case of a theft/incident. same goes for the framerate, im not sure what would be the required framerate for such a task? there will be about 9 cameras in total. one or two will be covering the carpark and yard so will need to be day/night cams. black and white cameras - maybe.

will be using on the local network, which is used for user login to server and also to an epos system over the network. wont need to stream over broadband. would like to stream to 5 or so machines locally

Lee Sharp · Post by **Lee Sharp** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 8:02 pm

This is quite a bit of load for highres IP cams. Way out of my league to scope this hardware. The problem is that each image has to be decoded, analized and re-encoded. This taks some grunt work from the CPU. You may need to do a test implementation on a spare box with a few cams to see how bad the load is.

Flash_ · Post by **Flash_** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:54 am

Re streaming to the 5 or so cams, use mjpeg in a good web browser using <img> tags and bypass ZM completely. Removes all stream load to the server and good cams can support multiple clients. (Axis tbh)

vaineh · Post by **vaineh** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 8:36 am

ok thanks for your help

will all this streaming grind the network to a halt??

W. · Post by W. » Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:49 pm

vaineh wrote: will all this streaming grind the network to a halt??

no, assuming you have good 100mbit ethernet.

vaineh · Post by **vaineh** » Fri Apr 20, 2007 8:41 am

would it be better to go with standard cameras and videp capture cards?

presumably the advantage of ip cams is that you can just plug them anywhere on your network. but if some extra cabling may be needed anyway would it be better just to go with normal cameras?