ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

I'm new to ZM but not to wireless networking. I have a situation where I need an IP camera that is wireless (outdoors). I wanted to go with the Axis WiFi camera (211W) but it is not day/night (IR lights won't help). The other camera I was considering is a Vivotek IP7154 which is WiFi & day/night but I'm concerned about it also being VGA quality and how compatible it might be with ZM (I'm running 1.24.3-build3 on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS).

So ... I go to thinking what if I pick a better quality wired day/night megapixel camera and then just create my own WDS type bridge ... then I can make any wired camera wireless and get better than VGA quality and have a better selection of cameras to choose from.

In my previous experience, a WDS WiFi bridge (using two AP's like WRT54G's running OpenWRT) has an average bandwidth of around 25M bytes/sec (tested with iperf). I would only have one camera on the bridge so I'm thinking a megapixel camera would fit just fine in that kind of bandwidth.

Anyone got any experience doing this that can chime in and tell me if I'm heading in the weeds or not?

Regards,

Brian

Yes, I have experience of using wifi with cctv.

My experience is such that now I use wired cameras everywhere. Cat5 is ALWAYS more reliable than wifi, and more secure.

I'm not sure the Cs in CCTV are valid with wifi anyway.

Reasons: Dropouts, basically. Caused by contention, overheating, atmospherics, bad firmware or just plain mystery.

Bandwidth can be designed around, but 100% reliable signal can't, afaics.

It's entirely possible you're getting with wifi than me, but I wasted a lot of time trying to get it to work with a variety of hardware before coming to this conclusion, and my life has been easier by nailing wires everywhere.

Cat5 not an option in this case. Camera will be outside on the edge of a parking lot. External Directional antennas will need to be used.

I've built WiFi bridge links in the past that were almost a mile in length and they would do a constant speed of 24MBs. I'm wondering how a wired camera would behave on such a link. I guess ill have to try it. I kind of want to avoid buying the wrong type of camera and being stuck with it.

If anyone has experience on WiFi cameras vs wired cameras on WiFi bridge, please let me know your preference and how it worked out for you.

Thanks,

Brian

What about Ethernet over powerline?. I have one camera using a DLink TL-PA201, and the performance and reliability are better than using wifi.

Hope it helps,

PacoLM

EoP is a system I have used in the past - both with success, and with failure. Seems to depend a lot on the local wiring.

Hutchman - an ip camera is no different than any other IP device and you can guage bandwidth with some simple sums. Surely you have enough experience to answer your own question here?

Take a look at Ubiquiti and use the IP cam you like. A couple of nanostation loco's will handle 80 Mb stream easy.