Home CCTV

Sorry about the multitude of posts lately folks. But, as I am getting my first house, all the things I have wanted to do (e.g. home cinema room etc) are coming to the forefront of my mind.

One of the things I wanted to do was also have a home cctv system. mostly for around my premises. So I am looking some ideas if you wouldn't mind?

What I would like the system to do:

Ideally, I would like it to record around my premises during the day and night. If there is an issue (e.g. movement) then it would message me or similar and I could log in on my phone and computer to have a look). I would also like it to have good quality. E.g. FullHD.

In terms of storage for cameras: I have the Synology DS2415+ 12 Bay. It has in built software for a home CCTV system. I am unsure how good it is though? Or if it would be enough for the job?

Cameras: They would need to be decent quality (FullHD?), good images at night time (infrared?), water/weather proof and wifi enabled to ease installation? Although if it needs a power lead then an ethernet lead wouldn't add much more hassle!
I liked the idea of having one at my door which also has a screen on the inside so you can see who is calling?

Locations (so far anyway,):

Front of house (driveway), Front door (possibly one which has a screen inside to check before opening), both sides of house (including a side door to the house), back patio doors and garden including shed area.

So, any advice guys? I think my inner geek is coming out but it increases security and would be a cool thing to have!

All help and suggestions very welcome. Thank you.:juggle:

Mark

I've been looking on and off for a while. Similar situation and setup. DS916+ doing the storage and from what I've seen surveillance station isn't bad at all.

Hikvision cameras seem to get good reviews and are certainly in the good price-performance banding.
I've been looking at the ds-2cd2042wd-i. Put off because I've already got enough of a backlog on the DIY front, the last thing I need is more stuff waiting in the 'to-do' pile!

I think the first thing you need to decide is what you're doing this FOR?

Some options, and they're just my categories, are

1) Visible scumbag deterrent
2) Toy for your inner geek
3) If need-be, police "intelligence" standard
4) Use in court if burgled, etc.

I probably ought to clarify use 3 and 4.

There are some hoops you will need to jump through for court use, and I don't remember the details, but I think it included that the video captured is clear enough for identification purposes AND evidence of a specific event, I.e. can clearly be attributed to date and time.

Category 3 comss about if it gives police useful information, but not good enough to be admitted as actual evidence. It might, for instance, convince them who is responsible, but they might have to prove it another way.

As for cameras, all I remember a professional installer telling me is that a lot of home-installer cameras are .... well, he said he wouldn't use them because he doesn't want to be back every other week fixing problems.

My advice is if this is a cat1 or 2 thing, perhaps even cat 3, then it's up to you. But if you're siming at cat 4, do your research CAREFULLY and, IMHO, get an expert quote or two. The last system I had ran about £450 for 3 cameras, 8-channel dedicated recorder, and about £80-90 more per extra camera. That was supplied, fitted, installed and running. It should give you a yardstick, for mid-range "domestic" standard.

What to recommend depends entirely on lots of factors. You can do it cheaply, but in most cases that will result in very poor quality images that would only really tell you if *something* is there.

Motion detection is almost always rubbish and results in lots of false positives from cloud cover, car headlights, reflected cloud cover, reflected sunlight from cars, cats, birds, dogs, etc. So, this means that you need an outdoor sensor with a relay which can be wired to a sensor input on a DVR, so you can get 100% accurate alerts that contain an image of whatever broke the sensor.

Optex is the best brand for outdoor sensors. You can get PIR sensors, PIR+microwave, IR perimeter beams, window/door sensors etc and at the ultra high-end the Redscan laser series that cost several $thousand per unit.

Ganz and Concept Pro are at the low end of the professional DVR products, but they both make crap low-end stuff, and good stuff. Ganz is much better with their public firmware updates. Xtralis/Adpro is the bees knees that Audi/Porsche dealers, military bases etc have.

Wireless sensors are by often by Inovonics (1st google result). Wireless CCTV is almost never done because it's too easy to jam and snoop.

The best IP cameras are made by Mobotix and Axis.

The best IR and white lighting is made by Bosch (Aegis), and they also make some kick-ass high-end cameras.

Cameras with built-in IR are usually terrible, reflecting rain and triggering false positive motion alerts etc. They also attract spiders, so it's best to keep the IR/white lights away from the cameras pointed at the same scene. Cheap cameras with built-in IR reflect the light and wash out the image.

Field of view and lighting are the biggest problems for any setup. A camera far away needs to be zoomed in to get a face, which reduces the detail. A camera giving an overview of a yard will inevitably be terrible quality. You need to combine CCTV with physical layout, for example creating choke points so that you can focus a camera on the choke point to get a good picture.

Home viewing of real-time footage is a whole other area. CCTV DVRs are usually very poorly designed and have many security bugs (ironic, I know), so I don't recommend making anything publicly accessible unless it's locked down to certain IPs or you set up a VPN to access it.

it's a big topic, and it gets expensive. Expect to spend several hundred on a DVR and many more hundreds on the cameras.

However, some people buy cheap hardware & cameras and are happy with it, despite having more bugs than professional stuff. Cheap IP cameras plus Synology Surveillance Station is a common setup, but this type of setup won't usually be able to accommodate sensor inputs (to avoid using motion detection) and can have security issues, for example UPnP [and the Mirai botnet depending on camera choice].

Don't forget to get a UPS for the cameras & DVR. Remember it's easier to power IP cameras from a PoE switch, and for outdoor cabling which is exposed to the elements, try to use UV-stabilised ethernet cables.

When I used to have a DVR & cameras(*), I had an outdoor sensor wired to the DVR sensor input, which was in turn had the relay alarm output wired to a wireless doorbell transmitter which set off a doorbell next to my bed to wake me up.

Good luck.


