All High Definition Camera Systems

The majority of homes and businesses today have some type of network with data being sent not only through the location but essentially all over the world. With this ever expanding technology and internet speeds increasing everyday we have an opportunity to incorporate this into our surveillance needs.

IP cameras allow video and audio surveillance to be sent over a network using cat5 cable with an assigned IP address to each camera. This allows for a vast improvement over analog systems such as individual camera configuration, wifi cameras, Power over Ethernet or PoE, adding cameras from other networks, better security features such as people counting and facial detection. Most importantly, extremely high megapixel resolutions are now possible.

Another major advantage to IP systems is that there is no limit to it. As we see an increase in megapixel resolutions and high quality cameras there isn’t a bottleneck to where IP surveillance can take us.

However, there are a few minor details that one can’t ignore when considering purchasing an IP system. With IP systems using a camera from one manufacturer and NVR from another could result in incompatibility issues such as not being able to record motion detection, occasional video loss, certain features on the camera and NVR not syncing with each other or the worst of all, when the cameras won’t display video whatsoever.

Obviously, this was a problem and needed a solution. The solution was created and dubbed the ONVIF protocol. ONVIF basically lets 2 completely different IP products “talk” to each other and generally do full time recording at the least. While it may not sound like much to some, to others this could mean being able to use a preexisting ONVIF IP camera they have had for 3 years on a brand new NVR.