Best DIY IP Camera Software for Under $500

[electron]

Curious about Vitamin D... Is it a browser based interface, where any PC on your network could view the cameras via a browser pointed to an IP address?

Unfortunately, there is no web interface, but if needed, you could have it save a snapshot to a dropbox folder which can be accessed remotely, or have it send an e-mail. It also runs on OSX (I believe the software was written in Python). To me, the accurate motion detection was more important than having a web interface, but hopefully it's something that will get added in the future.

 

[drvnbysound]

Ehh, the price for VitaminD is appealing, but I really want something with a web interface. If its not obvious, the reason the web interface is good... is so you could open a browser on any PC on your network, point it to the web address of the 'server', and be able to view all cameras live. Many of CCTV software companies have went that direction, which is a very nice interface so you can have multiple viewing locations, or in the instance of enterprise solutions... many people able to view at once.

 

[electron]

well that's why I have a regular DVR as well. Vitamin D gets a copy of the analog cam output, but for real time monitoring, I use my regular DVR.

 

[rusgrafx]

I run several Panasonic IP cameras with server software bundled on the CD that came with them. AFAIK it supports up to 16 cameras, but I never tried that many. The server software is free, but requires purchase to unlock additional features (like external COM-port triggers, schedules, etc.). The software has continuous recording mode as well as motion-triggered only, supports time-stamping, search, etc.

The cameras themselves provide decent web interface (also can multiplex up to 16 cams on one screen), though audio stream is available only in Internet Explorer on Windows systems. Also there are tons of great apps for iPhone and Android for on the go viewing, including PTZ support.

Face recognition is performed by my brain

I'm gonna check the Vitamin D, the name sounds familiar to me, but I don't remember ever trying it out.

 

[Penman]

blue iris

While I like the feature set of Blue Iris, I have found that it can really eat a lot of compute resources. I have run it on a dual core 2.8Ghz Pentium ca. 2006, and it will nearly max out the CPU with 6 cameras. I use Axis IP cameras, and the problem with Blue Iris is that it seems to transcode the video from these cameras, rather than just recording the MPEG-4, which makes for a serious compute load.