General questions

[cinnman]

Hi. I have been reading up on video systems to learn more in order to help my friends (and yes I am a retired, part time kinda techie nerd with nothing better to do). After finding vitamin D and reading about it, I downloaded and set it up. I have it working nicely with a usb camera (very nice program and works excellent), but I have a home security camera system with 4 analog cameras feeding into a DVR that I can monitor over the network or internet (the dvr is QSee QSD9004v and I have access through a local ip 192.168.1.100:81 media port 9000 and it is connected with cat5 to a gigabit linksys vpn router).

I have been unable to figure out how to connect the network video stream to the vitamin D program. Is this possible?
My other questions are: Can vitamin D be used to monitor multiple camera feeds at the same time or is it only possible to use it on one (iP) camera at a time. This I ask since my friends want to set up an ip system with 4 cams and a dedicated video server for a commercial location and your program seems to be perfect for them. Also if we help them set up a computer based video server can multiple cameras be monitored through vitamin D on the video server and what effect does higher (2 megapixel up to 1600x1200) resolution video streams have on the effectiveness of your program?

Thanks very much for any information that you can provide me with. I do enjoy investigating the technology for what I can learn.

[cinnman]

Well with time to read, I got most of the information except the stream path of the video coming out of my DVR which I have requested information about from the manuf. Interestingly, I can see the video from at least 3 different monitoring programs, but just can't seem to hit the exact link that lets me bring it into VitD.

The full version of the program should work very well for my friends situation, but I do want to explore some more before advising them to buy, and sinceI don't have an ip cam available to me right now, I really want to see if I can use the video stream from my home system.

Ron

[ryan]

Hi Cinnman,

I tried searching for a bit and couldn't find access information for your DVR. My assumption is that it isn't compatible with VDV. DVRs like this typically save all their video locally and allow you to later export specific clips. Vitamin D Video would need direct access to the camera feeds, something rarely exposed in these types of devices. What other programs are you using to access it, and with what sort of address?

To answer your question about recording at high resolutions (1600x1200), The effectiveness of VDV will remain, presuming the machine running it on has the processing power to handle it. 1600x1200 requires significantly more computation to decode and encode (640x320/VGA video has 204,800 pixels, 1600x1200 has 1,920,000) and more disk space to store the same amount of video. Aside from the computer itself, you'll need to think about network bandwidth in those situations. A number of cameras streaming at 1600x1200 over wifi can quickly saturate the network, you'd want to use a wired connection if possible.

Hope that helps! Let us know if you have any other questions.

[cinnman]

Thanks Ryan,
I am still trying to mess with it a bit, but it is of pretty low importance. For the ip cam system for my friend, it is all wired with very high bandwidth so it shouldn't be a problem except for the processing on the local machine.