What do you get when you take an IT Systems Engineer with more time on his hands than usual and an unfinished home project list that isn’t getting any shorter?
You get this:
That’s right. I’ve stood-up some IP surveillance infrastructure at my home, not because I’m a creepy Big Brother type with a God-Complex, rather:
- Once my 2.5 year old son figured out how to unlock the patio door and bolt outside, well, game over boys and girls….I needed some ‘insight’ and ‘visibility’ into the Child Partition’s whereabouts pronto and chasing him while he giggles is fun for only so long
- My home is exposed on three sides to suburban streets, and it’s nice to be able to see what’s going on outside
- I have creepy Big Brother tendences and/or God complex
I had rather simple rules for my home surveillance project:
- IP cameras: ain’t no CCTV/600 lines of resolution here, I wanted IP so I could tie it into my enterprise home lab
- Virtual DVR, not physical: Already have enough pieces of hardware with 16 cores, 128GB of RAM, and about 16TB of storage at home.
- No Wifi, Ethernet only: Wifi from the camera itself was a non-starter for me because 1) while it makes getting video from the cameras easier, it limits where I can place them both from a power & signal strength perspective 2) Spectrum & bandwidth is limited & noisy at distance-friendly 2.4GhZ, wide & open at 5ghz, but 5 has half the range of 2.4. For those reasons, I went old-school: Cat5e, the Reliable Choice of Professionals Evereywhere
- Active PoE: 802.3af as I already own about four PoE injectors and I’ve already run Cat5e all over the house
- Endpoint agnostic: In the IP camera space, it’s tough to find an agnostic camera system that will work on any end-device with as little friction as possible. ONVIF is, I suppose, the closest “standard” to that, and I don’t even know what it entails. But I know what I have: Samsung GS6, iPhone 6, a Windows Tiered Storage box, four Hyper-V hosts, System Center, an XBox One and 100 megabit internet connection.
- Directional, no omni-PTZ required: I could have saved money on at least one corner of my house by buying a domed, movable PTZ camera rather than use 2 directionals, but 1) this needed to work on any end-point and PTZ controls often don’t
And so, over the course of a few months, I picked up four of these babies:
Trendnet TV-IP310PI
Design
I liked these cameras from the start. They’re housed in a nice, heavyweight steel enclosure, have a hood to shade the lens and just feel solid and sturdy. Trendnet markets them as outdoor cameras, and I found no reason to dispute that.
My one complaint about these cameras is the rather finicky mount. The camera can rotate and pivot within the mount’s attachment system, but you need to be careful here as an ethernet cable (inside of a shroud) runs through the mount. Twist & rotate your camera too much, and you may tear your cable apart.
And while the mount itself is steel and needs only three screws to attach, the interior mechanism that allows you to move the camera once mounted is cheaper. It’s hard to describe and I didn’t take any pictures as I was cursing up a storm when I realized I almost snapped the cable, so just know this: be cognizant that you should be gentle with this thing as you mount it and then as you adjust it. You only have to do that once, so take your time.
Imaging and Performance:
Trendnet says the camera’s sensor & processing is capable of pushing out 1080p at 30 frames per second, but once you get into one of these systems, you’ll notice it can also do 2560×1440, or QHD resolutions. Most of the time, images and video off the camera are buttery smooth, and it’s great.
I’m not sharp enough on video and sensors to comment on color quality, whether F 1.2 on a camera like this means the same as it would on a still DSLR, or understand IR Lux, so let me just say this: These cameras produce really sharp, detailed and wide-enough (70 degrees) images for me, day or night. Color seems right too; my lawn is various hues of brown & green thanks to the heat and California drought, and my son’s colorful playthings that are scattered all over do in indeed remind me of a clown’s vomit. And at night, I can see far enough thanks to ambient light. Trendnet claims 100 foot IR-assisted viewing at night. I see no reason to dispute that.
Let the camera geeks geek out on teh camera; this is an enterprise tech blog, and I’ve already talked abou the hardware, so let’s dig into the software-defined & networking bits that make this expensive project worthwhile.
Power & Networking
These cameras couldn’t be easier to connect and configure, once you’ve got the power & cabling sorted out. The camera features a 10/100 ethernet port; on all four of my cameras, that connects to four of Trendnet’s own PoE injectors. All PoE injectors are inside my home; I’d rather extend ethernet with power than put a fragile PoE device outside. The longest cable run is approximately 75′, well within the spec. Not much more to say here other than Trendnet claims the cameras will use 5 watts maximum, and that’s probably at night when the IR sensors are on.
From each injector, a data cable connects to a switch. In my lab, I’ve got two enterprise-level switches.
One camera, the garage/driveway camera, is plugged into trunked, native vlan 410 port on my 2960s in the garage,
The other switch is a small CIsco SG-300 10p. The three other cameras connect to it. The SG-300 serves the role of access-layer switch and has a 3x1GbE port-channel back to the 2960s. This switch wasn’t getting used enough in my living room, so I moved it to my home office, where all ports are now used. Here’s my home lab environment, updated with cameras:
Like any other IP cam, the Trendnet will obtain an IP off your DHCP server. Trendnet includes software with the camera that will help you find/provision the camera on your network, but I just saved a few minutes and looked in my DHCP table. As expected, the cameras all received a routable IP, DNS, NTP and other values from my DHCP.
