Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : need advice- video surveliance

[com1usa]

I have a customer ( a construction company, ) who has recently installed security video cameras at 3 small malls that he has built and manages. Currently, the video is stored on a 500 gig harddrive on a local server physically at his corporate office.
His idea ( he did this before becoming my customer) was that every month ( which is how long it takes for the hardrive to fill up) he would then archive the video, in case the customer needs it for some reason, and then start again the next month with a clean harddrive.
You can imagine the problems... takes forever to make the backups... he has no way to really store that much data...

also he wants the customers to be able to actually log in and view the videos live, if they want, and to be able to download their own video archives, if they desire....

oh, almost forgot--- he has finished 3 other properties and wants to expand to 15 surveliance cameras!

Sounds like a web based solution may be better, with web cams... but not sure the best way to do this, that wont cost the customer thousands of dollars a month in bandwidth charges... anyone out there have any suggestions? Thanks in advance

[cristibighea]

It might be me but this sounds a bit weird... why would mall customers want to see security video recordings?

[com1usa]

no the customers are the tenants for the mall ( owned by the contractor) ... the mall TENANTS want to see the surveliance videos of their store... its a common thing

[cristibighea]

Perhaps you might be able to achieve something such as live streaming on the Internet with 1-2fps, but offering archives might require you to categorise everything and have a system built for it. Something that would probably sit on a dedicated server with a few TB of space.

[SysAdminMan]

I spent a while playing with a project called zoneminder a few years ago and was really impressed with it. I think it could probably do what you are looking for.

Matt

Just to add a bit more - we used it with Axis IP webcams and the motion detection worked quite well too. No point recording the stream all night unless something happens! :-)

[xaero]

i would check out zoneminder, and then have him colo the server somewhere. that way it has a reliable connection and LOTS of bandwidth. Then zoneminder has a pretty sweet interface that will let people log in and view one camera or many.

here is their page of screen shots

http://www.zoneminder.com/screenshots.html

i should note that with all of the feature this has it does take quite a bit of computer power for many cameras, however it has processes for each camera, so it does benifit from having a multi cpu system with LOTS of ram

[mrzippy]

If you just need backup/storage space, these guys are pretty reasonable:

http://www.bqbackup.com/

But it is not accessible via web, so your customers can't login to it directly unless you build a front-end on your own server or something...

[Jz1977]

webcamxp is also a windows solution. works well, i should test out that zoneminder. looks interesting

[B2Netsolutions|Adull]

Which solution was better? is zoneminder only linux based?

[nixwebo]

Have you looked at x10 cameras and there computer surveillance system? I have not looked to see what they have for years now, but they used to have some nice deals and cool setups.

[tulix]

It could be a hybrid system. Local system with local archiving and live video over the Internet (thera are bunch of such systems in Fry's, for example). Then weekly, monthly or daily all data could be tranferred, converted and become available from a hosting company which focused on such type of services. Something like video sharing (with login and passwords) highly scaleable (from storage point of view) service would be perfect for you.

[smueller]

Does your customer already have cat5/6 wiring in place for the cameras? If so, use a PC with a geovision card. They require 4 wires for video and power (so 2 can fit on a cat5/6 cable and go a pretty far distance) and 5 wires if you want sound too. Geovision supports 16 cameras (with audio) in 1 card and all data can be easily sent over the internet live or archived to backup. Live streams are very high quality with even a cable modem's typical poor upload speeds when using h264.