Hi, am new to the forum but have used X10 gadgets a long time ago. Now am getting back into doing some home automation. While I have 2 X10 cameras , a BW wired and a color Xcam2 wireless, I just bought a set of non-X10 4 wireless cameras with a 4 channel receiver.
Now I need a good dvr card that can handle these 4 cameras and be expandable to handle a total of 7 to 11 cameras. Checking thru good old Ebay, I find a number of cards available, but it seems hard to find detailed info on the software. Surprisingly, I found the same lack of info on the commercial cctv web sites.
So am hoping to find experts here. I want to be able to watch at least 2 cameras in real time. The others can be displayed more slowly. For storing the images, a much slower frame rate will be ok (and save a lot of drive space). And I want to use motion detection on a couple oft he cameras. Thus each camera's settings need to be done independently.
Presently am looking at 8 and 16 input cards with 120 or 240 fps. But what software will do the job I need? And how much of a load will the cards put on the cpu? I would prefer that the card do as much of the decoding/encoding as possible.
Am guessing that the more expensive cards are going to put less load on the CPU, but how can I figure that out? There seem to be 5 ranges pricewise for cards based on the chips on board and the fps. The $20 ones(all only 4 inouts max), the $60-75, the 60-$99 ones, the $120-150 and the really expensive ones that are way beyond my reach. btw these Ebay card prices include the shipping. I have found 8 & 16 inout cards in the 4 pricier ranges.
Suggestions will be very much appreciated.
Tia ClamRake