[wplug] Security System?

[Eric Cooper]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 11:26:32AM -0400, Rob Knapp wrote:
> [...]
> Any one know of existing solutions that would help me?  I've rigged
> up something similar using 1 webcam and motion to provide a motion
> activated feed.  That's a nice solution since it can do a timestamp,
> however I'm not sure if it would be possible to have three instances
> running, each capturing from a different camera.

It is possible; you can use "motion -c ..." to specify separate
config files with different video devices.

> It looks like I"m going to need 3 tv cards (one for each camera), a
> big HD (160GB), and some way to get the video off the computer
> (DVD-R or something).

A cheaper alternative may be to use a 4:1 video mux (google for "video
quad mux"), if the resolution is sufficient.  This takes 4 analog
video sources and produces 1 analog output with 4 quadrants, which you
then digitize on your computer.

> Will I need to upgrade the CPU?  (I _think_ it depends on the card I
> get... if the card does the MPEG on-board, I should be fine... if it
> offloads it to the cpu, then I'd need a bigger CPU.)  Also, we'll
> need some kind of ventilated enclosure so that someone couldn't just
> break in and walk off with the CPU.

I'm using the quad mux approach on an old 400MHz PII with a vanilla
bttv tuner card; it works fine.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u