Video Surveillance and Open Source

New challenge. I need to setup video surveillance over an area that will
require at least 4 cameras to cover. I'm interested in any experience from
PLUG'ers using the 'motion'[0] software on Linux.

A bit off topic, but I'm also interested in opinions on the best camera
approach. I see

1) Buy fairly expensive ~$100+ "network" cameras[1] that connect to a
wireless ethernet network (802.11b/g). They serve the video and still
images from an internal webserver. The 'motion' software supposedly works
with most network cameras.

2) Buy similarly priced "wireless" cameras[2] (not ethernet, think cordless
phones) that connect to a base station, then run the "video-out" jacks from
the base station into a 4-port video capture board in a Linux box (and hope
I can convince Linux to recognize the card and map all four ports to /dev
devices). I'm certain 'motion' will work this way.

3) I want to avoid USB-powered cameras because I can't get wiring everywhere
and I would have to use Cat5 extenders.

Additional complications:
- Some of the cameras need to be outside (it's darn hot out there)
- Cameras must work well in low light or night situations

Ultimately, I want 'motion' (or equivalent) to create timestamped mpeg clips
when movement is detected in a video stream from /dev/videoX or http://X. I
will then run a cronjob each night to cat the clips together into a
"daily.{date}.mpg" and archive it. Simple, huh?

...Kevin

[0] http://motion.sf.net/ - motion project
[1] http://tinyurl.com/d9a7v - Hawking HNC230G Network Camera
[2] http://tinyurl.com/oysem - Swann 2.4GHz wireless CCD Camera



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