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PoE Budget Planning for IP Camera Deployments PoE power planning is one of the most common hidden failure points in commercial surveillance deployments. On paper, everything looks fine: the switch has enough ports, cameras are PoE-capable, and video is online. Then night falls, IR turns on, heaters kick in, and a few cameras start resetting or dropping intermittently. It looks …

Stop Buying Megapixels: How to Actually Engineer Camera Coverage Most surveillance systems do not fail because of hardware defects. They fail because of design mistakes. The most common one? Buying cameras based on megapixels instead of coverage geometry. A 12MP camera mounted at the wrong height with the wrong lens is worse than a 4MP camera engineered correctly. Resolution al …

We’ve all seen that episode of a crime show or scene from a dramatic movie. The officers are gathered in a dramatically lit room, walls of monitors display streams of data and video feed. Then the breakthrough happens: A lone camera captures a figure. Excitement fills the room, they leap for the monitors and call for the picture to zoom and enhance. A box comes onto the …

In the IP security camera world, manufacturers often highlight how many megapixels (MP) a camera has. More megapixels, or higher resolution, often mean a significant increase in camera prices as well. So what are megapixels, and should you really pay up for them? Let’s start off with just the pixel. All digital screens display images that are broken up into tiny little squ …

Codecs A video codec is a mechanism that takes analog data, like light, color, and sound, and compresses (the “co” part of codec) that data into information the computer can understand. From there, the video is decompressed (the “dec” part of codec) so it can be played on our screens. Codecs are an essential part of all digital video recording and  IP surveillance ca …