It's been a while since I posted anything. With this post, I'm finally going a different direction than my usual rants. This is the first posting for a new topic group I'm creating called "Projects". This project is to created a system that can monitor several security cameras in and around my house. Please "read more"...

A couple of years ago I invested in some cameras and a quad-input DVR from Costco. The brand name on these was Q-See. The cameras mostly work ok. I've had some trouble, but I think that's because I haven't properly waterproofed the electrical connections on the cameras. The DVR works, but that's about all I can say for it. The user interface is horrid. Trying to access a particular time in the recording is time consuming and error prone. The manual says the disk format is proprietary and cannot be read in a Windows or Linux machine. I haven't verified this, but don't really care at this point as I'm going to reuse the hard disk and retire the system.

When I bought it, I was only going to use it for a while and replace it with something more open and perhaps accessible remotely. It took longer than I anticipated, but when I finally stumbled across the open source project called Zoneminder, I knew I'd found what I wanted.

So now I've finally started the project. Today I purchased a few new toys to build the system. First, I needed a video capture card. I wanted to be able to hook up my existing four cameras, and still have room for expansion. After doing some research, it seems you pretty much get what you pay for as far as capture cards. The really cheap ones consume a lot of CPU resources and have low frame rates. There are quite a few on the market that only support Windows. Why someone would want to run a video security system on an unstable platform like Windows is beyond me. The one I finally settled on is much more expensive than I'd hoped, but I have more confidence it will work well. I bought the Ituner Spectra 8 card with the expansion bracket that bumps the number of inputs to eight cameras (at the expense of a slower frame rate).

Now I needed a system to put it in. Since I wanted a rather small dedicated system to handle this, I settled on a Mini-ITX motherboard. I chose the VIA EPIA CN13000. I don't know yet if 1.3 GHz will be overkill or be too slow. I suspect it will be ok. I ordered 1GB of RAM, since I know the system will probably be memory intensive. If the system isn't taxed too heavily, I'll probably use it as my home automation controller (which is another project) rather than build a second box for that.

For storage, I bought a 250GB Western Digital SATA hard drive for $89.99(!) That should be plenty of space to archive video.

The last thing I needed was a case to put it all in. I chose the Venus 668B. This is a small case that reminds me of the Shuttle computer cases.

As for the operating system, I may initially put one of the Fedora Core with Zoneminder images that are already available. Eventually, though, I would like to make my own system built around Gentoo Linux.

Well, that's it for now. Now I just have to wait for all the stuff to come in and I can start putting it together!

You can read the next installment of this project by clicking here.