My security camera setup

[RAM]

After looking for a couple of years for a way to (cheaply) view my 3 outside cameras, I think I am finally happy with my setup.
I have 3 cameras watching my driveway, inside of the garage and my front door area. I wanted to be able to check them via web/internet and also have motion sensing/recording capability. My biggest problem was always doing this without using up too much CPU power, as I use one PC for both my Homeseer server and camera server. I wanted to stick with one PC instead of setting up another one just for video because I pay the electric bills around here, you know.
After hearing many good comments about Axis video servers, I decided on an Axis 2400 (4 camera server) and got a used one on eBay for a reasonable $250. I use the server built into this to do all my web/internet serving of snapshots and live video. I use Active Webcam 'Pro' version (from Pysoft.com) for my motion sensing and recording. This has resulted in virtually instant serving of snapshots, reasonable quick loading time and good serving of live streaming video without bogging down my Home Automation server and good motion sensing/recording of what's going on outside. Typical CPU load for my HA server is around 20% and I have noticed no degradation of response times since adding the Active Webcam software to the mix. I think that by having the Axis doing the camera/video serving and using Active Webcam just for the motion sensing/recording is the reason my PC CPU load hasn't gotten unreasonable.
Besides the motion sensing/recording I have events that automatically grab snapshots of the front and backdor/driveway area whenever the doorbell rings and optionally whenever my x10 motion sensor detects motion in the driveway of front door area.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

I'm basically doing the same thing here with a couple of different options.

I also use Axis 2400 Video Servers (and one Axis241Q) but use WebCamXP for the motion detection on a dedicated computer. I like using the cheaper day/night (non-IP cameras) and just make them IP enabled via the Axis Server. One reason I like WebCamXP is because they now have an option to record motion based on a "percentage change" of nominal background. This is great for day/night cameras because the software will trigger on a percentage change "above" background. In other words, you don't just enter a "raw" video percentage change to trigger motion detection. This is really a nice feature as the night time images have more noise in them due to the cameras increased gain (yes, I know the more expensive cameras avoid this, but we are talking five outdoor cameras here at the $120 or so price range).

One of Axis Communications product's biggest weaknesses though is they do not have a supported software scheme to view thier products via a Windows Mobile Device (phones). I find this a huge annoyance and I often wonder how a modern company putting out IP viewing products could do this!?!? I called their tech support about this and they said there is no demand for this type of product anymore. I wonder who exactly they are listening to.

One thing I noticed you do is take images based on home automation events with Active Webcam Pro. I thought I read something about this in the past (I believe another Cocooner may have mentioned this) but how exactly do you do this? In other words, how does the software detect these 'events'? I might have to look into this as one of WebCamXP's weaknesses is the inability to trigger video capture based on any of my home automation hardware notifications.

EDIT: Just browsed through Active Webcam's instruction manual and noticed that you can access features via a 'command line'. Very nice. I wish WebCamXP had this available.

I noticed this command: webcam.exe/snapshots_on to activate snapshots.

So to discern which camera you would enter webcam.exe/device 2 for say camera 2 before you enter the above command?

 

[RAM]

One thing I noticed you do is take images based on home automation events with Active Webcam Pro. I thought I read something about this in the past (I believe another Cocooner may have mentioned this) but how exactly do you do this? In other words, how does the software detect these 'events'? I might have to look into this as one of WebCamXP's weaknesses is the inability to trigger video capture based on any of my home automation hardware notifications.

EDIT: Just browsed through Active Webcam's instruction manual and noticed that you can access features via a 'command line'. Very nice. I wish WebCamXP had this available.

I noticed this command: webcam.exe/snapshots_on to activate snapshots.

So to discern which camera you would enter webcam.exe/device 2 for say camera 2 before you enter the above command?

Actually a Homeseer script does all the captures. I have an event that triggers when my doorbell is rung and this script (excerpt of it shown here) does all the work:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
dim image, date_info, fso, file_name, file_path

date_info = now()
file_name = "front-" & year(date_info) & "-" & month(date_info) & "-" & day(date_info) & "-" & hour(date_info) & "-" & minute(date_info) & "-" & second(date_info) & ".jpg"
file_path = hs.GetAppPath & "\html\door-images\" & file_name
image = hs.GetURLImageEx("http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx","/axis-cgi/jpg/image.cgi?camera=3", file_path, xxxx)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
That way Active Webcam isn't even involved. Right now I have Active Webcam only doing motion detection and recording.

Dick
======================

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Ah, I like that method.

I'm also thinking of using the digital inputs of the Axis Server to push an image via FTP to a remote site. Possibly tie it into my Ocelot/Caddx system so a PC isn't involved (push FTP image on an alarm for instance).

 

[huggy59]

In the old days when I had a bunch of cameras and no software interface for triggering capture on/off, I had a dedicated PC as the video machine where I simply set up my own sequential stills buffers. I ran capture all the time - each cam was capturing stills periodically (once or twice a second) into its own subdir, with each subsequent capture filename being incremented by 1 (image1.jpg, image2.jpg, ..., image199.jpg - this was a function of the software I was using). I had it count up to 100 or 200 or so and then it would flip back to 1 and start over, giving me 50-100 seconds of stills at any given time in a circular buffer.

Then when I had an event trigger, I'd just wait a few seconds and then copy all the images over to a special subdir (or another machine) based on the event time, date, trigger, and cam. This subdir was available via a web server so I could "watch" the stills that lead up to and after the event.

While these cams could also do streaming, I found the event stuff much more interesting, just as informative, and a lot less hassle.