Posted: 8/4/2016 12:00:15 PM EDT
 
Yesterday between noon and 6pm, someone stole our 2 month old front porch chairs. Scary part is wife was home. When we put them out front in June we both wondered how long they would last. I had a 10% chance in my head... welp it came true. I drove all the streets within 1/4mi of our house looking to see if whomever did it was still cruising the neighborhood... no joy. All our neighbors are solid too so not suspect of them. Have you seen us? Missing from Chandler, AZ Ave/Warner area. 
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Quoted: Keep an eye out for "landscaping" trucks and follow them to wherever they ultimately take their shit.  Some guys in a work truck stole the AC unit from the vacant house next to me. The same week it had been making a lot of noise so it made sense someone came to fix it.. only that was just coincidental timing.. I should have taken pics of them and their truck. At least that house had been vacant for months, stealing your camn chairs when your home... that is another level far too bold. |
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Don't get a big box store security camera system. They're shit and don't hold up well in the heat. Our old place had an old analog system that did its job. The new setup we're doing will all be IP digital, PoE CAT6. Look into Hikvision cameras. They're pretty cheap and pipe the megapixels back to a NVR.
Look for natural choke points and try to set some at the edge of the yard with views up and down the street. Getting a license plate is a 100x better than a good picture of their ugly face. Keep the install discreet. In our planned setup, we're doing 32 cameras and piping it to two 4K Wall mounted TV's. Our place is pretty remote and covers a good size area. So we're doing longish conduit runs buried in the yard to key areas. Go around your house with your phone and take pictures from proposed placements. Guess at what zoom you'll actually have. There are online calculators that will overlay common lens field of views over satellite photos of your property. Then start thinking how you would get the CAT6 to that location. Record 24/7, do not rely on what the system perceives as motion for trigger events. Many events we caught took place before or after what would have been. A motion event. If the NVR has 8 hard drive bays, get 8 of the biggest drives. If you can't afford them all at once, come up with a long term plan to add more. The more TB's you have, the further back your records will go. Two weeks of records is good, a month is better. Realize that more cameras will mean more data to store. Slap a padlock on your power panel of its outside. Get a power backup for the camera system and the monitors. Even if it only runs for 5 minutes, it'll give you some situational awareness to rescue your attackers by calling the police. You want your place to be a huge pain in the ass with lots of associated risk to rob. Most criminals are lazy fucks, so taking solid steps to deter them will prevent most from even trying. |
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Quoted:
Don't get a big box store security camera system. They're shit and don't hold up well in the heat. Our old place had an old analog system that did its job. The new setup we're doing will all be IP digital, PoE CAT6. Look into Hikvision cameras. They're pretty cheap and pipe the megapixels back to a NVR. Look for natural choke points and try to set some at the edge of the yard with views up and down the street. Getting a license plate is a 100x better than a good picture of their ugly face. Keep the install discreet. In our planned setup, we're doing 32 cameras and piping it to two 4K Wall mounted TV's. Our place is pretty remote and covers a good size area. So we're doing longish conduit runs buried in the yard to key areas. Go around your house with your phone and take pictures from proposed placements. Guess at what zoom you'll actually have. There are online calculators that will overlay common lens field of views over satellite photos of your property. Then start thinking how you would get the CAT6 to that location. Record 24/7, do not rely on what the system perceives as motion for trigger events. Many events we caught took place before or after what would have been. A motion event. If the NVR has 8 hard drive bays, get 8 of the biggest drives. If you can't afford them all at once, come up with a long term plan to add more. The more TB's you have, the further back your records will go. Two weeks of records is good, a month is better. Realize that more cameras will mean more data to store. Slap a padlock on your power panel of its outside. Get a power backup for the camera system and the monitors. Even if it only runs for 5 minutes, it'll give you some situational awareness to rescue your attackers by calling the police. You want your place to be a huge pain in the ass with lots of associated risk to rob. Most criminals are lazy fucks, so taking solid steps to deter them will prevent most from even trying. I am piece mealing one together... I just got a simple 720p wifi ip cam out the front now. I am building a NVR server that will start with 2 TB's of storage for now. I am looking at genius vision and a few other freeware software packages. I need to add 3 more outdoor wifi IP cameras for sure, one pointing from back yard to the gate(which now has a lock on it), and one from each corner of the house pointing across the front of the house(this will catch people and cars coming from each direction and meld with the front window cam providing 180+ degree FOV on the front of the house. I am going to go all wifi and it has its own network already. |
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Careful how many cameras you run through the wireless network. It'll bog down fast. Depending how many people are on that frequency/channel in your area can also cause grief. Sticking with the 720 res should keep you safe though.
