Re: [Hampshire] Linux CCTV

On Thursday 12 Jul 2007, John Cooper wrote:
> Damian Brasher wrote:
> > I wonder if anyone can help me speed up this mini project:
> >
> > I have purchased an outside mono chrome motion activated camera -
> > from Wickes for about £35 and mounted it in a suitable place. It
> > has a scart socket; the video out. I want to capture the video
> > into an 'S' video socket located on a old Nvidia graphics card,
> > GF MX400 running Linux. Then feed the images captured every two
> > seconds to a remote server using scp. Then a website on the
> > remote server will display an image updated every two seconds and
> > archive the images for reference. It is hoped the images will
> > only be about 10-20K or less - high quality is not an issue.
> >
> > Questions are:
> >
> > How to convert scart to 'S' video?
> > The simplest way to capture an image every two seconds via the
> > graphics card using a bash script?
> >
> > TIA
> >
> > Damian
>
> I use Zoneminder with two wireless CCTVs. You can get a cheap bt878
> codec card ~£15 (Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878
> Audio Capture) and the scart in/out conversion box from ebay. ZM
> motion detection is superb and together with its filters can reduce
> the disk usage to a minimum.
>
> I normally compile zoneminder from source but have just found that
> Fedora 7 yum repos have it now. My problem is the cheap cards work
> well but the image quality is poor and I can't find a better
> quality card that runs on Linux (I did get a 100fps from China ~£50
> but it completely locks up the pc after several minutes running
> ZM).
>
> John.

At my previous church we had two CCTV camera with Zone Minder using
some cheap capture cards. The frame rate was a very useful 25fps with
one camera but dropped to a clunky 7fps with two cameras due to
switching overheads in the (single chip) card. It turned out it was
far cheaper to get two 'virtual 4 channel' (one chip) cards than to
get a single 'genuine 4 channel' (4 chip) card.

ZM is now in the Debian repos as well, though I've only ever compiled
from source so I don't know how well it sorts the various config
issues.

Peter