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OT: CCTV. Monitoring / security systems


Happyoldgit

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CCTV monitoring / security systems: Having gone through previous threads on the subject thought I'd start a new one as what the market has to offer changes as time goes on.

I need to set up a system around my place to cover a couple of areas of the property plus inside some internal areas in buildings that contain stock that are far enough away from the house to make setting up a wired system a chore [nearest 25metres, furthest 5-70 metres. There is mains power in the locations in question.

So what I'm after is a 4 - 6 camera wireless system that will enable me to monitor and record in the house. There are no public rights of way. Broadband is poor as is the mobile phone signal.

A simple all in wireless plug and play bundle would be ideal as I don't fancy spending time speccing something and scratching my head over technicalities I don't have the time to digest ;)

Ideas on a postcard to yours truly please :)

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I think I may have started one of the more recent threads on this.  I have yet to report back on it as we are just about to change houses thus the CCTV system was put on hold.  However, I have continued researching for the new property.

 

The consensus seems to be not to bother with wireless, as Wifi of whatever type just isn’t set up to cope well with ‘streaming’.  However, if mains power is available in your outbuildings, network ‘powerline’ adaptors can used to provide a wired connection for your IP cameras.

 

I’d be interested to see what Network Video Recorder (NVR) people recommend, as they either seem to be of the Chinesium cheap-and-nasty variety, or many hundreds for a decent unit.

 

I have been trying to persuade Zoneminder to work on a Raspberry Pi 3 (in my lunchbreaks), i.e. the roll-your-own solution, but I got bogged down in configuration and dependency hell.

 

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Not much has changed in the market other than the advent of "cloud" based solutions like the ring doorbell, but as broadband is poor that is out and that digital camera's have got higher resolutions and or cheaper prices and that storage hard drive/ flash memory has also got cheaper/bigger.

I have an IP camera with a Synology NAS (but not with Surveillance Station) as the camera just needs remote storage.

I don't think that there is an easy solution.

Probably the easiest is a Network video Recorder /NAS with IP CCTV cameras and power over Ethernet.

I've probably mention these points before but these are not changed by any advances in the market.
1) Analog is far to low a definition to be any use other than a deterrent.
2) Separate infra red lighting is really a must for outdoors / garages due to spiders and insects and birds being attracted (unless the area is permanently illuminated)
3) Record on motion detection never provides enough pre/post event recording to make it useful, better to record 24/7 with a still image recorded on motion event (which you can use as a time marker to check the 24/7 recording with)

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Anything IP and Chinese will secretly (or not so secretly) "phone home" to China when connected to your network. Also there's a higher-than-you'd-like chance it'll get hacked and used in a botnet or (worse for you) used as a backdoor into your home network.

Analogue may be lower quality (although good analogue is better than bad IP) but is easier setup & lower risk.

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We spent a fortune on a CCTV system about 10 years ago at work. It's an analogue system although there are multiplexers to reduce the amount of cabling. The problem is if you put the camera far enough away to get a wide angle of a driveway then the picture quality just isn't there, you can watch your stuff being pinched but you can't pick out a numberplate or face. If you put the camera close enough to get the detail then you need loads to cover the area and they become easier to tamper with.

I also find they tend to be pretty useless in the dark, the IR has a very limited range and attracts spiders like crazy and the webs block the night vision. You either need the IR source away from the camera or to light the area well.

The IP ones that I've used are a much better quality but much more expensive. If your concerned about security then just don't connect it to the internet. Usually CCTV is used to look back at events so you don't really need to be able to live stream it unless you want to use it for a remote location or parcel drops or to keep an eye on your wife and the milkman or something.

To show just how crummy it is this is a plane that crashed outside work, OK I recorded it by holding my phone to the screen as the CCTV recorder won't let you play exported videos without the right codec but watch as the post van goes past, impossible to make out any detail.

 

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1 hour ago, FridgeFreezer said:

Anything IP and Chinese will secretly (or not so secretly) "phone home" to China when connected to your network. Also there's a higher-than-you'd-like chance it'll get hacked and used in a botnet or (worse for you) used as a backdoor into your home network.

Analogue may be lower quality (although good analogue is better than bad IP) but is easier setup & lower risk.

If you buy a no named cheap brand from flee bay and expose it to the internet then may be, but it is fairly easy to prevent that.

I would argue that Analogue modern (using a hard drive not VHS tape) is a lot harder to setup because you have to worry about encoding rates and frame rates because the analogue to digital converter probably won't be able to handle all cameras at the usual max resolution of 480 × 576  @ 25 frames a second (which is probably why Cynic-al's video is at a standard CIF format).
I tried a cheap analogue 8 camera system and even though it was designed to handle 8 cameras it could only handle one at max resolution and a decent frame rate (it could only handle 8 at QCIF and low frame rate)

The analogue one i tried was so unstable I spent a lot more time fiddling with settings to try and get something useful and stable before I returned, IP CCTV was way much quicker to setup and a couple of mega pixel camera provided a much better result.

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It is an old system and the multiplexing limits the quality, there is a newer cctv system that's just used to monitor machines to work out why they stop which is set higher but it's still not enough to pick out a numberplate or face unless the camera is close up.

Storage is also an issue, it's a 16 camera system and uses huge data per day.

If I've still got it I've got the footage of when the factory was hit by lightening so it's not completely useless :)

Edited by Cynic-al
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2 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:

Anything IP and Chinese will secretly (or not so secretly) "phone home" to China when connected to your network. Also there's a higher-than-you'd-like chance it'll get hacked and used in a botnet or (worse for you) used as a backdoor into your home network.

