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User: WolfWings

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  1. Okay, let's get a simple break-down on this... on Large-Scale Video Archiving? · · Score: 1

    My instincts tell me you're not going to WANT to point ALL 1000+ cameras at one central point. Rather, indeed, build the system from building blocks of around 50-100 cameras. Storage and management systems for this sort of thing are very common already, so you can run several of them in parallel quite easilly.

    This also has the 'durability' factor of avoiding a single-point-of-failure if you point ALL the cameras into one storage system.

    If you're truly wanting to go fully digital, I'd still say keep it modular, and buy some of the DVD-R 'automated silos' that can hold a hundred DVD-R's or so, which gives you ~850-900Gb of storage per silo. The media lasts long, takes up very little space, and each 'silo' can have usually around 4-8 DVD-R drives installed in it, which gives you a cummulative recording speed of 12-24Mb/sec per silo, assuming a 3Mb/sec recording speed per DVD-R.

    I'd also assume you'd spend the money to install cameras that have the compression built into the hardware, so the DVD-R silo's can simply be handed the 'raw compression' in 3-hour chunks from a hundred cameras per silo per DVD-R, which would still give you a healthy 'margin of error' to deal with the management of fresh DVD-R's in the silo's, and recording drives possibly failing, without having to worry about actually losing any of your data.

    I'm specifically preaching a modular, broken-down format since you made such a point of data being archived forever. That meant, to me, that you NEED to keep the data, above and beyond most else, so who cares if you can record all that data, if something fails and you lose 3 hours because of that? This way, you have a lot of 'fallback' points, without having to worry so much about any single component going belly-up on you.

  2. Re:The obvious solution for multi-DVI setups... on Dual-Headed DVI Flatpanels? · · Score: 2

    Growl, Slashdot chopped the link. http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/pricing/home.cf m That's the link to the page listing all the pricing information in Canadian and US dollars. The cards aren't too hard to find on-line at stores and such, shop.matrox.com usually has them in stock.

  3. The obvious solution for multi-DVI setups... on Dual-Headed DVI Flatpanels? · · Score: 2

    Matrox. Scroll down that link to the very last section titled MMS, short for Multi-Monitor Solutions. Price for a dual-G200 card with 8M per card is $500 US per card, quad-G200 is $700 per card, or quad-G200 w/ TV tuner is $800 per card. You'll need one split-DVI cable per pair of DVI monitors at $60 US per cable, so for a dual-DVI setup you'd be spending $560 US roughly before tax, for a quad-DVI setup you'd be spending $820 US roughly before tax. Assuming you could find decent LCD screens for $1500 each, you'd still be under your target price of $7k per full rig if you got quad-head per rig instead of the originally-mentioned dual-head.

  4. From what I know, here's what you'd need. on Trading Right-Of-Way For High Bandwidth? · · Score: 2

    My one word-of-warning. I ramble a lot, and might not always be clear. Feel free to ask for more info if you want, or e-mail me. :-)

    First off, don't ask for a full Class D, unless you're planning on giving the entire town internet access, or literally wall-papering your house with terminals, you'd need at most a 16-IP class D, or in techno-speak, a /28 IP block. I'm living in a techo-house with LAN and phone wiring into every room except the bathrooms with 7 other folks and over 14 computers, and we actually only have 1 IP address and some good Masquerading software. But get 16, and insist that they be 16 IP addresses visible to the outside internet, otherwise they might double-deal ya' and only give ya' a cheaply Masqueraded port that you can't actually use for anything besides web-browsing. :-P

    And considering how large your average ranch is, they'd probably be putting a repeating on your property anyways, so splitting off the relatively smaller fiber cable to your house wouldn't be bad.

    INSIST ON FULL ARMORING ON YOUR LINE, COMPLETE AND UTTER! If you need to go out and buy some thick galvanized pipe for them to place the fiber in, do so. It's cheap compared to the durability it'll give vs. gophers or other nasty critters. And don't forget about water condensation, have each end of the pipe be somehow sealed, perferably with foam on top of a heavy and thick rubber plug around the fiber. Water is *NOT* your friend, and you want none of it inside your conduit. :-)

    I'd ask for:
    Gel-filled fully armored underground-rated 8-pair fiber. At least. I install fiber and cat5 and other such stuff as a job, and can say that we usually use exactly that just on principal of never having to repair anything after we put it in. The stuff's strong enough to be used to pull a tractor without damage, thanks to the armoring and pull-fibers inside. (Tyvek, wonderful stuff. :-) The 8-pair will guarantee you'd at LEAST get 400-500Mbit/sec each way, or roughly 4 100baseT lines each direction. And honestly that's more bandwidth thank most sites can even handle. :-)

    Finally, you'll need a fiber-supporting switch, I'd recommend a Linksys with 2 expansion ports, with a 4-port fiber channel module included. That'll give you enough ports to plug in all 8 of those pairs, and it'll handle most of the switching for your network, as it has 16 ports, one for each of your IP addresses. :-)

    It won't matter how they plug the fiber into their end, so long as it'll talk to the fiber module in the Linksys at your end, so don't bother specifying how, just remind them that you want all 8 pairs active from the get-go, and you'll be set.

    Oh, and get it in writing that you'll get 16 internet-visible IP's in a contigious block, and that your guaranteed minimum bandwidth is 400Mbit/sec full duplex.

    Final bandwidth you're likely to get: 400Mbit/sec each way. This is roughly 50 MEGABYTES a second you can shove AND draw at the same time. :-) Enjoy finding ways to actually use that much bandwidth. :-)

    And yes, I'm assuming the guys laying fiber'll act like snakes-in-the-grass, this is from working with the Telco personally before to get such-and-such job done, and you might luck out and get nice folks, but you want the setup as durable as possible so you never have to call them again, and also so they can't immediately say the problem is in your equipment. You can plug right into the Linksys, or if it doesn't have little bright lights by the fiber ports, you know it's their equipment. :-) So it minimizes/removes the "it's not my fault, it's your fault" round-robin Telco run-arounds. :-)

    And requesting 16 internet-visible IP addresses means you'll have directly access to the net with those, which also means the outside world'll have access to your end. So prolly shop around for a firewall or router or just learn about it yourself. >^.^ Just a friendly reminder/warning.