Ebay Chinese IP CCTV cameras – keep hold of your Landy...

[UdderlyOffroad]

All,
Somewhat Landy-related, as it has to do with deterring* the theft of your Land Rover and other equipment. Mods please delete if too wildly O/T.

After the theft of an admittedly minor item from my yard, I’ve decided that in addition to physical security measures a recording of anyone who enters and exits would be in order too.

I’ve seen the Chinese Ebay specials… for about £30 for a wired IP camera, and £40 for wireless. Has anybody used them? Any positive experiences to report?

What I’d like to be able to do for it to be able to record onto my NAS. But looking at the listings, I’m not sure they can do this without a PC permanently on running additional software. Of course this would be a perfect Raspberry Pi project, but time constraints mean I’d rather be spannering on my Landies than tinkering with Linux command lines…

Any feedback appreciated.

Matt


*yes, I know the deterrent effect is arguable, but please let’s keep this thread technical rather than debate the merits or otherwise of CCTV versus 12-gauges versus big dogs.

[FridgeFreezer]

There is a fairly ready-made setup for the raspberry Pi using "motion" (terrible name for a piece of software), that would be my preference as you have a fighting chance of getting it to do what you want. Also, the camera is pretty decent quality and the Pi is re-usable.

[Gazzar]

This is definitely a worthwhile tread, it's a topic I will be investigating soon.

I was looking at an IP based solution that can cope with night time, have a decent resolution (3 megapixels?) can brave the UK weather, and record to my home server.

I was thinking of getting a few of these to see how that would work.

G.

[ejparrott]

I know very little about CCTV, but I do know that in order to get anything worthwhile in the event of a theft, the more money you spend on quality cameras the more likely you are to get a useable image from them.

[C18RCH]

I run one for exactly the reason you intend to.

The wireless ones don't need anything. Not sure about the wired ones.

You set them up with a PC and then they use an email account to send emails once the motion detection is activated. I set up a spare hotmail account for mine to use. As long as the camera has your wirless password and the password for the email account you wish to send emails from, it is stand alone.

You can get them to email themselves so that you are not spamming your usual email account every 2 seconds. They are very sensitive, whilst you can adjust the sensitivity, in reality even shadows set them off. However, set up to email themselves, you only need to check them if you suspect something suspicious.

[nicksmelly]

Simple NVR solution and add a 1 TB USB hard drive = http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mini-NVR-4X-4ch1080P-960P-720P-Network-Video-Recorder-IP-Cameras-Cloud-P2P-ONVIF-/121257793379?pt=UK_CCTV&hash=item1c3b871763

[=jon=]

I've got two of the cheapy-ish ones looking over the house and garden. The (free) linux backend software is called Zonealarm and runs on one of my PCs... Some of the cameras have motion detection software built in but normally it's a bit pap...

The first cam is a 'Foscam' clone - basically a chinese company called foscam ripped off another companies design and made clone cameras, these clones themselves got ripped off hence most of the cheapy ones on ebay are referred to as foscam clones. Mine's a DB Power something or other which was about £40. It works OK, the res isn't great and the night vision range isn't that great either. I ended up buying a different lens for it to improve the field of view - a lot of bits are changeable and sometimes you can improve the quality by refocussing them as they are slapped together without a lot of care..

The second one I have is a Dahua (http://www.use-ip.co.uk/dahua-ipc-hfw2100-1-3mp-hd-network-mini-ir-bullet-camera.html), which are the same as the ones you can buy in the high street rebranded as Swann. The quality (both image and build) is a lot lot better, 720p HD if you want it, and the quality at night is much better too - but for moving subjects at distance you would struggle to identify someone well enough to provide the police..

My advice would be to skip buying the cheap crappy ones and get decent ones - the quality is so much better compared. I'd also check the lens size to make sure it's got a wide enough depth of field to cover what you want If you are paranoid you can also get external IR illumination which improves the range / quality at night..

[Jon White]

I would avoid the cheapo ebay ones, and make sure that whatever you buy is ONVIF compliant which is the international standard for CCTV.

More these days are POE powered so can be powered via cat5 cables from a cheap POE switch.

I would then use Milestone Go which is free PC based software which is superb. the free versions allows up to 8 cameras and stores recordings for 5 days. You can export anything of interest easily, and it has really good motion detection etc, including pre-buffering which is a really useful feature. Milestone is compatible with most major manufacturers kit (but it must be ONVIF compliant which the el-cheapo ones are not). We use Milestone corporate at work and it is an excellent product. The free version has pretty much all the same features (in fact we also use it at work for some smaller stand alone systems).

We run it using i5 NUCs which are ideal to leave on all the time.

Cheers

Jon

[mike4444244]

FYI I just got my costco discount leaflet through and they are selling a Swann 8 channel system with a 1TB hard drive, 3 bullet cameras and a pan/tilt dome camera for £350 delivered, I know nothing about CCTV but thought I'd mention it!

Mike

[zardos]

FYI I just got my costco discount leaflet through and they are selling a Swann 8 channel system with a 1TB hard drive, 3 bullet cameras and a pan/tilt dome camera for £350 delivered, I know nothing about CCTV but thought I'd mention it!

