I have been wondering about getting web camera so that I can check the status of the inside of my house when I am away.
One product that I have found is a Trendnet TV-IP862IC.
Does anyone have any experience of these devices which they can share?
Doesn't that mean you have to leave the camera (or its power supply) and your internet connection (and maybe routers etc too) on? Are you happy to have all these extra fire risks on when away?
I would have thought the danger of fire from an IP camera was negligible by comparison with the probability of someone breaking into a property.
Do you switch off the electricity supply when you go on holiday? What about fridges, house alarms, etc?
The router is left on anyway as it allows me to monitor temperatures and the status of the central heating system.
I try to ensure that these devices have good cooling.
I have one of these
which look remarkabley similar.
It works fine on a PC W7 but not on a mac something to do with the java li brary not installing due to security. The camera has a speaker and mic. It runs fine on an ipad3 and ipod 3rd gen. On the ipad/ipod you can detect sound and temperature which sends an alart to the ipad. The RSPCA now have a higher res one on offer £150 I think, and an outdoor version.
You get access the the monitorsite which is how you access the camera you c an have up to 4 cameras.
I switch off everything that's inessential.
On the whole I trust large appliances, house alarm etc - because I'd expect them always to have been designed for long-term continuous operation. It's penny-pinching wall-warts that worry me more.
I will have in about a week - have a D-Link DCS-2210 fixed indoor camera on order.
What?
Do you turn every last device off when you leave the house?
I do agree in not leaving certain things running, like tumble driers unattended - but what I do is make sure my computers, routers etc are installed nicely and will not get buried under papers and crud - and I hoover them to remove dust periodically.
I just keep mine away from stuff that is trivially combustible. As opposed to combustible like the wooden shelves they are sitting on.
Only this lunchtime, there was an illustration of that. A chap whose house had been burgled once fitted cameras front and back of his house and in every room. They showed the very clear footage of a fellow breaking in, and everything he did inside the house. He though he was very smart - he wore gloves, and covered his feet with those blue plastic jobbies the SOCOs wear - but not a hood. The Police had all the evidence they needed to arrest someone of whom they already knew, and in no time at all.
Sadly everything these days has a dodgy looking wall wart.
I preferred the days when everything had a laminated iron transformer as being the first and only thing on the mains (apart from a switch maybe). I have never seen one of those go bang, unlike:
The best mitigation is to arrage things so when it does smoke, that it is unlikely to set anything else on fire in the immediate vicinity.
Assuming decent quality, I'd not expect the risk to be very great at all. Probably about as much as being struck by lightening. Brian
Use PoE and have one dodgy 48V wall wart then.
In message , Michael Chare writes
I have been running a Tenvis JPT3815W and a Foscam 8918 IP camera here since June. The Foscam is borrowed from one son, the Tenvis was bought on ebay for about £25. The aim is to run them in other son's house when he isn't there.
The Foscam has switcheable infra red leds, the Tenvis ones are on permanently when it goes dark. The resolution is different on the 2 cameras. Neither are very high resolution, but I think they are good enough. I run them into iSpy on a W7 machine, the aim being to log into that machine remotely from time to time for a look, and rely on the email and sms alarm functions as a sort of primitive alarm system. I have not yet set this part up, having concentrated on checking reliability and setting up the recording functions. iSpy records into a cache, so you usually see the event that triggered the recording. I have also spent ages and ages trying to get ZoneMinder to function well on Linux Mint. It works, and ought to be very close to what I want, but I'm bogged down with error messages. Google reveals that the standard approach is just to suppress the messages.
I just went for the cheapest cameras that had wpa security.
Running 24/7 since June, I have had a couple of times had to reset the Tenvis camera, and iSpy has crashed just once. Both companies run forums
You have to power the cameras, I just chose PoE and run a network cable.
I have busted the limits google let me have for storing the recordings so I have just ordered a cheap (
Are they syslog errors about the JPG format being iffy ? You can build your own version of the graphics library (libturbojpg IIRC) which fixes it. You just need to make sure you tell your system to use it in future, otherwise the symlinks get overwritten everytime you update the graphics libraries.
The messages are: Corrupt jpeg data:2 extraneous bytes before marker 0xd9 or Corrupt jpeg data:1 extraneous bytes before marker 0xd9
in file zm_jpeg.cpp
I've tried all the workarounds I've seen via google
I'm not sure that I'm up to rebuilding a graphics library.
:-)
can you type
./configure make sudo make install
???
if so you can rebuild a graphics library.
The key is to find someone to tell you which file to edit first and what to change it to..
It's a piece of crap and is being returned under the DSR (whatever...).
It has a god awful 1990s web interface which asks for authentication credentials in a random way.
The video stream does not play under firefox or opera on linux.
It's also too narrow a field of view for my needs, though that's not a "fault" as such.
I did manage to hack the right URL to feed into vlc and that played. But it was damn laggy (stand in front of camera, several seconds later my fizzog appeared on the screen).
Picture quality was not good and the night illumination LED was poor.
OK it was on the cheaper end, but it performed like I would expect a £20 ebay noname chinese bit of tat to work, not a branded device costing £146.
Time to start the search again.
Yup, that's them.
AIR it wasn't too difficult to download and build the library. It's not a bad idea anyway, since it's supposed to offer quite a performance increase. From memory, download the source (synaptic is your friend) and then unpack, and it's 3 commands:
./configure ./make ./sudo make install
However I vaguely recall you need to ensure the symlinks for the libary now point to your version. And then every system update will overwrite the symlinks. There are ways to prevent this (ISTR the ldd tool mentioned).
That said the errors you're seeing don't stop Zoneminder from working.
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