Surveillance Camera Capture Software

[ddrueding]

Building out a resteraunt. They already have all the cameras and the PCI-based capture card. The system will be running XP Pro or Server 2003 (haven't decided yet). I need software that can monitor/record 8 cameras. If it has a web server that would be awesome, high-level compression would be great too. This system will also be doing other stuff, so keep that in mind.

 

[Buck]

Perhaps this cannot be changed, but I would highly recommend that the machine be dedicated to capturing surveillance video.

I've built a few machines with CCTV capture cards from Sentry and they come with the necessary software. They have some interesting hardware and compatibility requirements, but when met they work very well.

 

[ddrueding]

The card and cameras are already there; part of the last IT guy's clusterf*ck.

They will almost certainly never use it. Primarily it is so the boss can watch from home. Even if I'm only capping 1fps per (motion activated) camera, it shouldn't be an issue. The other tasks are very lightweight, and I plan on building a pretty strong system. Space is at an absolute premium; Even 2 Shuttles would barely fit; But if I need to, I can.

Tasks:
1a. Play MP3s (Winamp)
-or-
1b. Play video (Media Player Classic)

2. Cap video from cameras

3. Run backend for POS system (very light service/file server)

I was hoping to get by with a single shuttle:
X2 3800+
2GB RAM
2x 400GB SATA
PCI Cap Card
Onboard video for control
PCI-E Video card with dual DVI for output to TVs

I know I"m pushing it a bit, but if you really think it won't work (even with a dedicated HDD for the vid cap), I'll consider a second SFF for that purpose.

 

[Splash]

• 
  I was hoping to get by with a single shuttle:
  X2 3800+
  2GB RAM
  2x 400GB SATA
  PCI Cap Card
  Onboard video for control
  PCI-E Video card with dual DVI for output to TVs

Maybe you could reduce costs by specifying a 120 or 160 GB SATA hard drive for the system/applications drive.

I know I"m pushing it a bit, but if you really think it won't work (even with a dedicated HDD for the vid cap), I'll consider a second SFF for that purpose.

Just as a note, if you were building something like this from scratch, you would *definitely* want the system to be a pure PCI Express system. We all know PCI Express is fast, but it can perform jobs like handling multiple streams much better than conventional "share bus" parallel PCI because each PCI Express device has its own dedicated *full-duplex* connection back to the system processor(s) and DMA.

The card and cameras are already there; part of the last IT guy's clusterf*ck.

Hey! Clusterf*ck might be an excellent name for his server, especially if you loaded a pair of Shuttle nodes with Win2K3 server and setup a high-availability cluster. Then you'd need pricey external shared storage; suddenly not such a good idea for some little ristorante.