My Adventures in Home Video Surveillance

I live in a peaceful neighborhood for the most part, but like most neighborhoods, we have our share of mischievous teenagers. Recently, the neighborhood kids have started experimenting with setting off acid bombs and dry ice bombs. One of the more recent attacks took place at about 1:30 in the morning in the form of 4 acid bombs blowing up on my front doorstep.  If you’ve never heard an acid bomb go off, you can’t truly appreciate the volume that they produce. I mean to tell you, they are LOUD!

After having these things set off twice near our house, I’d had enough. I was determined to put together a decent video surveillance system and catch these hooligans. In hopes of helping others who might want to do the same thing, I decided to document my experience.

The Camera

After doing quite a bit of research, I outlined the following requirements for my camera. The camera needed to:

• Be on my network so that video could be streamed without it being plugged into a computer.
• Provide sufficient video quality to aid in identification of any individuals in my yard.
• Not look obnoxious. In other words, no big cameras mounted on the outside of the house.
• Be able to record video at night in darkness.
• Be of high-quality so that I never need to worry about it working.
• Not require wiring for the video signal. AC wiring for power was fine.

I looked into webcams that would suit these needs, but most of them required that they be hooked up to a computer. My computer is a laptop that goes with me wherever I go, so hooking the camera to a computer was a deal-breaker. Other cameras required a lot of wiring and mounting on the outside of the house, something that I really didn’t want.

After a long search, I decided to purchase a Sharx SCNC2607 camera. I wasn’t familiar with the brand (Sharx Security), but the reviews on Amazon were very good and many raved about the excellent support that Sharx Security offered. In the beginning, I was a little hesitant to spend $300 on the camera, but after using it a lot for the past week, I am so happy that I chose it.

The Sharx camera can be wired into your network by just connecting a network cable from it to your router. However, it can also join your wireless network so that you can put it anywhere. You do have to plug it into the wall for power, but that’s handled by a typical AC adapter and isn’t an issue.

You can access the video from the Sharx from just about anywhere. Naturally, you can access it from any computer on your network right from your Web browser (you just browse to http://scnc2607 on your home network and it pulls up the camera), but you can also access it from any computer on the Internet! You can also access video from your phone (any phone that has a Web browser), and there’s an iPhone/iPod touch application called Eye See U that you can buy for $1.99 that allows access on your iPhone/iPod touch from anywhere. All of this is made possible by the fact that the Sharx streams several video feeds directly from the camera, no computer necessary.

The Sharx camera has pretty powerful motion detection and alarms built in. It allows you to specify up to four rectangular regions of the screen, each with its own motion detection sensitivity and threshold settings. Using this functionality, you can usually obtain a setup that is perfect for your needs. When motion is detected, the Sharx can send a picture (or a series of pictures) to your cell phone, email, or an FTP server. This is another incredible feature of this camera because it means that most people won’t even need to add any additional software to have a complete DVR system for the camera. Even better, the Sharx does all of this without a computer whatsoever. One more really cool feature. The Sharx has a microSD card so that you can record video to a microSD card and pull it of the camera later.

While getting the camera set up, I did have a few questions. I filled out a form on the Sharx Security site and asked them to contact me. Shortly after that, I received an email that simply said, “How may we assist you?” I asked my questions and Sharx Security always answered promptly and thoroughly. In fact, they went out of their way to provide me with a ton of technical information about how to access the camera’s video stream using many different methods. Each time that I emailed them to ask more questions, they answered very quickly and were extremely friendly.

A couple of days later, I noticed that the sun was shining directly into the camera as it came up in the morning. I emailed Sharx and asked them if this would cause damage to the camera. In typical fashion, I got a response quickly and they told me that given my setup, there should be no damage. They went even further to say that if the camera does get damaged because of this, they will accept it as a learning experience that will allow them to update their documentation and that they would gladly replace my camera if damage occurs.

I cannot recommend the SCNC2607 or Sharx Security highly enough. The camera is excellent quality, and the quality of support is top-notch. Finding that combination these days is extremely rare.

The Software

As I pointed out before, the Sharx comes with software that will suit the needs of many folks, but I had some specific requirements that necessitated a more powerful software package. Here are the requirements I needed for my DVR software.

• Allow me to automatically record motion during the night.
• Allow me to specify precise areas of the video feed that should not be checked for motion because I have a lot of trees and don’t need recordings of the tree branches moving in the wind.
• Archive video footage on my Windows Home Server and allow me to easily review that footage for any events of interest.
• Run as a service on my Windows Home Server so that I don’t have to worry about whether it’s running or not.