Eh, it's not exactly a lot of effort to just keep it away from the internet.

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I had some cheap IP cameras at my old house, with Zoneminder running on my server, and it worked pretty well. You could do unlimited pre/post record on motion detection, or do full 24/7 recording if you wanted with 'events' being highlighted. There was a notable jump in quality between the cheap camera (£40 foscam clone) and the better one (£100 Dahua). The cheap one could use wireless which worked OK, but the better one was wired only. It also supported Power over Ethernet so you only had to run one cable to it. 

If I was doing it from scratch again, I would get a load of Hikvision or Ubiquiti cameras, and feed them back to either a PC running ZoneMinder with lots of storage, or a NAS like a Synology. If the buildings were remote with power, I would have a look at using powerline networking to get it back to the server, set up a wifi network if that failed, or bury cat-5 if all else fails!

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Zoneminder does not really have unlimited pre event record as you need to specify the number of pre event frames which should be no more than 50% the ring buffer which is limited by the size of shared memory available, while the shared memory size can be tweaked it is limited by the available memory.

The other thing I found with Zoneminder and Synology's surveillance station, is that some of the work is done on the PC/NAS for things like motion detection and this can put a load on the system with many cameras, a lot of IP camera will do all this themselves and thus distribute the load and then the only need to have simple central storage (Windows file share from a PC or NAS)

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14 hours ago, elbekko said:

Eh, it's not exactly a lot of effort to just keep it away from the internet.

Didn't say it was - but for non-techies it's worth pointing out that the "easy" route of just plugging it into your home router is a bad idea. Keep it separate and it's fine.

As a few have hit upon, most cheap recorders can't record full-resolution multiple streams, goes for analogue + digital. The whole industry is full of blatant lies really. So many cameras claim brilliant resolutions but the lens/sensor are cr&p so you get a blurred mess in twice as many pixels. Likewise night vision capabilities etc. etc.

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I use Milestone which free for up to 8 cameras and use a NUC as a recording server. I've also set up dynamic dns to allow me to use the iPhone app to connect to my home system to view the footage.

ive a mix of it cameras, old analogue cameras connected via encoders, but have also simply used USB webcams. The webcams are blind at night however.

Have a look at milestones software - we use the corporate version of the software at work, so it was an obvious choice for me.

the problem with home cctv is always the cost of cameras, as decent cameras are not cheap, and cheap cameras are not decent.

jon

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I've been looking into something similar recently and ended up returning some cameras as I didn't trust them.

I wasn't happy about the active-x software that was needed to configure the camera. Technically there is little reason why you should need to do this but the one I returned and another I'm using at home couldn't be set up fully with the Onvif viewers.

I'd say avoid DBPower cameras from Ebay.

I'm still looking for a HD night vision pan - tilt - zoom that can be set up without it needing to be connected to the internet, ONVIF compliant, and linux friendly.

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Wes - if you've got about £1500 per camera I might be able to help, failing that they're mostly all the same cheap Chinese IP encoder modules cloned or re-badged and glued into a variety of housings with a variety of sensors/lenses. That includes at least one which claims to be made in the UK. I wouldn't trust any of them on my home network or the internet.

Oh and no-one actually fully supports ONVIF, it's about 10,000 pages of badly documented and ambiguous WSDL and every manufacturer interprets it differently. Most pass ONVIF certification the same way VW pass emissions tests.

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1 hour ago, WesBrooks said:

Failing ONVIF my next approach was going to be raspberry pi (or similar) + web cam. At least I would know what it was doing then.

ONVIF will at least give you some idea that you'll be able to find, control, and configure the camera on the network, but beyond that all bets are off.

Raspberry pi + cam is more expensive than a cheap IP cam of equivalent quality tbh, not sure I'd bother unless I wanted to play with motion sensing / openCV etc. if you just want a working camera, a cheap IP or USB webcam suitably fenced-off is far easier.

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Thanks chaps, much appreciate the input.

But my head hurts already, I need more of a big dummies guide ;)

So, can someone point me in the direction of this or that kit or maybe bundle of bits from this or that supplier to nail together without the need to understand unfamiliar acronyms.

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I would start off small and simple with a 1 camera setup that you can expand to a multiple camera system while you gain understanding or ask professional advice like from the Use-IP forum I posted a link to.

Some thing like a 2MP IP CCTV camera like
https://www.use-ip.co.uk/vivotek-ib8369a-2mp-bullet-camera.html

A POE injector to power it like
https://www.use-ip.co.uk/tp-link-tl-poe10r-poe-splitter.html

Use the internal storage feature, so you require a memory card

https://www.use-ip.co.uk/verbatim-64gb-microsdxc-class-10-card-with-adapter.html

Some length of CAT5E cable from powerline adaptor to camera

On https://www.use-ip.co.uk/accessories/cables-and-plugs

A Set of powerline adaptors to connect it to the rest of the network

https://www.use-ip.co.uk/tp-link-tl-pa8030p-kit.html

Indoors Mount 1 Powerline adaptor in remote location and connect to POE injector, connect power cable to POE injector, run CAT5E cable to camera (can be indoors or outdoors).

Connect second powerline adaptor in to your home network router/adsl modem/(what ever you are running)

Memory card in camera and configure camera to record to it and email you stills of motion events.

 

Note I believe all this kit will work together as it is based on a simple version of what I run, but I take no responsibility if it does not.
There will be a fair amount of RTFM to configure the camera.

I have no connection to Use-IP except being a happy customer.

This system can then be expanded to a multiple camera system with off camera storage and external infra red lights, etc

Use-IP have the camera PDF manuals available online for you to read before hand

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