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The obvious question is why not both? The problem with CCTV is that it's space-inefficient. It records a whole lotta nothing. By pairing a cctv with a motion sensor, it can turn on the recording just when something interesting is happening. Or if they still want to record the whole time, the motion sensors can be used to tag interesting time codes on the tape, so you know where to fast-forward to without having to watch the whole damned thing. Heck, I can do this with my iSight and Evocam http://www.evological.com/evocam.html

While this is a Mac solution, you could always pick up a Mac mini. This has motion detection, and can initiate an Apple Script.

http://www.evological.com/evocam.html

Alerting the police that you will be leaving, setting up an EvoCam Mac to alert you via text and to video anyone entering, and perhaps a few lights on different timers would do the trick.

Pretty accessible. It's easy enough to put your iSight and iChat into "auto-answer" mode, which would be handy to catch dumb thieves. :)

Also, I personally use and like Evocam. It's great webcam software and scriptable, and can do the "auto capture every x minutes" thing.

There is a small green light that comes on whenever the camera is active.

Check out Evo Cam for motion detection on a Mac. I used a demo version of it last year to capture hurricane pics out of my office window (until the power went out). Worked great with both a cam-corder and an iSight.

I have mine record movements while out as well as speak "Intruder alert, intruder alert" hoping to scare any would-be burglers away while snapping their photo.

Hopefully it will never be "needed."

A great use for the new Mac Mini too!

These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:

WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.

DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.

PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.

Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.

MorphX: Morphs one image into another.

SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).

Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.

LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..

And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.

CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).

Onyx: A must-have system utility.

MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.

Books: A library software (book database).

Xnippets: A decent information organiser.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)

A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:

ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).

EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)

Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.

Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)

Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.

Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)

cheers- raga

One of our comp. labs (in an engineering dept. at a state Univ) will be monitored in a similar fashion, The lab does not have a proctor. To unlock the lab door, you have to punch in a unique numeric code. There are approx. 150 grad. students who are provided fresh access codes every semester (old ones expire).

The lab has only 20 PCs, 1 laser printer and a plotter, but we have been having problems with keyboard/mouse walking away, printer abuse, etc.). Thankfully, the rodents have not (yet!) walked away with any of the (expensive!) hardware dongles some of our software requires.

The $20 solution we have came up with is:
Mac G3 (333/beige) + ColorQuickCam (both laying around) + $20 for EvoCam. The camera is mounted at one of the top corners of the room and the Mac is setup in the next room. Sampling every second, we save images as a QT movie. The HD can store about 2 weeks of "movie".

Let's see if we catch any rats.

BTW, EvoCam is, by far, the best of its class (of WebCam apps) on any platform.

cheers- raga

The first thing I did was get a high-resolution webcam, the FirewireDirect DV WebCam and an X10
Ninja for remote panning/tilting. You can remote control this with your computer, but I chose to not use this option yet - though I would like it controllable from the web.

Then, for the recording, I'm using a beta build of CoolCam X from the great folks
at Evological who implemented a few motion detection changes for me.

Currently, for every time the motion detector trips, it records a JPEG still shot, and it also appends it to a Quicktime movie (in Photo-JPEG format, which, xine and xmovie happily reads). Every nite, a crontab entry moves all of the JPEG's and the movie into a dated directory, for later review.

The Quicktime movie is kind of fun, watching life in motion lapse. I keep it all on the web, but since my link is small, I'm not going to link to any of the quicktime movies for now.. suffice to say, it's funny watching the street in the front of my house.

All running happily on my (now obsolete) G4 DP533 running MacOS X.1