[wellylug] Video Capture device

Wood Brent pcreso at pcreso.com
Tue Sep 28 15:42:29 NZST 2004


> > Anyway, what I want to know is, with these 4 capture devices, work wants
> > to use them for Video Surveillance,  


A comment on the overall application rather than the particular technique....


Summat I used for that sort of application was a Dlink camera, which acts as an
ftp client so each camera can ftp frames/images at user defined intervals to
any specified/connected ftp server. Other brands have some wot do the same
thing... I'm just familiar with Dlink.

(The bundled Windows app allowed you to watch up to 16 cameras simultaneously,
in a 4x4 regime on screen, with streaming video in each, but this wasn't that
relevant in this application)

For the captured & stored images, the files were saved with a name as timestamp
on a Linux PC, automagically by the camera. 2 sec intervals was fine in this
case.

I had a script using ImageMagick to write the timestamp into each image, also
compress each image to save space. (the particular situation didn't require a
lot of detail in the images- just used for vehicle counting).

Also pretty simple to have a cron job merge the images as frames into an mpeg
for a daily animation per camera.

As each camera has a built in web-server, you could also connect with a browser
to view the camera live or configure it.

For some security surveillance operations, streaming video is a massive
overkill, both in data volume & bandwidth to support it. Depends what is
appropriate... just figured to let you know of another approach, poss more
suited to several cameras concurrently.


Cheers,

  Brent




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