(The Sharx SCNC2607 meets many of these needs all by itself, but I needed a bit more power in the area of motion detection masks and archival of video footage.)

The Bad

I decided to purchase a copy of Blue Iris, a software package that seemed to fit my needs. After running Blue Iris for a couple of days, I realized that my server was filling up with video files that didn’t appear to show any motion. It turns out that the trees in my front yard were blowing and setting off the motion detection, but I had masked those trees in Blue Iris. I pulled up the software and checked my motion detection masks, and I was quite surprised to see that all of my motion detection masks were gone!

I recreated my motion detection masks, clicked OK to apply those changes, and then I went right back in to check them again. Once again, they were gone. This is a pretty serious problem because the whole point of these masks is to tell the software to ignore motion in a certain part of the camera’s field of vision. For example, if you have a flag waving in the breeze, you don’t want the software to constantly record because of the flag’s motion. Instead, you want to mask out the flag and tell the software to ignore it. Blue Iris has that functionality, but it just plain didn’t work!

To work around this problem, I decided to lower the sensitivity of motion detection in Blue Iris with the hope that my trees wouldn’t set it off. After doing that, I noticed that I wasn’t getting a bunch of recordings of blowing trees, so I assumed that the workaround resolved that problem. However, after a while, I realized that I wasn’t getting any recordings at all!

I went outside and stood in front of the camera waving my hands and jumping up and down. I thought, “Surely this will set off the motion detection of Blue Iris.” I went back inside, and much to my surprise, Blue Iris hadn’t recorded a thing. Blue Iris has a feature that shows blue on the screen where it sees motion, so I turned that on. As I was watching the screen, Blue Iris showed huge blue marks indicating it was seeing motion all over, but it simply refused to record anything. In order to get it to record, I had to turn the sensitivity almost all the way up.

Blue Iris has a motion detection meter so that you can see where the motion that is detected compares to the detection sensitivity. Unfortunately, the meter doesn’t work at all when you run Blue Iris as a service, a problem that Blue Iris support admits but has no resolution for. During all of this, I also realized that the date and time that Blue Iris adds to your video footage wasn’t there anymore. I went into the settings for that and turned it back on, but Blue Iris kept removing it as soon as I looked at the properties for my camera.

Another problem I had with Blue Iris is that it would constantly lock up on my machine. The timing of this was seemingly random. Sometimes it would lock up as soon as I launched it. Other times, it would let me work in it for a while before locking up. I emailed Blue Iris tech support about this problem, but all I got back was a blank email response. Eventually, I discovered that others were having the same issue and the resolution is to disable the Watchdog feature of Blue Iris. (This feature reconnects to the camera if the connection is lost.) After disabling Watchdog, Blue Iris no longer hung, but that was yet another major feature of the software that just flat out didn’t work at all.

Finally, I was so frustrated that I decided to uninstall Blue Iris and reinstall it. I was thinking that maybe something with my install was bad. Once I uninstalled, I reinstalled it. Upon launching it, Blue Iris asked for my registration key. I entered it only to be met with a dialog box telling me that my key had already been used and that it had been deactivated. In order to use Blue Iris, I was asked to email their tech support and wait until they reset my key. (I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate this kind of thing.) I emailed Blue Iris at about 9:30 in the morning, and by 4 in the afternoon, I still hadn’t heard a word from them.

By the way, the reason my key was invalidated was because I had installed Blue Iris on my laptop in order to connect to the Blue Iris service running on my Windows Home Server machine. (That’s typically the way a client/server architecture works.) As it turns out, Blue Iris’s idea of a client/server architecture is that you must run the service and the client on the same physical computer. If you attempt to run the client on a second computer, they invalidate your registration on the original computer without telling you.

At this point, I was so frustrated that I emailed them again and politely (really) asked for a refund. A short while later, I got an email back saying “Our licensing scheme doesn’t allow us to refund your money.” I emailed back and forth with Blue Iris several other times in order to provide them with details on the problems I was having. Eventually, Ken (apparently the owner) at Blue Iris told me that he wasn’t going to refund me because his payment processing company, RegNow, would charge him $10 for refunding me. I asked again for a refund (and I was very polite with him each time), but the response I got was sarcastic and he still refused to give me my money because “the software works for most people.” Unbelievable.

