ZoneMinder Forums

Greetings.

You may have seen me before on these forums. I've been tinkering with Zone Alarm now for a few months, and I have learned a lot of information. But now things are moving along that I need to look into ZoneMinder much more deeply.

I work for a medium-sized school district. The idea security cameras has been floating around for a few years now. We did have a firm come out to our site and price us a few cameras... and we were quoted a very large amount for 10 cameras. A large part of this price was the cost of the software.

Being the sort who looks to see if it can be done cheaper, I spent some time looking at different solutions. Along came ZoneMinder on Linux... completely eliminating the issue of software costs.

After purchasing the cheapest camera I knew worked with ZM (A D-Link DCS-900 for $80), I downloaded the ZoneMinder live CD, booted it on my laptop and made presented a proof of concept to the powers that be. Within a few days, talks of using this system began to turn into a plan for the same general 10 cameras.

Well, that was a while ago. Now things have changed, and we may be installing many more cameras than we innitialy thought. Currently the number is up to 21+ cameras.

The good news is that we have already purchased a server, and we thought ahead... it's a 4 core intel Xeon powerhouse with 2.7 Terrabytes of available space for the camera data. Also, we plan on placing the bulk of the cameras on their own seperate network, so bandwidth should not be an issue (unless we can suck up a gigabit connection).

So far, we have only had two cameras... the DLink I mentioned earlier and a GadSpot GS1600H outdoor camera. Both have worked remarkably well for being such inexpensive cameras, with their respective caveats of course. But as we begin to move to this larger install, it is clear that much more data is going to be needed.

I have questions I hope some of you could answer:

Powering cameras: what kind of system is commonly used to power cameras, especially outdoor cameras? Most cameras themselves run on either 5V or 12V DC, with the occasional 24V AC. Mout Outdoor housings run on 24V AC. There are also cameras that operate on Power over Ethernet or with a Power over Ethernet splitter. I would love some comments on how powering your cameras can and should be done. For example: Can I run power to my cameras/housings using Cat-5? (I would imagine yes.) Can I use the unused pairs in the data cable I'm already running? (Obviously no if using PoE, but unknown if not.)

Day/Night Cameras and IR: I know that some cameras are able to see in an extremely low light condition (aka, they have a low Lux rating). But some cameras can pickup infrared. Can all "Night" cameras do this, or is there something I should be looking for if I need this ability in a camera?

Outdoor Housings: I'm impressed with the GadSpot GS1600H, but I don't think it would fair well in the extremely hot summers we get here. Temperatures will peak over the 100 degree Fahrenheit mark for about a week during our summers... and our winters also get very cold. From what I can find out from vendors, the Videolarm ACH13HB(N) is generally the best housing for box cameras, has anybody dealt with this housing? A quick search of the forums doesn't come up with any results.

Cameras and the Sun: I've heard that directly pointing a camera at the sun can damage the CCD on a camera. What other "do-nots" are there like this?

Wireless Cameras: What kind of wireless options do I have for some of the more odd-ball outdoor locations I am looking at? Would it be better if I had a camera on the side of a building with a zoom lens, or a camera closer to the area I need to cover? (This particular question is about covering a parking lot.)

I think that's enough questions to start out. I would love to hear any advice or suggestions which you may have.

--Pathway

I'm no expert but I have a few comments on your questions.

1. You can run power over cat5 without using proper PoE. Most of my cameras are connected via cat5 with one pair for power, one for PTZ and one for video. I don't know if it is the ideal solution but it works fine for me, though you need a balun at each end (not exactly sure what they do electircally though). You can of course power most cameras locally to the camera and do not need to feed power fromyour central location.

2. I think most cameras are 'sensitive' to IR but the better ones have filters that kick in depending on whether they are in day or night mode. This improves quality of the image but don't ask me exactly how.

3. Other camera placement gotchas include pointing at glass with large reflections of the sun or lighting, pointing down too steeply so all you can see is the top of people heads, placement in too exposed a location so the lenses or covers get wet frequently and then dry off obscuring the view. You will need to get to your cameras fairly often to clean them. You will also probably get spiders making their homes on them especially if IR illuminated and you will have many happy hours of videos of spiders lit up like light bulbs going back and forth across making webs.

1. Sounds like you're talking about using analog cameras... I will be using Network cameras. But, you give me hope that I might be able to use the spare pairs for power. I'll have to experiment on if pushing 24V AC power will cause dropped packets or not.

2. It's interesting that most of the cameras are able to see the IR... I should try pointing an IR remote at one of my cameras to see if it shows up as a flashlight.

3. Spiders?!? Hehe. No problem. With the external housings, most cameras should be able to handle the "get wet, get dry" problem... no? Unless you're talking about water on the glass, and "water stains" obscuring the view?

Thanks for the input. I appreciate it.

--Pathway