Author Topic: EDIT- audio with Icam, confusion with I cam pro - my current set up  (Read 3225 times)

Cheapo

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Hey guys, new to the forum here and I had some questions about my iCam set up to see if you guys could recommend anything to improve the system that I havent thought of yet  :).

The sole purpose I am trying to use this system for is for security. If there were ever a break in or such I would like to have some evidence of who it was and what was stolen. I idealy want a self sustaining system that requires very little maintenance from my part. 

So the current set up is as follows; In my living room of my tiny 1 bed room college apartment I have 2 USB cameras set up. One looks right at the front door, the other looks over the living room (the frames over lap somewhat). I have a small form factor windows 8 desktop in my living room I use as my media center computer and both cameras run to it via a few USB extensions. The PC sits under my entertainment system hard wired to my router.

As for the software side of things, I have iCam constantly running with motion detection enabled for both cameras. Its running as a service that starts on start up without needed a user to be logged in. Auto start is also enable so essentially when the PC starts iCam starts monitoring for motion immediately. The only account on the computer is an admin account which is password protected and the computer is locked all the time im not using it. The other thing I have done is had the cameras save the motion events to my google drive folder. The thought being even if someone were to take the computer hopefully it would have had time to upload at least a few pics to my google drive folder where they cant be touched. The idea is at this point I will clear out my google drive folder every week or so as its constantly running and would have pictures from normal stuff going on in the apartment. For notifications, I will generally go into the iphone app when I leave my apartment and set notificaions to on so while I'm going Ill get a notification if someone comes home (as its a 1br so no one but me or one of my friends with a key should be coming home). Also I forgot to mention the Pc is set to boot after power loss, so if the power ever went out the thing would boot back up and iCam would start running again.

I may be forgetting something here, but so far has anyone thought of anyways I could improve this? So far the the current set up has been running flawlessly. Thanks for any help!  :)
« Last Edit: March 24, 2015, 11:30:23 PM by Cheapo »

rjgvt

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Re: Can you improve anything on my security setup?
« Reply #1 on: December 03, 2014, 10:52:42 AM »
Sounds like a good setup. I do something similar with a mix of 2 webcams and 1 IP cam at home and 3 IP cams at a remote location. I have everything saved to a Dropbox account. I use host domains for both locations.

My dedicated desktop computer is Windows 7 Pro, I can remote into it and stop/start Icamsource in case one of the cams locks up. Sometimes the power glitches at my remote location and I have to start/stop Icamsource to get it going again. Sometimes one of the webcams has a frozen image and I dod the same to recover.

OUAnthony

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Re: Can you improve anything on my security setup?
« Reply #2 on: December 09, 2014, 12:03:35 AM »
As rjgvt pointed out, you'll want to be able to remote into your computer using the built-in RDP or some other service (logmein.com, etc). You also want a free Dynamic DNS account if you don't have a static IP address from your ISP...that will provide a link that you can use to remote in instead of having to remember an IP address or not knowing your IP address if you have a dynamic one. Once you have set up the correct port forwarding in the router (if necessary, based on your remote desktop service), create a batch file on your desktop with the following text:

@echo off
net stop iCam
net start iCam
exit

The above text assumes the name of the iCam service is 'iCam". If it's something else, change the word "iCam" in the middle 2 lines to whatever the correct name of the service is. If the service name has a space in it, you might need to put quotes around the name. If icamsource ever crashes, you can remote into your computer and quickly run this new batch file (as an administrator by right-clicking on it) and restart the iCam service.

If you don't already have Google Drive to run as a service, you might want/need to set that up. If the computer reboots for whatever reason, and a user isn't logged in, Google Drive might not run and back up pictures until a user logs in. That would be easy for you to verify before you need to mess with it, though.

If possible, get rid of the USB extension cables...many users on here have had stability issues with those. If you run into this problem, and removing the cables is not an option, you can create a scheduled task to run the iCam batch file above every day or however often you deem necessary. Each time this runs, iCam will be down for 30 seconds or so. You might need to add some other commands to the batch file (such as taskkill) if it doesn't work as expected when used as a scheduled task and/or when icamsource freezes up.
« Last Edit: December 09, 2014, 12:08:06 AM by OUAnthony »

Cheapo

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Re: Can you improve anything on my security setup?
« Reply #3 on: March 24, 2015, 11:29:49 PM »
wow I got some response! But yes after posting this I did realize I  needed google drive running as a service too and set that up. I also been using teamviewer with an account to remote in and its worked really well. So far icam has been running very smooth for the past few months. The only thing I'm trying to figure out is how I can record audio the same time it records the pictures. Dont have to link the pictures and audio together (I mean that would be the definition of a video really lol) but time stamping the audio so I could go back and listen will seeing the frames would be nice. Icam pro has video recording as a feature but after reading about it and playing with the client on windows, I cant see where it mentions anything about recording and saving video. Any ideas how to trigger audio recording on iCam or can someone clear up this confusion with iCam pro? Thanks and thanks for the previous replies (sorry my reply is so late  :P).