Cctv Dvr Capture Card

[fawlty99]

Possibly the wrong forum but I'm looking at PC based CCTV system using a DVR capture card. There's lots of DVR card options available but precious little info on any of them. They range from very cheap ebay cards to more expensive items from Geovision etc. In between we have offerings from Swann and GoVideo. Has anyone some practical advice on which way to go with regards to features, hardware stability and software?

A standalone PVR would be better of course but this installation is for home surveillance only and I have a spare PC lying around which would be dedicated to CCTV.

Thanks.

[Public Image Ltd]

A standalone PVR would be better of course but this installation is for home surveillance only and I have a spare PC lying around which would be dedicated to CCTV.

Apart from that, almost no PVRs have AV inputs and, when they do, it tends to be for pass-through rather than for recording. A second nice-to-have but impossibly hard to find feature would be the ability to trigger recording from an IR sensor signal (saves you wading through loads of nothing happening). As far as I can tell, most consumer systems are still VCR-based, and I too would be very interested to hear more about how people have done this digitally.

[DrP]

If you are going to do this sort of thing with a PC, it'd be best to use either a MPEG4 ASP type capture card or just a generic analogue capture device and do the compression in software. The second option may be better as there are heaps of capture applications out there, most of which can be operated via the command line.

[Mcrackn]

I can post up some info when I get home, I'm already doing this.