(*) Optex VX-402R, Concept Pro VXH264 (getting a bit old now), 2x Bosch & 3x Night Devil cameras. The only two cameras capable of recording a recognisable face were the zoomed-in Bosch cameras which had street lighting. Without lighting, *no* camera can capture a recognisable moving person - it's just a blur.

Do you still have to register CCTV and give notice about where people can obtain recordings? Or is that only commercial use?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by neonplanet40

Ideally, I would like it to record around my premises during the day and night. If there is an issue (e.g. movement) then it would message me or similar and I could log in on my phone and computer to have a look). I would also like it to have good quality. E.g. FullHD.

In terms of storage for cameras: I have the Synology DS2415+ 12 Bay. It has in built software for a home CCTV system. I am unsure how good it is though? Or if it would be enough for the job?

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The DS2415+ comes with 2 camera licenses, but you can have up to 40.

Yes, the Synology Surveillance station is good enough for home (and commercial) use.

I have a DS211 at home with one camera (more on that in a bit) and a DS213 at work with three cameras.

Quote:

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Cameras: They would need to be decent quality (FullHD?), good images at night time (infrared?), water/weather proof and wifi enabled to ease installation? Although if it needs a power lead then an ethernet lead wouldn't add much more hassle!
I liked the idea of having one at my door which also has a screen on the inside so you can see who is calling?

Locations (so far anyway,):

Front of house (driveway), Front door (possibly one which has a screen inside to check before opening), both sides of house (including a side door to the house), back patio doors and garden including shed area.

So, any advice guys? I think my inner geek is coming out but it increases security and would be a cool thing to have!

All help and suggestions very welcome. Thank you.:juggle:

Mark

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If you're going to use the DS then check the list of supported cameras first. Licenses aren't cheap (see!) so you may want to research before you cover the house in cameras.

Motion detection for all cameras is managed by the DS, recordings are kept for a week at home and a month at work.

At work I have three YCam blacks installed a long time ago - average day quality, good night quality. Successfully used once to incriminate a ne'er-do-well. Motion detection set 24/7 and all I have to worry about is clearing spiderwebs - make sure you can get to the cameras relatively easily.

At home I've had three Foscams; FI8905W, FI9805W and FI9900P. I should have stopped after the first one died, but I didn't. They all lasted just over a year and I'd never buy another one so long as I live. I've recently replaced it with a Hikvision DS-2CD2142FWD-I 2.8mm and I'm disappointed I didn't opt for one sooner. Quality is exceptional both night and day and their remote access app is streets ahead of Foscam's shower too. You can access the camera remotely via the Hikvision app or the DS Cam app.

In a similar situation myself.

I'm going to go for a Hikvision system with 4mp cameras. Interestingly though, even the 8 channel NVR can't actually run all 8 channels at 1080p due to insufficient bandwidth. It seems until you hit the 32 channel mark, you can only have 6 cameras running at full 1080p quality, the remaining have to be set to 720p.

I run a cheap setup using an IP camera and ZoneEdit.

It works well enough, but we get lots of videos of cats and foxes wandering past. If I turn the sensitivity down enough to skip those, then you could sneak past the camera so I stick with the false positives.

One thing I did notice, the video feed is going over a mains ethernet link and into the server running the VM. It pretty much dominates the firewall throughput graphs with a big square wave (there isn't much to pick up at night so the image compresses better). The camera has WiFi built in, but I imagine that would be really bad so I run it on cabled ethernet. Perhaps a more expensive camera would compress better, but the network traffic is not trivial.

I am in the process of moving the UPS back into the loft and will be moving the server with it. At least the server has 4 lan ports so I can split the load from the main network. I have looked into the Hikvision kit so I am taking a seat in this thread to see what happens :)

The police round here will knock and ask to check footage, my brother in law has a load of reclaimed low resolution cameras, the police knocked looking for a specific car going past at a certain time, you could hardly make out what it was but it was used with a lot of other footage as evidence that a car had passed by at that time. It assisted a tiny bit in putting the following scum away for a considerable amount of time. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...shire-35557898

Here was me hoping it was a case of: buy these four cameras, have a professional install and wire them, link them to the synology and you're good to go :p

Seems I will need a new switch as well. PoE one :)

Gonna be expensive all in. I guess I can always start small and add on over time.

Anyone know how much disk space these Hikvision 4MP cameras would use in an average week?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by neonplanet40

Anyone know how much disk space these Hikvision 4MP cameras would use in an average week?

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I had thought my home recordings were set to auto-rotate weekly but it seems they're not, for some reason I've set them to rotate when the folder size reaches 100GB

My recordings go back to 28th December '16 and I know during that time I've spent at least one weekend on the drive working on a car.

My settings are;

Record 5 secs before and after event and save video every 10min (or sooner)
Video Format - H.264
Stream 1 - 1920x1080 25FPS

Took the plunge on a Hikvision DS-2CD2342WD-I 4 mm from amazon (direct, no 3rd party)
Not quite figured out how I am going to power it yet though :)

Let us know how you get on :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by neonplanet40

Let us know how you get on :P

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Will do, probably going to put this looking at the back yard but I am now stumped on location as ideally I would put it under the soffit located on the corner of the kitchen as that is the furthest point. Only issue is it would be (almost) accessible due to the kitchen being a single story extension.

We bought a Yale system last year as some little no mark put our back window through with an air gun.

It has a small black box which can record up to 30 days and it came with 2 cameras, we have one set at the front and one overlooking the back and garage. You can set it to constant record or when it detects movement, quality is ok, not quite as good as the high def ones you see in supermarkets but you can make everything out clearly. You can add up to 4 cameras to it and one of those can be the dome style which you can move around and zoom in, you can also access the system via the Yale app on your phone and see what is going on.

Pretty good system that only cost us around £150 from Amazon