At Alex's request I am going to author a somewhat more comprehensive article on setup of Video Surveillance on Windows Home Server and on the EX495 specifically.
I know that a lot of people are interested in doing this. For many of us, the home server is on 24 hours a day, so what better place to host security recordings, especially with the wealth of software on the market and the price of security cameras getting lower all the time!
It is a bit beyond the scope of this article to make recommendations on what hardware you want to go with. I would caution the intrepid adventurer to do some research however. The big names in security cameras such as Axis, Toshiba and Panasonic enjoy quite good support from 3rd party software companies. It is also key to choose a camera that is appropriate for the application. Want good low light performance? Pick a camera with a low LUX rating. Want to stream the camera through the Internet? Pick a camera that broadcasts in an industry standard format that will be supported by all browsers.
I was looking for a camera with good industry support, some audio capabilities, and good low light performance. The cameras would be installed at the front and rear of my home in sheltered areas. I suspected I could get away with buying the "indoor" version of a camera that offered both indoor and outdoor versions. Ultimately I went with the Panasonic BB-HCM511A, which is available for a very good price from
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16881180023&Tpk=bb-hcm511a.
It is worth noting that this camera does not include a power supply but does support Power over Ethernet (PoE) which means you can use a single CAT5e or CAT6 cable with a power injector to power the camera, or you can use a network switch that has power over ethernet ports.
Putting the camera on the network was pretty trivial. It comes with a preconfigured address in the 192.168.0.x subnet, the same as most home networks. You can either web into the camera and begin setup, or you can use the included Panasonic setup CD from a Windows PC to set the camera up.
Once up on the network you can easily access your camera by going to the camera's URL. It supports some basic features such as programming of the camera "home" position, programming of a daily camera reboot, network port forwarding, etc.
If you really want to do surveillance though this will not cut it. You will need actual surveillance software that can pick up the feed from your camera and record it, either continuously or under conditions such as when motion is detected or during specific hours.
When investigating software to do this, it can be a bit overwhelming. There is free software (which doesn't support my camera or the WHS operating system) and there is $500 professional software which can do just about everything. Key considerations for me were that the software had to run as a service (so that if my server was restarted the software would start automatically), had to support my hardware, and had to offer some easy remote way to view the camera feeds and the recorded video.
Ultimately I ended up giving the Blue Iris software a try (
http://www.blueirissoftware.com/). They offer a free 14 day trial with all of the features turned on, which really gives you a chance to try things out before deciding if it's right for you. Even though their website is pretty spartan, the software is quite robust, and there's even a basic support forum available to get configuration help. Importantly the software can run as a service, supports Windows Server 2003 (so should be no issue to run on WHS) and gets regular updates. Most importantly it's inexpensive. A single camera license is $29 and a license for up to four cameras is only $49. That's the lowest price full featured software I could find, anywhere!
It is worth noting that you will probably want to use remote desktop on your WHS to set the software up. While it might be possible to set it up using the Advanced Admin Console, I simply chose to use full blown RDP and administrator account to do the software install. The screenshot below will give you a general idea of what the Blue Iris interface looks like when running in remote desktop;
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Once you have Blue Iris installed, there is some house keeping you will want to do. You will want to immediately go in to the options and set the software to run as a service, and very importantly, you will want to check the box that says to display video during remote terminal sessions! If you forget to do this you will only see a black screen in place of your video and a note about "remote session detected".
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Be aware that if you are running the software as a service that when you access the WHS remote desktop or console you will see no indication the software is running (even though it is). However, if you launch the application it will launch the GUI and operate normally.
You also need a place to keep recordings. I created a new share in the WHS called "surveillance" and created a "new" and "old" subfolder. Blue Iris allows you to set how long you wish to keep recordings for before archiving them, either by length of days or by a size limit. This is very handy in preventing the recordings from consuming all of the disc space available in the WHS! By default the recordings are in an AVI format using XVID codec. If you want to playback recordings directly from your surveillance share on a computer you will need to load XVID or you will need to use a media player that can handle the XVID codec.
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Next order of business is to get our camera programmed. You right click on an open area of the application and choose "add new camera". Generally speaking for IP cameras this is pretty easy. You simply input the IP address of the camera. Port number is typically 80 although you might have to make a note of what port number is showing up in your browser when you are connected to the camera. Blue Iris does a pretty good job here, offering generic templates as well as support for quite a few IP cameras. You probably want to check their compatibility list first to make sure your IP camera is supported. You enter a few other properties such as a camera name, "short name", etc.
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At this point you are up and running! You should see the camera displayed in Blue Iris and now can get on with the task of setting it up to either record continuously, or record motion. A handy feature with motion recording is that you can program it to only key on a portion of the displayed image, so that for example a bush or tree that moves frequently will not trigger recording. You can also program multiple schedules in for a camera and have that camera record only at certain times. To add to the mind boggling options you can even set things up so that you will receive an email or text message of a motion detection event occurs! I will not delve into all of these options here, suffice to say, most users will want to set up simple motion recording which you can see below;
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You should now be in pretty good shape. You can access the software through remote desktop and view your live camera feeds as well as recorded clips. It's worth noting that since the HP MSS does not have a sound card, I have no way to test whether or not audio will work through remote desktop. Might be interesting if someone with a USB sound card plugged in to the MSS can test this out.
But wait. What about being able to access the cameras without having to access the desktop on the MSS? Those crazy German engineers have you covered here too. BI has a built in Web Server. It will be important to make sure you change the server port to something other than the default of 80 since that's already used by WHS. You can also set a password for web viewing. These options are all quick to set up in the BI program.
Then it's just a simple matter of accessing your server followed by the port number for Blue Iris... in my configuration it would be accessed by going to
http://gizmo:8000.
The default for BI is to come up with an Active-X interface that only works for Internet Explorer. However, they thoughtfully include a Java viewer and even a basic JPEG viewer for browsers that don't support either Active-X or Java. Each interface has its own URL so you can really just access the software via the correct URL for the plugin you want. Below is an example of accessing the Java interface on Safari running on a Mac.
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I have control over my cameras and can not only view my cameras but review my recorded clips too! If using the Active-X interface you can set up the BI software to also stream audio to the browser, but this will only work for live video, not for recorded clips.
One of the really powerful things about the web server built into the software is that through port forwarding you can quite easily check your security from anywhere on the Internet through any browser. Traveling abroad? Just log in through the web interface to your home IP address (or homeserver URL) followed by the port number and you can review your security logs.
A word about performance. One of the big speculations about WHS and Surveillance recording centers around how much of a hit the server will take. With one camera installed and recording on motion you can see from the stats below that performance impact is negligible. Even when viewing the web interface and playing back clips I don't see the CPU activity spike above 50%. The server in question is also running Squeezebox Server, DC++ and several other services in addition to the normal HP MSS fare. I plan on adding a 2nd and possibly 3rd camera soon and will provide an update on server impact. I don't expect users will run into performance issues until they go over 4 or 5 devices.
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I hope that this has been helpful to the community and will try to answer questions. I can also put together a screen grab of the software options, speed, etc, if that would be helpful.