Question: Have any of you all had as many problems with ACI International's CCTV
system as I have. This is not a reliable system at all and I would
not purchase again. Have anyone ever had problems with CCTV Digital System?
Answer:We have a Philips CCTV Digital System solution where I work. I'm not
impressed, though maybe my expectations were higher than what we were sold.
We have fifteen cameras connected and the DVR typically holds only three days
of video (the DVR is a couple years old now, there may be some with
>80GB drives). When we first installed the DVR we had 8 cameras, but
we still only got four days of video.
The codec is proprietary, you must use their player to view video.
You could watch the video from the DVR, but navigating the menu is
tough because you must know the time period you wish to view. If no
video was recorded at the start of the period you set, then your
search will fail.
The motion detection system doesn't watch for pixel changes, it looks
for contrasting lines. This means the system tells me that the lines
in our parking lot are moving on a fairly bright day. This can be
adjusted, but then actual movement may be missed.
The DVR records one stream at up to 60fps, but that takes up a lot of
space. We found using 15fps still gets us acceptable video. But
since we have 15 cameras multiplexed, if all 15 cameras trigger (does
sometimes happen), we can get as little as 1fps per camera, which is
not suitable for tracking someone who is running, for example. The
system can be set to focus exclusively on one camera during an action
event, but it will ignore all other action events until the first is
done.
Backup recommendations include a tape system and a CD-R device. They
only support one Yamaha SCSI external CD-R drive. The drive itself
had impressive numbers, but CDs are written at 1X speed and the
process is not automated in any fashion (you must select a timeframe
to archive and it must be less than 650MB, which is impossible to
determine). By the time one day has been archived, you would be
behind by two days and would have a bucketful of CDs. We didn't explore the tape system because it was too expensive for us
at the time.
Alternatively, their remote software can communicate via ethernet, and
recordings can be made to a PC at a fairly good clip, but that darn
2GB filesize limit will bite you every time.
And we spent more than $20,000 for this package including miles of
video, power, and data cables and all the installation. But for all
its faults, it's cheaper and easier to manage than tape (15 VCRs plus
room to install them plus tape storage plus the monumental task of
swapping tapes) or anything we could kludge together (and I kludge
well) with off-the-shelf equipment. And the one time we fell victim
to a car prowler, the system proved its worth by IDing the criminal,
aiding in his arrest and conviction.
