Difference between revisions of "Analog cameras"

Revision as of 08:09, 3 May 2010

Snapshot of an analog surveillance CAM

Most analog cameras will work with a video capture board/card. There is usually a power/connector panel to which the cameras connect in a wired solution (e.g. power-over-Ethernet), with RCA or BNC connectors for video output.

Cables connect the camera outputs to the video capture board/card, which is usually housed in the LinuxMCE Core server PC.

Examples of analog camera brands are Greyfox, Smarthome, and Lorex.

Setup

This requires an interface device. LinuxMCE includes the device Motion Wrapper, which is a wrapper for the open source project Motion. It will technically be the interface device (even though the video capture board is the hardware interface). The Motion software monitors the video capture board for you.

• In LinuxMCE Admin-->Wizard-->Devices-->Interfaces-->add device "Motion Wrapper" from the category "Surveillance Video Interfaces", then click the "Pick device template" button.
• In LinuxMCE Admin-->Wizard-->Devices-->Surveillance Cameras-->add device "Generic Analog Camera" from the category "Peripherals"-->"Surveillance Cameras" for each camera. This includes analog cameras you have connected to a video capture board, as well as USB cams and web cams. Then click the "Pick device template" button. Choose the "Controlled Via" device to be the motion wrapper.

• For each camera you will need to specify a number in the parameter "Port/Channel Number".

• If you have only one camera, put a 1.
• If you have several cameras connected to a single multi-port capture card, the number for each camera should correspond to the port number on the card.
• If you have a mixture it may require some experimenting to see which camera gets mapped to which port. For example, if you have two 4-port capture cards, and you call the 8 cameras "Cams 1-8", and 1 USB camera, which you call "Living Room cam" cam, there will be a total of 9 cameras. The order is determined by the drivers. Normally USB cameras come first. So try giving the USB camera "Living Room cam" a port 1, and then the 4 cameras on the first capture card port #2-5, and the 4 cameras on the second capture card #6-9. Later when you are viewing the cameras if you find the port numbers are incorrect you may need to re-arrange them. If, for example, you go to view the camera you called "Living Room Cam" and see that it is really showing you another camera, go back and change the port parameter until each camera is correct.