Appreciate if anyone can advise if I can hook up a CCTV to a TV capture card or does it need to be a video capture card specifically for CCTV cameras?
If it will hook up to TV capture card, any recommendations on PCI or USB type?
TIA
Either PCI or USB will work. Both types will capture at a similar quality. I am assuming all you want to do is capture the video. Some CCTV systems come with a web option that you can use to connect to the system over the internet for control and recording. I just helped set up a samsung system with this option. Very nice to be able to view and capture from the web. But the short answer to your question is no it doesn't need to be made for CCTV. One thing to think about is that outputs the CCTV system has. Most I have seen have BNC connections which won't hook to a normal capture card. Something like this will work for you in that case, but if it is connected to a Time lapse recorder they usually have s-video or coax outputs that a normal card can use.
Scott
One thing to remember too is that recording video _can_ take up a lot of disk space and CPU cycles. If you want something as a constant surveillance recorder, especially if using more than one camera, you might want to consider a dedicated computer for it, and probably have a dedicated hard drive for video storage. 80GB drives are dirt-cheap these days and should hold a good bit of video, depending on various record settings (constant vs. motion record, resolution, frame rate, compression level, etc.)
I agree... space will be needed. My server houses 8 drives and 1TB of storage space. Nearly all full of video. You can get 300 gig SATA drives at very reasonable prices now a days. You might be better off getting a time lapse recorder and just streaming the output from it to the web. It all really depends on your application.
I have considered a dedicated pc for the longer term. What I was thinking would be an old P3 system and fit a large HD & capture card. This pc would have no monitor, keyboard or mouse, only the CCTV connected. I would setup this dedicated pc on my LAN so I can access the captured video from the pc I would normally use. Appreciate your thoughts on this. TIA
Just make sure the headless machine is able to support the large drive. I'm not sure what OS you want to use, but there are several out there. Windows will chew up a bit of memory and Linux will be tougher to set up. I leave that up to you. Over all that setup sounds plausible.
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