Posted November 24th, 2004 @ 09:51am by Erik J. Barzeski
Someone sent me this. If you have thoughts, leave a comment:
Erik, do you think I could use a G5, hook it up to the internet, get some software, iChat, iSight cameras, etc. and set up as a video surveillance and security system in my warehouse in [some city]?
Personally I think that it may be cheaper to get a standard security system, but I don't know if those tie into "remote viewing" very inexpensively.
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Posted 24 Nov 2004 at 10:37am #
Linksys makes a wireless B and G video camera. You can give it an ip and browse/pull down the pictures or live feed right off the internet. One of these and a cheap wireless router may be the way to go for surveilance.
It will be much cheaper at any rate.
Posted 24 Nov 2004 at 12:08pm #
The good thing about using the iSight for such a purpose is that you could also always use it for other purposes, as well, thus justifying the purchase in some sense. So, that said, if one chooses to try using the iSight for surveillance, I highly suggest using EvoCam and possibly a one-line shell script to scp the current image to a web server. Though, if the computer in question is visible to the network, you can just set EvoCam to save the image to a web accessible directory.
Posted 26 Nov 2004 at 8:59pm #
This was done recently at a computer lab at Brigham Young University. They had some problems with thefts on campus, and the lab happened to have the Macs and iSights on hand, so they set up some software to do after hours surveillance. The good news is that they caught the perp the next time they tried to strike...so I'd say that this is not only something that can be done, but it can work pretty well. The iSight is fairly high resolution, too, so you can get a pretty clear ID on anyone it catches in the act. I don't know which specific software was used, but you can probably still look up the news story on the net. The story I recall seeing on the news just said they used inexpensive shareware, if memory serves.
Posted 03 Jan 2005 at 4:25pm #
I need software that will pull sound and video off of my PowerBook G4 and iSight. Any suggestions?
Posted 16 Mar 2005 at 4:34pm #
I have some questions over this. I am currently designing the security system for a daycare. I was hoping to go with Isight, and an apple xserve to do all this, but I have no idea where to start looking... Any recomendations on this?
Thanks