Mike

I would not touch these systems with a barge pole, the quality of the recording was terrible when I tried similar analog systems and they were all were just the same rebadged Linux based CPU and graphics capture card on one board and rebadged software which in some configurations would crash every 30 seconds.

A good MegaPixel or above IP CCTV camera gave much better results.

I would also suggest only use separate IR illumators to stop insects from being attracted to the lens by the light and triggering motion events and to stop spiders taking up residence in front of the lens to capture the insects and also triggering motion events.

[zardos]

To answer the original question, when buying my IP CCTV camera I looked at these and a friends has said no to these cheap cameras, he was on this 4th different model as they all would crash and need reseting every couple of days.

I in the end bought a VivoTek IP8332 from http://www.use-ip.co.uk/ and using a specialist UK seller who test out cameras before they sell them was well worth it.

[tweetyduck]

Ever seen a crimewatch type program and thought the picture of the crook is crappy quality......then spend the money and get the best you can possibly get. In fact spend another £100 and get a better one. The Swann ones seem OK to me. Not sure about low light or the IR capability but they seem good enough. Remember distance is the factor.....closer to the subject the better. A carp camera takes a good picture of your face at 1 foot away...

[zardos]

With the analog cameras you are going from a digital source in the camea to an analog signal and then back to a digital signal in the recorded, this double conversion looses detail.

Also with analog camera's the transmission will usually be in PAL standard or possible NTSC, but these limit the resolution to PAL 720x576 or 720 x 480 (NTSC)
Which means a 700 line camera is down sampling to 576 lines to transmit the data.

I found that with the analog camera's I could not read my car number plate at 8m with a 1MP IP Camera I could read the number plate at 8m
Most of the Crime watch CCTV images come from analog cameras and it shows (probably also from a Tape that has been recorded over and over thousands of time)

You also need to think about field of view and lens size
A calculator http://www.howtosurveillance.com/HowToVideo/CCTV-lens-calculator.html

[zardos]

So the camera listed might be compatible with Surveillance software on your NAS if it has it (like http://www.synology.com/en-us/surveillance/index )

But the Vivotek I use just does all the work itself and just uses my Nas as remote storage.

Other feedback, I found that all of the software available (In camera, Nas, zone minder, etc ) for motion triggered recording was cr*p.
Not enough pre and post event buffer to make it useable.

So I configured mine to do 24x7 recording with emails of a single jpg of event to highlight motion events of interest. The if I decide it needs further investigation I have a virtual limitless pre and post event recording.

[CwazyWabbit]

I also went for 24/7 recording, storage is so cheap now that unless you have lots of cameras there isn't a great deal of point bothering with motion sensing.

[UdderlyOffroad]

Some excellent responses there, thanks all.

My advice would be to skip buying the cheap crappy ones and get decent ones - the quality is so much better compared. I'd also check the lens size to make sure it's got a wide enough depth of field to cover what you want If you are paranoid you can also get external IR illumination which improves the range / quality at night..

Sound advice, but tragically given my tight-fisted tendencies not likely to be advice I’m going to listen to, at least in the first instance! I’ll get a cheapo one first, if its quality is too poor, relegate it to the back yard or inside the garage. As for the distance thing, I’m fortunate that the layout of my yard is such that it ‘funnels’ people down a certain path, so I should be able to get a good mugshot of ne’r-do-wells from not very far away.

Simple NVR solution and add a 1 TB USB hard drive = http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mini-NVR-4X-4ch1080P-960P-720P-Network-Video-Recorder-IP-Cameras-Cloud-P2P-ONVIF-/121257793379?pt=UK_CCTV&hash=item1c3b871763[/url]

I had no idea ‘NVR’s like that existed! Looks like the perfect solution, as I don’t want to leave a PC running all day, burning power. Saves tying up the router’s painfully slow USB connection (that can remain free for backup/archive use)

Make sure that whatever you buy is ONVIF compliant which is the international standard for CCTV.

More these days are POE powered so can be powered via cat5 cables from a cheap POE switch.

I would then use Milestone Go which is free PC based software which is superb. the free versions allows up to 8 cameras and stores recordings for 5 days. You can export anything of interest easily, and it has really good motion detection etc, including pre-buffering which is a really useful feature. Milestone is compatible with most major manufacturers kit (but it must be ONVIF compliant which the el-cheapo ones are not). We use Milestone corporate at work and it is an excellent product. The free version has pretty much all the same features (in fact we also use it at work for some smaller stand alone systems).

We run it using i5 NUCs which are ideal to leave on all the time.

Cheers

Jon

In this application at least, I can easily run power to the camera. Also, I intend to use PowerLine Ethernet adapators which I don’t think are POE compatible! As for NUCs – again probably overkill in this application. A £45 NVR coupled to a £45 USB hard drive should do, and should be far easier on the electricity bill. In the past I’ve tried to avoid running a ‘home server’ as I don’t think I need something on all the time just sitting there. Definitely take the point about buying a camera that is (or claims to be) standards compliant though.

Incidentally, over on ‘Fender2, someone has bought a "genuine" Foscam and had good results with it.

I'll have a look around again during lunch today and get a camera on order, along with an NVR and 1 Tb HD. Will do the install and report back.

Matt