Busy Playing Games
27th of May, 2008
For the past couple of days I've been involved in setting up a surveillance system at a client's premises. It's a system of wireless cameras each streaming video to a central repository.
The nice thing about it is that anything with a web browser can pull the camera feeds, so they'll end up using their mobile phones when away from the office. When they asked how they could get the feeds up onto the big-screen TV, I said they could even use a games console with a web-browser if they wanted.
When I turn up at their office I see they've bought themselves a Wii in anticipation of viewing their security footage through it. So instead of doing any work, we bowled for most of the afternoon.
So much for it being a legitimate business tool. :)
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I’d be interested in hearing more about the cameras setup…
well, the quick rundown is as follows:
They’re wireless IP cameras, with simultaneous dual codec support (meaning you can record using one codec, while viewing with a higher bandwidth one).
The cameras are always recording (if that’s what you want) but they also have motion detection at which point they begin to buffer video of that ‘event’ and will email you (or 10 of your friends) chunks of video as it’s happening, so you can react to it appropriately.
With a monitoring system in place, your alarm monitoring company can jump into your feeds either by accessing a dedicated hard-line, or over your existing internet connection, as most people don’t want to pay for dedicated links.
With the live viewing software on your pc, you can get split-screen views of live footage, with the ability to give focus to any one camera, then either rotate or zoom it depending on the capabilities of each device (casino style).
For those times when you’re not near a PC with the software installed, we set up a web-based system. For your average wide-screen medium-resolution layout, we set up a page of your 6 faviourte embeded feeds which can be viewed simultaneously (of course, any multiple of 6 is possible, with any number of additional pages).
From there, you can click through to additional pages (or “zones”), or click on the individual embeded view to see an enlarged image of what’s happening on that camera.
The individual camera view is also available via your internet-enabled mobile phone, so lets say… you’re in bed and you hear something outside, you grab your phone which is usually nearby anyway, and access the ‘favourite’ you have stored called “Back Yard - Reverse” to see your back door from the perspective of an outdoor camera hidden in a tree.
It’s certainly possible to create a closed-circuit system using these cameras, but since they’re all IP based, it works out much cheaper to set up a device which you can use to pull up a web-page on your TV, rather than buying all the technology to set up a closed-circuit system on channel 100 (for example).
So if you have a TV in your bedroom, or on the TV in the lounge, all you do is switch over to your Media Center PC, or your Wii, or whatever other console you have which gives access to a web page, and pull up your camera feeds.
I think that about covers it… If there’s anything else I can tell you, just ask :)
Thanks for the info, that sounds like a pretty cool setup. Surely it would be overkill for a domestic situation? I’ve looked into IP cameras in the past and they’re not cheap!
Certainly the started off quite expensive, but you can get them for as low as a $150 for indoor domestic use now. Those aren’t great, but if you go a couple of notches up, you can get something quite nice for a reasonable amount given that you don’t need expensive recording gear.
That’s the tradeoff… buy regular cameras, spend on recording and monitoring. Buy IP cameras, spend on the cameras, but the recording and monitoring is cheap.
Having said that, the only time I get into the domestic market is if we already have a business relationship with them, so my clients are somewhat outside of the average.