Jaycar Digital Video Recorder

Opps. Here is the link:

David

Have a look at the four channel PC ones on ebay. Cheap and will work over network.

Thought about getting a 4 channel PCI card instead?, like this one:

$36 posted Use a 2nd hand PC for

"David"

** Why ??????

Expecting your next door neighbours, relatives or friends to burgle your house ???

Surrounding your home with video cameras and lights is dumb paranoia and a waste of money.

Pure geek think.

........ Phil

He might live next to a paedophile. Automatic weapons are illegal and you cant stay home or awake forever. That is a stupid comment Phil, as you have no idea of his circumstances.

Rob

Maybe I'm a bit behind in market values, but would a PC of that price have sufficient power to be able to capture and dump 4 channels? My Duron 1.2GHz used to have problems keeping up with 640x480 capture at

25fps. At one end of the scale the HD couldn't write the raw data fast enough, at the other end compression reduced the amount written to the HD but it was too CPU hungry. Too close to either extreme resulted in dropped frames, so it took a fair bit of experimenting to find a reliable balance.

I have not used these video capture cards, but I used an old $50 700MHz PIII to do Firewire video capture and editing and it worked just fine. Editing was a bit slow because of the slow video card, but I didn't get one dropped frame on the capture. Firewire of course doesn't do any compression on the fly, so maybe compression might be a bottle neck?

For a dedicated machine like this you would remove every driver not necessary, that means firewalls, virus scanners and other resident programs that hog system bandwidth.

Even if it worked for only one channel, it would still be cheaper to buy 4 second hand machines and 4 cards! Not exactly low power consumption when running them 24/7 though.

Worth spending the 100 bucks and trying it anyway I recon.

You can get a P4 >1GHz for $100 depending on configuration.

Dave :)

Unless you really need constant real-time video, use motion detection to capture frames that have motion above a certain threshold. I use gspy on a linux box which works well. That way you don't end up with hours of footage in which nothing happens.