Build your own CCTV Systems...

[AJWhite1970]

Hi

 

Been asked to look at the possibility of replacing our old and now out of warranty CCTV system with something built in-house using a large file server, several IP cameras and existing cat5 cabling.

 

A quick 2 second search on Google and a few open source CCTV systems come to the front, iSpy and ZoneMinder

 

Does anyone have any experience with regards to attempting this project, looking for any pro's (have several cons already), recommendations for cameras, software etc.

 

Thanks in advance for any assistance

Andrew

 

PS - please move if this isn't the right forum, maybe Enterprise Software instead?

[spadam]

Havn't attempted this myself but have been very tempted to for the last few years, just isn't a priority for us..

 

I envisage the pro's being:

• Cheaper than a commercial solution
  
• Easier/cheaper to change / upgrade / add cameras or recording format in the future
  
• Great learning experience
  

[jb2201]

One thing to consider is your capability to power the cameras over PoE within your current infrastructure. Makes your life a hell of a lot easier if you can, if not it can become a pain installing PoE injectors all over your hub rooms. Last thing you want is to have to try and run power to them as well as data. Also you really should have your PoE switches UPS protected to prevent video loss if the power goes out, if they aren't already ofcourse. Edited May 21, 2014 by jb2201

[Sephiroth]

I intend to do exactly this at some point in the near future, with a beefy server controling ~30 IP cameras with ZoneMinder. I have used it in a production environment before and love it. So much so that I use it at home with my 2 cheap cameras!

 

Pros and cons off of the top of my head...

 

Pros:

- Cheap (free!)

- Easy to set up and configure

- Extremely powerful

- Extensive knowledgebase and forum support

 

Cons:

- Your responsibility if something goes wrong

- Can be picky about camera types

- Requires a little CLI work and possibly some scripting

 

Obviously this is only for zoneminder, as that is what I use and know. Other free solutions may well be better but I would strongly advise that you look into it. If possible, building a machine to play with it.

 

As a side note, what kind of control are you looking for for the cameras (PTZ, Zoning, Motion Detection...)?

[plexer]

Milestone does very competitive pricing on it's smaller solutions and it's a very good system.

 

Ben

[johnat1121]

I have a setup using Ispy with old HP Ultra Slims in the roof connected to HD webcams and they just run Ispy server these all stream back to a rack-mount server it was about 1/15 of the cost of getting it done professional and the quality is 720p which is great. However Ispy is very very harsh on CPU utilization doing the h.264 encoding below is a screenshots of the quality i am using mostly Logitech C270s and they just slip from underneath the celine tile.

[FN-GM]

Milestone does very competitive pricing on it's smaller solutions and it's a very good system.

 

Ben

 

We use it, excellent product!

[AJWhite1970]

Thanks for all the feedback thus far, very useful.

 

With regards to cameras, I would guestimate about 10 external fixed focus cameras (potentially with night sight) and 6 internal cameras for some corridors, either traditional or dome.

 

Would be looking to store video for about 14 days (so I need to run the calculator on the massive disk storage required for that lot) and a simple front end that site team can use (preferably browser based rather than installed client).

 

I'll add this lot to my summer list...

 

Cheers

Andrew

[fairm010]

I use iSpy to record on motion detect in the server room and in the IT office. Works a treat!

[plexer]

I can't remember the number of cameras now but it was more than 16 and saving data for about 4 weeks our storage was a 2TB drive as it only records on motion.

 

If you want to record usable pictures at night you are either going to have to buy very expensive cameras with power IR light coverage or put in PIR floodlights.

 

Storage Calculator (MPEG4) - Milestonesys.com

 

Ben

[has]

I recently upgraded analog to ip cameras at home. Bought 7 Hikvision bullet and 1 dome. They are day and night with excellent picture. Also using hikvision pcnvr software for controlling them. You can get vilest software for computers and apple app for it.

[mdench]

+1 for zone minder here!!

 

We have recently just upgraded the server its sat on to a HP DL380P Gen8 with the additional HDD Bays in the front. Will double check the specs but running dual 8 core procs (36 cores in total) and 96GB Ram 146GB mirrored disks for the OS and then rest are 1TB disks giving 20TB in storage

 

We have 47 cameras running off of this which are a mix of Vivotek Cameras both indoor and outdoor. Can get model numbers if your interested but they are really good quality cameras and giving a very nice image quality.

 

Required a little of playing around with at the beginning to get everything right so that it ran properly with any errors. We are going through a building expansion and plan of the plan will probably be to buy another of these units with a load of new Vivotek cameras and split them into an external / internal servers

 

The web interface is easy to use, we have trained our Lead Pastoral staff in how to use it if they need to check up on an incident and allows them to download the videos if need be.

[Boredguy]

We're using Genius Vision NVR installed onto a old clipbank server (Core 2 Duo processor and XP OS) and have 9 internal PoE CCTV cameras running though it without much issue.

 

We have been buying very cheap Topica cameras and it copes with them, along with a D-Link and some Panasonic ones to.

Software can be accessed from other stations via the remote console and it's reasonably user friendly but I might look into that Zone Minder now

[Sephiroth]

We have recently just upgraded the server its sat on to a HP DL380P Gen8 with the additional HDD Bays in the front. Will double check the specs but running dual 8 core procs (36 cores in total) and 96GB Ram 146GB mirrored disks for the OS and then rest are 1TB disks giving 20TB in storage

 

Do you use any of the advanced features, such as motion detection or zone monitoring? Just wondering as I know that if using modect or similar settings, it runs 3 threads to analyse the footage. What kind of resolution are you recording in and how much space do you use?

