Personal CCTV System

[Negeva]

Hope this is the right section to post.

Was wondering if any of you had some advice, hints, tips or all of the above on setting up a personal CCTV system for the front of my house.

It would mainly be used to monitor the drive way where the cars are parked - we've had a minor spate of vandalism. Thus, it would need to see in both day and night time. I also, have access to a low powered PC with a few hundred gigs of HDD space not being used. So that can be used to record events.

Any pointers will be most welcome: hardware/software etc.


Thanks in advance.

Negs.

[Force Flow]

I've used supercircuts.com for a dedicated security camera system. Just a DV recorder with enough video inputs for the cameras. But, this will run you a $125 or so for the unit, and about $80-$110 for each camera.

The cheap version would be to connect a USB camera on a PC running XP and run Windows Media Encoder, and set it up to record continuously. The downside to this is that you won't have timestamps (unless you use manycam for the PC or camtwist for a mac), and you'll have to deal with the massive file that's created if you ever need to review the footage (you can probably access/edit it with windows movie maker).