I know we've talked about this before and I promised I'd let people know what I learned once I got around to mucking with the cameras at our store.
Well, here we are.
The program we use for storing security footage is called ZoneMinder. It's free (GPL) but I have no idea what the install process is like as I'm not the one that put it in there. My brother did that, years ago, and he wasn't much of a *nix guy at that point. So, can't be too hard, and looking at their website they even have a LiveCD distribution. I assume that'll install directly to disk with minimal fuss.
Currently all of our cameras are hooked into ZoneMinder via coax cables and bt878 capture cards. The cards suck, they can only record at 6fps when you've got 4 cameras to a card, and they're prone to just crapping out, but they only cost $15-$25 a pop. I've looked at other capture cards but you're getting near $200 for anything decent, Linux support can be spotty, and you've still got a tangle of coax coming into the machine, and best I can tell you still can't get more than 16 cameras on a box going that route.
So, IP cameras it is. Got out first one in today for testing: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003LNZ1L6/
Hey, it's $58 bucks, does panning and tilting, has IR night vision (that works in a room, it's not going to light up a barn), and you can pull a 640x480 image off the thing's 0.3 megapixel camera. You can run either with wired ethernet or a WiFi connection. Hook it up wired first, wait for it to grab an address via DHCP, point your browser to that address and you can configure the WiFi if you want. Once that's done you just follow the ZoneMinder directions on how to configure it to record a Foscom camera (
http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Foscam), which isn't the brand of what I linked, but many brands conform to that standard. Probably because they're all made in the same factory and rebranded the marked up.
ZoneMinder won't control the pan/tilt functions of the camera (that I know) but you can just pop your web browser over to the camera's own webserver to control that stuff.
Now, as to the computer that's recording all of this stuff, it's just an old Pentium 4 with a 1TB-ish drive in it. The CPU does not appear to be taxed at all but I'm running a load average 1.ish on it which tells me I'm probably a bit I/O bound, but that's recording 9 streams right now.
My other brother (the non techie one that also works at the greenhouse) saw the camera and thinks he might want do a setup like that for his home. Basically just a camera to watch the driveway while he's away. With the camera being WiFi enabled I figure we can get away with tossing a barebones Atom box in a closet wired into his home router, stick 250GB of storage in there, and we're off. Should be about $150 for the PC and another $58 for each camera that he wants going. That's not as cheap as some of the stuff I see for sale off the shelf, but I think there's a benefit to not having to wire everything, and the cameras are more capable in my case.
Now, going with WiFi is going to reduce the available bandwidth on your network. Looking at the capture files I'm getting at 640x480 they're 55k each and I'm taking 8-10 per second right now. I want to get that higher, but I'm not sure why it's not capturing faster. So, that's 550k per second or half a meg, or 5Mbps in network speak. If you've got a 54Mbit WiFi network and you drop 2 cameras on there you're only left with 44Mbit. With home internet connections now starting at 18Mbps for even the cheap service adding 8 cameras to the network would start slowing down your internet connection, or getting close to it.
Of course, you could always run one network for the PCs and another for the cameras. Just drop another AP somewhere ($20-$40) and set it up on a different channel.
Or just drop the resolution. Our standard cameras that record at SD TV resolution only take 8k per frame.
But, I think this is a workable solution for both extremes. On the low end you've got no cables, not much bandwidth used, and it's pretty easy to get running if you're OK with the first step being "install this Linux LiveCD to disk." On the higher side of things I've got to deal with bandwidth, but I'll be going wired, and getting some disks with fast write capability, but at least I don't have half a mile of coax and piles of tuner cards with dubious reliability. I honestly think I can get all 40 cameras that we'll need at the new place going this way on one box. Most of them are probably going to be stupid 0.3 megapixel thingies but a few are probably going to be higher end, like 1.3-2.0 mega pixel.
One more note on storage: ZoneMinder, apparently, deletes the old stuff if you don't tell it to save it. I know that because I've never had to clear up those disks. The 1TB drive that has been recording those 8 cameras at low resolution and 6fps 24x7 have logs going back to October 5, 2011. I see some stored from dates previous, but those were most likely cases of marking video to be stored forever, as it was evidence of theft.