 

(Forgive the interrogation, I'm just curious as a CCTV server is something that I intend to look into when I have some budget again!)

[Simcfc73]

We have been running iCatcher for years. I know its not free but the motion capture is really useful and saves loads on disk space. We pay support of about £300 annum.

 

We have 2 servers, a ML 115 running 15 cameras and A Fujitsu X server running 7. All camera are Axis ones, a lot of the 206's have gone now and am using ML111s.

[m25man]

Do take a look at the new Uniquiti Airvision Pro range.

This is set to upset and disrupt the market in much the same way as Unifi has done in the wifi sector.

 

It's been a longtime coming but now its here I think we will see a lot more of it.

[MordyT]

Why build your own... You can buy a DVR box that will do 16 cameras for under $150. Throw a 2 TB HDD in there for another $100 and the DVR part if done.

 

I use to build them using Digivue (EYESPY), which was a $400 card for the box and only did 9 streams at that point.

[rob_coles]

We've used http://www.acti.com/product/detail/Video_Management_System/NVR_V3 free for less than 16 cams. it's just sat on an old server.

 

And various acti cams.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

We've used http://www.acti.com/product/detail/Video_Management_System/NVR_V3 free for less than 16 cams. it's just sat on an old server.

 

And various acti cams.

[Easy_506]

I'm doing the same project this week during half-term. We had a handful of D-Link IP cameras a couple of years ago, but no PoE switches to power them (so each one had a power block) and they ended up causing the old cat5 network to slow down to a crawl.

 

What we now have is a much more robust network with fibre links between each cab and the core. I've taken the old cctv 'server' (that resembled more of a high-end gaming machine - NOTE your CCTV server does not require a £300+ NVidia graphics card) and rebuilt it into a fileserver with an i7 processor. Highly recommend WD Red HDD's. We've currently got 2 x 2tb that record 11 cameras archiving for one week. We've gone for the Milestone Pro software to manage the cameras, and am happy to say it hasn't let us down yet. I will add though - the only reason I rebuilt the server was because it was sat there full of usable parts. If starting afresh, I would keep costs to a minimum and purchase a DVR box. Much simpler and cheaper.

 

I think we've learnt a lesson that D-Link, whilst solid kit, is overpriced compared to other options out there. The other problem we experienced was with the D-Link software bundle. I found it to be unstable and buggy, especially when trying to configure cameras or maintain connections. And attempts at getting support were painful and fruitless.

 

As the Milestone license allows for more cameras I've also just ordered eight Hikvision fixed dome cameras. I cannot recommend Hikvision enough. At around £100 per camera the quality is excellent - particularly good for picking out faces in crowded corridors. Another plus-point is that Hikvision cameras use Sony CCDs which are noticeably better than other alternatives.

 

For further info/advice I can highly recommend speaking to Stacey at CCTV Direct, and Phil at Use-IP Ltd.

[Oaktech]

We use a home brew server with a quad core xeon 8gb ram and a software raid of 3 3tb disks and a single 160gb for OS. We run server 2008r2 and LuxRiot (which costs about £1000 for unlimited use) and a whole load of other IP cameras. We don't exploit nearly all the software features!

 

We like luxriot because it is simple and quite cheap and is not picky about cameras.

 

Originally it was built for us by Prime Digital but they proved to be unreliable and untidy so we waited out our contract and then we took over looking after it ourselves.

[steveg]

Might be worth looking at some of the mid range NAS's that you can get - the synology one that we've just put in for additional backups has a lot of options for supporting CCTV cameras, might be a much quicker and easier way to set it up - all done through the web interface. Not sure how much extra the licences are, but the RS2414+ box we have supports up to 35 cameras when the licences are added.

 

Steve

[synaesthesia]

We've gone through the motions. iSpy was damn demanding on CPU so that was written off, it couldn't cope with 5 cameras on a core i3. We plumped for buying BlueIris in the end which was more than capable and have been using that since. Very cheap too.

We looked at the CCTV licenses for our Synology box but DAMN it's expensive. Far cheaper to buy a beast of a server, buy software of your choice and DIY it!

 

I use zoneminder for home CCTV. That works rather well although not exactly easy/intuitive by any means. Wouldn't recommend it for multiple cameras.

Edited May 29, 2014 by synaesthesia

[RobFuller]

I would recommend Axis hands down for cameras, they are of rock solid build quality and reliability and the feature set is brilliant, expensive but worth the extra IMHO. We use a QNAP QVR for the recording side of things which have also been very good and easy to use set and forget appliance. The latest software version 5 is a big improvement over the old.

 

Another thing the Axis and also Mobotix cameras do is edge recording to SD card, SD cards are cheap these days and although you'll spend more on the camera it will save having large RAID arrays for storage.

 

I can also recommend the 360 degree hemispheric cameras, we have replaced some wall mount dome cameras for these in low ceiling corridors and they have been amazing, no where for the offender to hide plus they look very much like smoke alarms so very inconspicuous.

 

Outside I've used Raymax Infra-red LED illuminators, they are the best and can be PoE powered and even controlled if you like that sort of thing!

[JRowley]

Do take a look at the new Ubiquiti Airvision Pro range.

This is set to upset and disrupt the market in much the same way as Unifi has done in the wifi sector.

 

It's been a longtime coming but now its here I think we will see a lot more of it.

 

A link for those who are curious, I have no experience with the product myself but if the school required one I would probably push for this. airVision | Ubiquiti Networks, Inc.

[Ephelyon]

Just as a side note if anyone is using AirVision, I've today managed to get the web interface working properly with IE11 if anyone has been having issues with that.