CCTV help

[Simon Waterfall Syman84]

Well for the second time in a fortnight we have the drunken T@"Ts running down the road and up and over every car and we now have two damaged cars from last nights. 

 

So help required c£300 ish for a decent CCTV system that can record for a decent period of time say 28 days the re write over. 2-4 cameras not really a fan of paying a subscription so stand alone system if possible.

 

many thanks  

[TableLeg]

Maybe have a read through these....

 

 

 

[cast iron]

we use the nest system, plug and play if you have home wifi

[Blatman]

Suffered an attempted break in recently. When SOCO arrived I asked what we could do to protect the property and environs. His answer was that most scallys wear hoodies because they're expecting to be on camera. This news was disappointing on many levels...

[Man On The Clapham Omnibus]

Cameras are usually mounted too high up, and wearing hoods only exacerbates the problem of identification of intruders. A low mounted (concealed) set of cameras might be better. Easier said than done of course. Deterrence is always better than detection, and detection better than pictures of the crime after the event. Difficult problem - maybe transportation to the colonies... 

[Lyonspride]

My vote would be on an old PC tower running Contacam (free software with motion detection) and then a nice cheap 1080p ONVIF IP camera.

 

PC=£100, camera £40.

From my £28, 720p camera on the front of my house


 

I work on high end CCTV stuff all day, most of it is no better than the cheap stuff available from China, even the stuff that retails for £5K plus per camera and £20k + for a DVR

 

[Blatman]

I agree with pressing an old PC or an eBay tower server into service although this alone could blow the budget BUT a fast processor and lots of RAM are worth having along with large HDD's. I recently bought something similar to this (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-T320-Tower-Server-Intel-Xeon-E5-2403-v2-1-8GHz-32GB-RAM-No-HDD/382969770785?hash=item592ac6f321:g:aXIAAOSwTGRc535h) for myself to use as a desktop and it's terrific!

 

Then use the free Milestone XProtect Essential Plus software and and pick any camera from their VAST list of compatible items. 

https://www.milestonesys.com/solutions/platform/try-our-software/

Milestone are owned by Canon so no question about quality. We install Milestone NVR's and Axis cameras all the time because they work, they're easy to set up and they are reliable.

[pistonbroke]

Heard numerous stories of folk being robbed who have CCTV evidence,  when presented to the police they get told " very sorry but we do not have the resources to follow this up, here's your crime number for the insurance claim " 

One case in particular was the theft of a £ 2500 outboard motor from a friends boat who had clear CCTV footage of the culprits plus the tools they had used for the job and left behind , same reply from Mr Plod " not enough resources " 

In other words , don't wast our time , we are much to busy collecting revenue from proper criminals 

[MrPid]

Its an interesting point. I have cctv at my house, as does my neighbour. Stand alone system which runs off the internal wifi and is extended down to the garage where the Westfield lives.

 

More than that I have two big steel beams that sit on brackets behind the garage door when lowered which prevents any opening at all from the outside.

 

The biggest question would be - what would you do to stop someone stealing something from your drive? Or should I say - What could you (safely) do or be allowed to do to prevent someone stealing from your drive, without you being accused of using excessive force etc etc.....

 

These days it appears you're damned if you do, and your damned if you dont! 😞 

[Man On The Clapham Omnibus]

1 hour ago, pistonbroke said:

Heard numerous stories of folk being robbed who have CCTV evidence,  when presented to the police they get told " very sorry but we do not have the resources to follow this up, here's your crime number for the insurance claim " 

One case in particular was the theft of a £ 2500 outboard motor from a friends boat who had clear CCTV footage of the culprits plus the tools they had used for the job and left behind , same reply from Mr Plod " not enough resources " 

In other words , don't wast our time , we are much to busy collecting revenue from proper criminals 

 

An appalling state of affairs, Bernie, and one that should not go unchallenged. While they turn out mob-handed for RTAs when, once assessed, a couple of people would do, I would not accept that attitude without a bl**** good go at them. At least a complaint to my MP (for what good that would do when he's David Lidington), and letters to the local press. I do not subscribe to Facebook, but I think I might open an account for the purpose of slagging the constabulary on their page.

[dhutch]

Sadly as said, CCTV is as much for your interest than catching people as far as I can see. We've not got any, although I am tempted by a £40 ip camera of my synology box for being nosey. 

 

At work we had some batteries nicked, big lead acid, about twenty in plain daylight. Good pictures and the police did come and look at them and look about but it came to nothing and wasn't worth a claim. 

 

Daniel

 

 

[Blatman]

8 hours ago, MrPid said:

without you being accused of using excessive force etc etc.....

 

Being accused of excessive force is one thing. Being found guilty of it is entirely another. There are plenty of stories out there in the press of people defending their property "vigorously" and despite protestations by the crooks (who have everything to gain by throwing accusations of course) it is rare for the innocent to even see the inside of the local police station, let a lone a court...

[TableLeg]

On 02/07/2019 at 13:52, Lyonspride said:

My vote would be on an old PC tower running Contacam (free software with motion detection) and then a nice cheap 1080p ONVIF IP camera.

 

PC=£100

 

On 02/07/2019 at 22:47, Blatman said:

I agree with pressing an old PC or an eBay tower server into service although this alone could blow the budget BUT a fast processor and lots of RAM are worth having along with large HDD's.

 

A question to both of you, what PC specs would be needed to run one of these free software packages with say 4 cameras?

[Lyonspride]

3 hours ago, TableLeg said:

 

 

A question to both of you, what PC specs would be needed to run one of these free software packages with say 4 cameras?

I'm running 4 cameras with the Contacam software, on an IBM T420 laptop, with core i5 and 8GB of RAM, the same machine also runs an FTP (filezilla) server, an OpenVPN server, a http server, FreeSSHD, a proxy server, Domoticz home automation server, as well as being used daily for light browsing/etc. With Contacam you want around 2GB per camera for seamless simultaneous recording.

As for recommending a tower PC for this, I recenty got a slim form factor Dell Optiplex 980 with slighty better specs for £145, for use as a dedicated server box.

[TableLeg]

3 hours ago, Lyonspride said:

I'm running 4 cameras with the Contacam software, on an IBM T420 laptop, with core i5 and 8GB of RAM, the same machine also runs an FTP (filezilla) server, an OpenVPN server, a http server, FreeSSHD, a proxy server, Domoticz home automation server, as well as being used daily for light browsing/etc. With Contacam you want around 2GB per camera for seamless simultaneous recording.

As for recommending a tower PC for this, I recenty got a slim form factor Dell Optiplex 980 with slighty better specs for £145, for use as a dedicated server box.

Thanks for the info.

 

So I guess an older home PC probably wouldn't have a good enough spec then. I have a few old AMD Pc's but no more than about 4gb of ram, although I would only be looking to run it for CCTV.