Recommendations for Digital Security Systems?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "My company has an ailing analog security system, (you know the types: 16 position multi-plexer etc, 24hour VHS tape, and so on). We're in the market for a 21st century solution, and was hunting around for a computer/hard drive solution, being able to store up to 8 weeks of video, from 8am to 10pm, 7 days a week at multiple frame rates (up to 30, but we'll settle for 3 to 5 frames per second, with motion detection...) and preferably at a resolution where you can tell if that's a nose on the persons face or not!" It's a reasonable enough question. Just for fun, how difficult would it be to build such a system using consumer-level-off-the-shelf parts?

"Some of the ones we're looking at have in the order of 480gb of storage. Windows or Linux based, it does not matter, but the ability to schedule recordings, export the pictures (water-marking for possible criminal and court proceedings...), backup options to dat/cd-r/dvd-r, always on, ability to view previous footage AND record live from multiple camera's (8/16 or better), possible remote network access, motion recording, and ability to use both digital or analog cameras (significant previous investment in these, would like to re-use the colour newer models...) and newer digital higher resolution camera's are some of the features I would like. Any ideas from the very knowledgeable Slashdot crew?"

Comments

computernerd

[Perdo]

I"m sure these guys could help. Still in Dev so you could prolly get it fairly cheap and insure that they incorporated the exact features you want.

Here's a cheap solution

[J.D. Hogg]

Get an Axis camera

Their network cams use multipart jpegs over HTTP. You can simply save off the growing jpeg file on a disk, or you can also set the camera to automatically upload a incrementally-numbered file onto an FTP server every n seconds, or you can write a small script that'll pull the file from HTTP every n seconds ...

What's more, you can also use third-party free software such as VNCCam that will allow you to customize and view your camera's display over VNC.

That's what I use for an indoors security solution : I have one of these cameras bolted on a ceiling (it comes with the hardware) of a room that has expensive equipment. For indoor use, these little cameras work great, they're reliable, they only cost between $500 and $1000, and they're a no-brainer to get going. However, if you plan on outdoors security, an Axis camera is definitely not what you want.

My EUR 0.03.

Visilinx

[alienswede]

The company I work for sells a complete remote management solution for the convenience store industry that does all the things described in the original post.

It also interfaces with point of sale systems, captures images at predefined events (such as NO SALE's or lottery winnings etc). It does timelapse video with retention as far back as 13 months. It does sales reporting as well as many other reports.

I could go into more detail but I'll just direct you to the website.

http://www.visilinx.com

Check it out...

Off the shelf parts.

[Restil]

RCA capable capture cards (winTV and others with the BT848) are about $25 now. All you need then
is practically any security camera. If you don't
mind investing in a card for each camera, multiplexing becomes trivial. Since they're PCI,
4-5 per computer is as good as you're going to get, but you can use low end pentium systems for the capturing easily enough.

Then you can do several frame captures per second easily enough if you want to store frames, or you can do realtime mpeg encoding. At 5 fps, with full color/sound, you're talking a little under 100 megs an hour per source when recording at 320x240. And this is without scaling down the quality any.

-Restil

Re:Fire Codes

[Myrv]

You are allowed to be locked into a building until someone pulls a fire alarm. Many of the doors at my old University had magnetic locks that would open if the power failed or the fire alarm went off.

Ok, here goes nothing...

[Raptor CK]

Assuming that you manage about a terabyte of storage, here are your numbers...

Let's use Tivo's basic quality as an example, but drop the framerate to 15fps. This should look acceptable considering the limited changes from a stationary camera.

A week's worth of data would use up 49 GB per camera. 16 cameras? 784GB.

I'd advise settling for something more realistic at this point. Perhaps lowering the resolution, or going grayscale. Either way, you've still got to address *sixteen* cameras, so they'll need to be Axis webcams or something else capable of talking IP. There's no way that you'll get away with USB cameras.

So, assuming that black and white reduces you to 33% of the previous number, that's still 262GB per week.

You'd need slightly over two *terabytes* of storage to handle 8 weeks of 15 fps, TV resolution, B&W footage from 16 cameras.

And you'd still need a way to encode the video feed to MPEG on the fly at the camera. And handle roughly 2.3 Mbit/sec per cam into your "server," which would have to reliably write 37 Mbit/sec to your 2 TB array. Without failing.

Now, considering the fact that this is all *WAY* under Fast Ethernet and ATA specs, it's doable. But a homegrown solution with 8 week rollback just isn't feasible. Drop the rollback by a bit, dump to tape (unless you've got a fiber line going to a remote site for backups,) and keep a lot of spare drives around. You can't afford to have a failure anywhere in this assembly.

Sorry if I've taken the wind out of anyone's sails through the judicious use of math, but I just wanted to make sure that no one does anything without being informed.