Hi,
My name is Chris, I own and operate a computer company that mainly builds office/restaurant and gaming computers. We started getting into surveillance systems a few years ago and usually build systems as DVRs. In my home I use x10 products throughout and decided to incorporate them in our services since you can put together a nice system without spending a ton of money and use the same system to automate. While trying to figure out a problem with a recent install we decided to go wired to rule out any RF interference. Now here is where we ran into a problem that none of the manuals had information on. When AHP switches from one camera to another it sends the off signal to the other cameras so your wireless video receiver only gets on signal, the entire system can only use one camera at a time, which is a very big disadvantage. Based on this info we got a wired switching unit that automatically switches to which ever input is live. So when you select camera 1 the others turn off and the switching unit should switch the to that input and output the video to the va11a then to AHP. However the switching unit does not work because the cameras do not really turn off. We hooked up a wireless receiver to a monitor and on a second monitor ran the RCA cable from one of the sentinels, when we switched the camera to a different one or used the all off sequence on the remote the wired monitor did not change, it continued to show live video, the monitor with the wireless shut off. So the only thing that shuts off is the wireless transmission of the video. It would have been nice to know that going in. With this info and the fact that while recording, AHP uses about 75% of any PC’s processor resources we have installed it on, we decided its best to use AHP to view and move the cameras and use a second machine with a multi channel DVR card to record the video. This enables you to record all of your cameras at the same time for security. One may pose the question, “why wouldn’t you just use motion detection to switch to the camera where motion is?” well that’s fine but what if you have several areas of motion, you end up switching back and forth while what you really need is constant coverage. Also with a DVR card we were able to get higher quality recording that with any setting in AHP, even if you select no compression the images are still worse in AHP than using a codec on the DVR card. A 4 channel DVR card with 60 frames/sec can be had for under $50, if you want more fluid video you can get a 120 frame/sec card for about $140. On four cameras 60 fps is plenty, 60/4 is 15 fps per camera. Hope this helps someone.