Any chance you could run power to a mailbox in the front yard and stick two cameras out there pointing up and down the street? Getting them out there on the low horizontal axis will really help get plates. Yours will need all the help they can get being limited to the 720 res. You want that pixel density as close to the targets as you can get them. Usually at night, oncoming headlights wash out everything anyway. The hope is to catch them as they go by with the subdued taillights and license plate light. You should do well with the space you have. My first system was a crappy analog system with four cameras. It would store nearly two months worth of constant video on a 250gb hard drive. |
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You need to get a RING doorbell ASAP. Takes 10 minutes to install and you would have had those suckers on camera. I thought about one of those, but wife does not want one since you end up paying for cloud services. I have already built a server(from old pc parts) and got ispy NVR up and running last night on it with the IP camera I got. I will be adding 3 more outdoor cameras as well. 720p is good for closer face recognition, but I am going to have to go way higher res for the other outdoor cameras... I want to go wireless for all those too. I have a second router that will be specifically for the camera network so that it does not effect internet and other devices on my wifi. |
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Quoted: I thought about one of those, but wife does not want one since you end up paying for cloud services. I have already built a server(from old pc parts) and got ispy NVR up and running last night on it with the IP camera I got. I will be adding 3 more outdoor cameras as well. 720p is good for closer face recognition, but I am going to have to go way higher res for the other outdoor cameras... I want to go wireless for all those too. I have a second router that will be specifically for the camera network so that it does not effect internet and other devices on my wifi. Quoted: Quoted: You need to get a RING doorbell ASAP. Takes 10 minutes to install and you would have had those suckers on camera. I thought about one of those, but wife does not want one since you end up paying for cloud services. I have already built a server(from old pc parts) and got ispy NVR up and running last night on it with the IP camera I got. I will be adding 3 more outdoor cameras as well. 720p is good for closer face recognition, but I am going to have to go way higher res for the other outdoor cameras... I want to go wireless for all those too. I have a second router that will be specifically for the camera network so that it does not effect internet and other devices on my wifi. |
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I'd be all over the Ring cameras if it wasn't for that service fee for cloud storage. If they made it so the video just cached to a drive on the network, it would be far better. My internet is dogshit out here in the middle of BFE on top of the mountain. We're talking 0.6mbps Down/0.125 UP on a good day. Streaming the videos to their cloud to drive a stake into the heart of my crappy DSL.
You want 24/7 recording. Relying on the motion events is a fail. On my old system, we had a car stolen out of our driveway. It was at night, and the video wasn't very good of the perp. However, since the cameras were on constant record, we saw him drive down the street and stop at a house down the way, then he took off. We realized the car had been stolen within about an hour of it occurring, and called the cops. We showed the cops the video and pointed out that the perp went to that particular house. They went and beat on their door at 1am and got a name. Later that day, guess who went to jail for auto theft. Without that key piece of info, we would have just had our thumb in our ass. |
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Quoted:
I'd be all over the Ring cameras if it wasn't for that service fee for cloud storage. If they made it so the video just cached to a drive on the network, it would be far better. My internet is dogshit out here in the middle of BFE on top of the mountain. We're talking 0.6mbps Down/0.125 UP on a good day. Streaming the videos to their cloud to drive a stake into the heart of my crappy DSL. You want 24/7 recording. Relying on the motion events is a fail. On my old system, we had a car stolen out of our driveway. It was at night, and the video wasn't very good of the perp. However, since the cameras were on constant record, we saw him drive down the street and stop at a house down the way, then he took off. We realized the car had been stolen within about an hour of it occurring, and called the cops. We showed the cops the video and pointed out that the perp went to that particular house. They went and beat on their door at 1am and got a name. Later that day, guess who went to jail for auto theft. Without that key piece of info, we would have just had our thumb in our ass. It is a work in progress.. to do it right is not cheap. I am still figuring out my NVR softwear too and agree it needs to record 24/7... and on top of that, the PC I rebuilt does not have hardware video decoding support.. it is an older ITX system I built as a webserver and it is having issues with dropping frames and artifacting. I switched to a different codec but the file sizes are now 3x larger but it records better, but still not the best. So I need to either put new guts in it, or build a completely new system... aka more money. But I have it set to record on motion right now from 3sec before detection to 30 seconds after it ends. This is only temporary. |
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Again, it's 3 dollars a month. Quoted:
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I'd be all over the Ring cameras if it wasn't for that service fee for cloud storage. He does not have the bandwidth to do it. StrangerDanger.. most IP cameras have streaming access portals so you can tap into them for your personal NVR system. That is what I did with the TP-Link camera. I have it feeding to their cloud so I can just look. But I have my NVR computer pulling in the 720p stream for its use. I will eventually set it up as a server as well so I can get motion detection warnings and view any of my recordings from my phone or work pc. |
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Again, it's 3 dollars a month. Quoted:
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I'd be all over the Ring cameras if it wasn't for that service fee for cloud storage. Trouble is I'd want more than one. Costs pile up and the bandwidth won't handle it the uploads. Price wise, they're expensive compared to something like HIK Vision. |
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not bad for $60 wifi camera... going to tweak its positioning a little bit though. https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8781/28917155955_7ffa855c61_o.jpg Resolution is quite good. You can tell your neighbors like Christmas year round. |
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