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technobard · 12-26-2004, 07:08 PM

A couple of questions come to mind:
1) Are you going to actually capture video from your surveillance cameras or simply switch between live feeds? If you're going to capture the various feeds, you'll want to consider cards that handle hardware encoding. They're more expensive, but they take the bulk of the load off of the CPU. I use a Hauppauge WINTV PVR-350. That's probably overkill for what you want (it does hardware encoding and decoding as well as having an FM tuner). The PVR-250 is cheaper (still not cheap) and supports hardware encoding.

2) Are you writing all of the software from scratch down to the drivers or are you looking for something existing that you can build on? Check out The IVTV Project. Their driver supports the PVR-250/350 and other cards. There is also a bttv(?) driver out there for cards based on a different chipset, but I don't know much about it.

I use my card with MythTV (open source TIVO substitute). The video quality is very good.

Good luck!

12-26-2004, 07:08 PM	#2 (permalink)
technobard Centurion Nova Prime Join Date: May 2002 Location: Oak Park, IL (USA) Posts: 287	A couple of questions come to mind: 1) Are you going to actually capture video from your surveillance cameras or simply switch between live feeds? If you're going to capture the various feeds, you'll want to consider cards that handle hardware encoding. They're more expensive, but they take the bulk of the load off of the CPU. I use a Hauppauge WINTV PVR-350. That's probably overkill for what you want (it does hardware encoding and decoding as well as having an FM tuner). The PVR-250 is cheaper (still not cheap) and supports hardware encoding. 2) Are you writing all of the software from scratch down to the drivers or are you looking for something existing that you can build on? Check out The IVTV Project. Their driver supports the PVR-250/350 and other cards. There is also a bttv(?) driver out there for cards based on a different chipset, but I don't know much about it. I use my card with MythTV (open source TIVO substitute). The video quality is very good. Good luck! __________________ It takes 2 points to draw a straight line, but at least 3 points to draw a conclusion.