Which External IP Camera?

[toscal]

Try in IE. If you don't have IE or prefer to use Firefox there is an IE plugin for Firefox, which I use. Its called IE Tab Plus. Very easy to use.

[ludditeal]

Hi Toscal,

I am talking about using the Cortex camera/movement detection processing rather than the built-in function on the Y-Cam.

I can set-up the movement processing on the camera using IE but I can't seem to find a sensible balance between the window for motion detection, the sensitivity and the threshold.

Cheers
Allan

[Karam]

Suggest you experiment with the settings using the stream from the example IP camera link provided in Cortex. This will help provide a feel of what to expect from a source that is 'known good'.

From personal experience I find the sensitivity grid settings have a somewhat non-linear characteristic where a weighting of 8 in areas of interest is not unusual whereas a value of 9 gives much more sensitivity than expected by a 1 point increase. I tend to put 8s in areas of interest and pretty much 0 in all other areas - but it does depend on the camera and what you are looking at. Night time images are known to be more noisy because the camera is in effect ramping up its gain and you therefore also get higher level of noise (moving speckles). You could try playing with some other parameters such as enabling the noise reduction option and changing the detection frame rate or limiting the detection colour. There may also be parameters on the camera itself which may help improve the signal to noise ratio

But ultimately IMHO unless you are doing something much more sophisticated like analysing for specific shapes or other such markers in the images, standard camera motion detection is more than liable to give false positives and you have to compromise on the amount of captured data vs. missing something. PIRs can be used either to augment or to exclusively trigger capture, though again external ones are not exactly foolproof...

[andyh]

I'm looking for external cameras for my setup also. Much the same criteria as the first poster. I already own a Vivotek indoor IP camera which is reasonably good and seems to work fine. I have this connected up to a Synology NAS which can record the stream.

Vivotek do quite a few network cameras and have several outdoor versions. Anyone any experience of the outdoor ones or on the Vivotek cameras in general - I've not used any other make.

[network video systems]

Just to throw into the mix VideoIQ ip cameras, we have recently stated to stock these in the UK, they have been a massive hit in the US

http://www.videoiq.com/

They are probably a bit OTT for home use, but I think this could be the future, on board storage, we are already seeing more and more IP cameras with onboard storage, in the way of a SD cards, but these bad boys can store 1TB of video.

http://networkvideosystems.co.uk