Re: freebsd as platform for video security?
The company I work for has done something like this for a local construction company. Basically, we set up a modest (P-200, if I recall correctly, maybe 64 MB of RAM) FreeBSD machine with a webcam and a video capture card (Happauge-based, I believe) to take pictures of a site they were building. Cron was used to take a picture every fifteen minutes, dial up another computer (also FreeBSD-based), and upload it; once there, it was merged with other pictures into movie files, made available in an archive, etc. Sorry to be vague on the details -- I had to rebuild the box once, so I wasn't involved in software choices, etc. (The ImageMagick tools would probably be a good starting point for merging pictures.) My point is that we did the job pretty well with modest equipment, so I think that, at least for time-lapse pictures, it is definitely possible to do what you're after. Oh, one other thing -- I do remember fooling around with capture utilities that basically acted as a web server: every time you connected to the machine, it would capture a picture and send it back. That might be useful to you. I can't remember the name of the program, but maybe someone else can help me out. Hope this helps, Hugh -- Saint Aardvark the Carpeted [EMAIL PROTECTED] Because the plural of Anecdote is Myth. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-questions in the body of the message
Re: freebsd as platform for video security?
In [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] typed: My father wants to be able to watch his security cameras at his business remotely. I know it can be done...static IP, video capture, streaming video, etc...in Windoze but I DO NOT want to deal with MS at all. Does software exist for FreeBSD that would allow me to: 1. Monitor security camera footage online, either in real time or recorded 2. Switch among 4 different cameras or meld the images together in a 4-way split screen. The magic word in this case is H323. That's the network video/voice conferencing standard, and the tools to do this kind of thing on FreeBSD that I know of all use H323. In particular, the ohphone port. You could, for instance, set up one computer at each camera, and have ohphone displaying the incoming video from them on the monitoring computer. I don't have an ohphone setup anymore, so I don't know how much trouble getting multiple incoming video streams setup is. This solution provide four images in windows. You can use plpwm (part of the plwm port) as a window manager, which will let you rotate through the windows with a single key. Or you could use a scriptable window manager to lay out the windows in four quarters of the screen. And what kind of machine (at the most basic) does everyone think would be required to handle this sort of activity? Do you think I would be better off using BeOS or another OS? I mention BeOS because I know what it can handle, especially since it is extremely good when it comes to graphics and other usually memory intensive programming. If you're going to pipe video over IP, then the end systems can be cheap - a 500MHz box is more than enough. The system running four displays is the problem. CPU load isn't much of a problem - fxtv chews up about 5% of the cpu on a gigahertz athlon box - but memory bandwidth could be a problem if you want to keep four running videos on it. mike -- Mike Meyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mired.org/consulting.html Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-questions in the body of the message