Why do I go into all of this? Because I’m hoping that if you’re reading this, you won’t make the same mistake I did and buy Blue Iris software. It’s a piece of junk that isn’t backed up by the owner/developer. His service was even worse when compared to Sharx Security’s incredible support.

The Good

I ended purchasing a surveillance DVR package called LuxRiot. LuxRiot is an incredible piece of software, and unlike Blue Iris, they completely understand how customers want to use the software. LuxRiot licenses the server that runs as a service on my Windows Home Server. That server does the motion detection, monitoring, alarms, and recording. The service is controlled by a client, and that client can be installed on as many computers as you want. Therefore, I install the client on my laptop and the server on my Windows Home Server and I’m good to go. (Blue Iris could really learn something from these guys.)

LuxRiot’s configuration options are much more detailed than Blue Iris’s and everything just works. Even better, LuxRiot includes an archive viewer that lets you review the archival footage that it has recorded. You can easily see where motion occurred right on the timeline, and you can quickly jump between motion events using buttons on the toolbar.

The image below shows how LuxRiot deals with showing archival footage. At the bottom of the window is the timeline. Dark green indicates time, light green indicates where footage was recorded, and brown indicates where motion occurred. Notice that the truck is highlighted by a box in the video window to indicate that it was detected as motion.

 

By default, LuxRiot’s motion detection mask is applied using a grid of 32x32 squares on the video surface. However, you can choose to change that resolution if it doesn’t fit your needs. It allows for adjustment from 4x4 blocks all the way up to 256x256 blocks of resolution! You can see how that feature works in the image below.

By the way, LuxRiot uses the motion detection sensor on the Sharx SCNC2607 to detect motion, and it does an excellent job. In fact, motion detection from the Sharx camera is far superior to what Blue Iris offers. The Blue Iris software doesn’t have the ability to take motion information from the camera, so I wasn’t able to use the Sharx’s motion detectors with it. LuxRiot, on the other hand, will use the detectors on the camera or in software. Very nice!

One Final Problem to Solve

After all of this, I had one final problem to solve. Because the SCNC2607 is an indoor camera, I have it aimed out the window. That works great until nighttime when the IR illuminators come on. IR illuminators send out a beam of infrared light (just like your TV remote control) that is invisible to the naked eye, but the Sharx camera can see it very well. Unfortunately, the Sharx can also see it reflecting off of the window, so at night, I had nothing but a bright white image.

Sharx Security points this out in their manual and they give you some pointers for positioning to try and work around it, but nothing helped for me. (Incidentally, this is not a problem with the Sharx camera. It’s a problem with all IR illumination used for night vision.) I emailed Sharx Security for what had to be the tenth time, and I got back a very nice response shortly after with many ideas and details on how to resolve that issue. I ended up purchasing an outdoor IR illuminator that is mounted just above my front door. It looks like a normal floodlight, but instead of visible light, it sends out a beam of IR light once it gets dark enough outside for it to activate itself. When that happens, there is no visible change according to the naked eye, but the view from the Sharx looks like someone is shining a bright spotlight out the front of the house. The picture below was taken in complete darkness (there were no lights at all outside of my house), but the IR illuminator makes it quite bright.

 

The IR illuminator I purchased is the YY Trade IR illuminator from Amazon.  This IR illuminator can be used with any camera that is sensitive to IR in the 850nm wavelength.

With this setup, I now have a comprehensive video surveillance DVR system. Right now, I’m running with one camera. I may add cameras in the future, but for now, I’m happy to have just what I wanted to solve the immediate problem. Thank you, Sharx Security!

Jim

Update:
I discovered last night that LuxRiot also uses a ludicrous DRM system that will disable your registration key as soon as you attempt to install the server on another machine. I decided to use a spare computer exclusively for the LuxRiot DVR service, but when I uninstalled it from my Windows Home Server and put it on the other computer, it wouldn’t allow me to activate without contacting LuxRiot. Unfortunately, it was 9:00PM on a Saturday when I did all of this.

I sent an email to LuxRiot asking them to reset my key, and much to my surprise, they responded a few hours later and reset my key. While I despise the DRM methods they use, I was surprised that they resolved my issue so quickly.

One other technical detail. The Sharx provides an M-JPEG over HTTP, JPEG over HTTP, and an RTSP feed. I obtained much better performance using the RTSP feed with LuxRiot. My settings are shown below.