Video Surveillance System

One thing that's always been an interest of mine is Video Surveillance. I've managed to put together a nice setup on a DIY budget and get my video and pics into my HomeSeer setup. Let's see how I do this.

The first part of getting this system to work is to get the Wave-P card to be seen by Windows. With that said, do NOT install the software that comes with the card! It doesn't come with any Windows drivers. If you have already installed the software, uninstall it using the 'Windows add/remove programs' console. Now to load some drivers that will work with all major camera software packages. To do this, simply install the 'Harmony 2007 CCTV Server' package. The program itself is useless, but it will load the necessary drivers for the chipset used on the Wave-P card. This is the only way I've found to get the drivers, and I've done a lot of research! You can download the Harmony package here, scroll almost to the bottom to find it.

Now for the actual program used to view the camera's. I originally wanted to use WebcamXP 5. WC5 is an awesome product but I could not find anyway to control it from a command line or other wise. If you don't want to control it from an outside source I would highly recommend this program. But, unfortunately I needed to control the software from within HomeSeer. I then went to Active Webcam Pro. This too is a powerful program to handle multiple camera's. The biggest difference is that it has a command line interface!

So now I have a great card/driver/software package. The next step was to get HomeSeer to control when to record video and/or take pictures. To do this I use a great plug-in to HomeSeer written by Stipus called 'HS Script Connector'. This allows me to base everything on my motion sensors already used in my security setup with HomeSeer. So now when there is motion at the back door, I can have HomeSeer send a message to Active Webcam to focus in on that camera and start recording video or take a few snapshots!

Using the built in webserver feature of Active Webcam Pro, I can view my live camera's from within my HAControl touchscreen package. I can also playback the video and pictures I have saved. I'm sure it would be just as easy to do within MainLobby or HSTouch, but I don't have any experience with either of those packages.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with this setup. I have a nice complement of camera's on a dedicated machine, that can be completely controlled by HomeSeer, and be viewed from any touchscreen in the house!

If you use Homeseer, you need Blade's Plug-in's!

bptworld@comcast.net