Dave. I have setup video surveillance recording systems, but only with the traditional CCTV methods. You'll see that some of the video capture boards can be a bit expensive. I have used boards such as the
GV-604 board in PIII systems. The boards I've used have four BNC connectors, but you can easily use a BNC-to-RCA converter if needed. Coupled with good CCTV cameras, these boards are priceless. It's great when you can remotely zoom or tilt the camera. The nice thing with these boards is that you can also hook up 4 different cameras on four different inputs so that each recording is 30-fps for nice detailed movement.
Alternatively, there are new items coming out as Fushigi pointed to that I do not have any experience with firsthand. However, their configurability in a CCTV setup is very limited.
Also, you'll want to consider if you want cameras with I.R. capability for recording in 0.0 lux environments. This is great for recording at night, especially outdoors.
The more expensive stuff seems a waste at times, but when it finally nabs a thief, you're happy you spent the money. For example, I had one place that spent big bucks on a real capture board, and some good quality hidden cameras. With the 30-fps recording, they were able to get a clear picture of the thief as he looked at the hidden camera (he didn't realize there was a camera, he just saw a nice picture in a picture frame) for a split second. If we had been recording at less frames per second, his face could easily have been missed. (This was inside a large company, and he had been let in by another employee. It was a team of people attempting to steal products.) You may have seen on other surveillance systems where you get two frames of the 'bad guy', both of which are blurs as they're walking by because the recording frames was low - bad idea. The downside, you need lots of hard drive space for 30-fps and several cameras. Three cameras recording in B&W with no audio, at 30-fps, 24-hours a day, will net you 10 days of data on a 60-gigabyte drive. Fortunately, the software will just write over the oldest days with new ones, so if you are not interested in archiving, it will just loop through the drive every n-days. However, if there is data you want to archive, you can always move the folder or the individuals frames you pulled out as jpeg's onto another storage source.
Hope this helps.
