Want to set up ZM, eventually with Misterhouse and a few other things so I want a bit of margin. I stuck with what I considered decent, modest stuff as it seemed sufficient and for SAF. Now I am hearing it needs to be easy to use and not to cut corners. Translation: I should spend more money.
Background: We used a VCR to record some by the hour work with large equipment and found they were generous with their time tracking - about $500 worth on a $8000 job. When we pointed out they didn't really have that much time in they didn't argue much and just reduced the bill. We have an even bigger job in the works so...
I plan to have up to 5 cameras, probably 2 to start. Here's the current hardware plan:
1 GHz PIII with 512 M of RAM, 40 G HD (already have)
Capture card: PV-143 (from Bluecherry)
Cameras: TP-6360WBC-DN (or possibly the TPH6360...)
These will be outdoors in the midwest so issues are temperature extremes (but protected from direct rain) and decent low light performance.
Some of the other issues is no sound but I can probably just use another program to record 1 channel (was useful to hear when the big equipment was running). Playback of the recorded stream of frames needs to be user friendly as I may not be doing it. Also some concern about the size of the HD although the framerate could be fairly low when no motion is detected. Could drop an additional 80G HD in for video storage.
I considered hardware encoding/decoding but encoding doesn't seem that common on low end cards and decoding is less of an issue. As long as I keep frame rates at 5 FPS or less I think not having it will be ok. May do a realtime DVR (freevo?) some day but that will most likely be different hardware anyway. Briefly looked at Matrox G200/G400 but the units didn't appear to have inputs - seemed to be mostly for playback.
Would like to know what others would recommend modest upgrades on. After the major work is done it will be used for general home security and automation.
If you run the web browser on the ZM system itself, it gets very bad, but still it is a hit from other systems. Just not enough headroom for me... Also, the faster frame rate means more pictures buffered in memory, which you will have none of, and that means swap. Now you are talking a world of hurt. The system you have might cut it with a gig of ram and a larger HD. But it might be at 2 fps per cam.