Using your PC for Video Surveillance
(7 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5)
It’s becoming very common for individuals to exploit their home PCs to turn them into surveillance stations for security cameras. Security and spy cameras can be purchased very cheaply these days, and you can easily add recording capability with a fairly low cost bit of kit. So in this article, I’ll cover how you connect a spy camera to a USB CCTV recording unit and ultimately your PC.
Exploiting a PC for surveillance purposes gives you a great deal of control over how and when footage is recorded from your surveillance cameras. For example, you can email pictures to yourself when the camera is triggered, you can view the webcam over the internet using your web browser, or you can simply log all of the images and video footage to your PC’s hard drive. Since PCs are easily upgraded with larger hard drives, your storage capacity is virtually unlimited.
Wiring any kind of camera to a CCTV digital video recorder (DVR) system is actually extremely simple. The diagram above shows that you literally connect 1 wire (video) or 2 wires (video and audio if available) from the camera or wireless camera receiver to the DVR unit. I’ve purposely not shown any power supplies in the diagram to make it simpler. But all of the devices except the USB DVR unit need a power supply of some description.
The USB DVR units can usually support recording from up to 4 cameras at once, with a variety of features for capturing footage. For example, you can set up motion detection, timestamps with the current date and time, camera names, etc. The framerate of captured video footage varies between different devices, but it’s usually between 10 and 50 frames per second (fps).
Here are a couple of example devices. The USB DVR Guardian Kit is probably what I would describe as a fairly full featured kit, since it provides audio support, motion detection and functionality to set up access to the cameras over the internet. The RapidOS USB 2.0 CCTV Hub is only slightly different, with a high video camera rate (50 fps per camera), but without audio support.
Once you’ve connected a camera to the USB surveillance kit, and then connected that to your PC, the software gives you the power to do the rest. This is what I mean when I say PCs are really versatile, since you can customise the behaviour of the recording system really easily using the software.
If you’ve got a PC-based CCTV system, I’d love to hear from you. Do let me know your findings!
September 3rd, 2007 at 5:31 pm
I use a Linux box with motion:
http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bi.....on/WebHome
It’s not user friendly for the average user, but very very powerful.
If you want something Linux based and user-friendly try:
http://www.zoneminder.com/
You can get LiveCD’s to play with it without re-installing your OS.
September 3rd, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Do you use a webcam? What kind of camera do you use?
I’ve heard of motion before and heard that its very good.
September 4th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Linux supports various video capture cards, and USB capture devices - you just plug any video input into one of those, and off you go. I don’t use USB webcams, but many people do - there is a semi-active mailing list for motion. I just use a standard CCTV type camera.
September 4th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Ah, so motion uses any video capture device. Useful to know, thanks for the tip!
Dan
October 14th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Check this company, http://www.interwatchsecurity.com. They operate in Cyprus and have been fantastic so far and I would recommend using them to anybody
October 15th, 2007 at 8:33 am
That’s an interesting concept. I’ll look into that in more detail.
Thanks
Dan
October 20th, 2007 at 11:19 am
I agree, I’ve just looked on Interwatch website and see they do surveillance for busineses - shame they don;t do it in my area.
Good website by the way
January 4th, 2008 at 10:58 am
I have the RapidOS USB DVR and cannot get it to record for more than half an hour! tech support is useless and just refers me to the manual. if anyone has any clue, please contact me!
January 19th, 2008 at 1:43 am
ive got a dvr (rapidos )with a small camera and the software but i just cant get the picture i keep getting a message saying that device dvr failed to initialize or cannot be found or its not ready any help please or some diagrams please… thanks nik
March 18th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
I’ve also just bought a dvr rapidos, the software installed but I cannot see my camera, any ideas please?
June 27th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
I have a RapidOS USB, and first the software doesnt run on XP 64 bit. On XP 32 bit, I have the same problem that the camera doesn show on the scren, but clicking on the USB imaging device in My Computer shoes the real time video. Also it will record. tech support is totally non-existent.
Nice idea, but a very poor product package for users.