Once I had the IP, it was off to the races:
- Set DHCP reservation
- Verify an A record was created DNS so I could refer to the cameras by names rather than IP
- Login, configure new password, update firmware, rename camera, turn-off UPNP, turn-off telnet
- Adjust camera views
Software bits – Server Side
Trendnet is nice enough to include a fairly robust and rebadged version of Luxriot camera software, which has two primary components: Trendnet View Pro (Fat Client & Server app) and VMS Broacast server, an http server. Trendnet View Pro is a server-like application that you can install on your PC to view, control, and edit all your cameras. I say server-like because this is the free-version of the software, and it has the following limits:
- Cannot run as a Windows Service
- An account must be logged in to ‘keep it running’
- You can install View Pro on as many PCs as you like, but only one is licensed to receive streaming video at a time
Upgrading the free software to a version that supports more simultaneously viewers is steep: $315 to be exact.
Naturally, I went looking for an alternative, but after dicking around with Zoneminder & VLC for awhile (both of which work but aren’t viewable on the XBox), I settled on VMS Broadcast server, the http component of the free software.
Just like View Pro, VMS Broadcast won’t run as a service, but, well, sysinternals!
So after deliberating a bit, I said screw it, and stood-up a Windows 8.1 Pro VM on a node in the garage. The VM is Domain-joined, which the Trendnet software ignored or didn’t flag, and I’ve provisioned 2 cores & 2GB of RAM to serve, compress, and redistribute the streams using the Trendnet fat client server piece as well as the VMS web server.
Client Side
On that same Windows 8.1 VM, I’ve enabled DLNA-sharing on VLAN 410, which is my trusted wireless & wired internal network. The thinking here was that I could redistribute via DLNA the four camera feeds into something the XBox One would be able to show on our family’s single 48″ LCD TV in the living room via the Media App. So far, no luck getting that to work, though IE on the XBox One will view and play all four feeds from the Trendnet web server, which for the purposes of this project, was good enough for me.
Additionally, I have a junker Lenovo laptop (Ideapad, 11″) that I’ve essentially built into a Kiosk PC for the kitchen/dining area, the busiest part of the house. This PC automatically logs in, opens the fat client and loads the file to view the four live feeds. And it does this all over wifi, giving instant home intel to my wife, mother-in-law, and myself as we go about our day.
Finally, both the iOS & Android devices in my house can successfully view the camera streams, not from the server, but directly (and annoyingly) from the cameras themselves.
The Impact of RTSP 1080p/30fps x 4 on Home Lab
I knew going into this that streaming live video from four quality cameras 24×7 would require some serious horsepower from my homelab, but I didn’t realize how much.
From the compute side of things, it was indeed alot. The Windows 8.1 VM is currently on Node2, a Xeon E3-1241v3 with 32GB of RAM.
Typically Node2’s physical CPU hovers around 8% utilization as it hosts about six VMs in total.
With the 8.1 VM serving up the streams as well as compressing them with a variable bit rate, the tax for this DIY Home surveillance project was steep: Node2’s CPU now averages 16% utilized, and I’ve seen it hit 30%. The VM itself is above 90% utilization.
More utilization = more worries about thermal as Node2 sits in the garage. In southern California. In the summertime.
Node2’s average CPU temperature varies between 22c and 36c on any given warm day in the garage (ambient air is 21c – 36c). But with the 8.1 VM, Node2 has hit as high as 48c. Good thing I used some primo thermal paste!
From the network side, results have been interesting. First, my Meraki is a champ. The humble MR-18 802.11n access point doesn’t break a sweat streaming the broadcast feed from the VM to the Lenovo Kiosk laptop in the kitchen. Indeed, it sustains north of 21mb/s as this graph shows, without interrupting my mother in law’s consumption of TV broadcasts over wifi (separate SSID & VLAN, from the SiliconDust TV tuner), nor my wife’s Facebooking & Instagramming needs, nor my own tests with the Trendnet application which interfaces with the cameras directly.
Meraki’s analysis says that this makes the 2.4ghz spectrum in my area over 50% utilized, which probably frustrates my neighbors. Someday perhaps I’ll upgrade the laptop to a 5ghz radio.
vSwitch, the name of my Converged SCVMM switch, is showing anywhere from 2megabits to 20 megabits of Tx/Rx for the server VM. Pretty impressive performance for a software switch!
Storage-wise, I love that the Trendnets can mount an SMB share, and I’ve been saving snapshots of movement to one of the SMB shares on my WindowsSAN box.
I am also using Trendnet’s email alerting feature to take snapshots and email them to me whenever there’s motion in a given area. Which is happening a lot now as my 2 year old walks up to the cameras, smiles and says “Say cheeeese!”
All in all, a tidy & fun sub-$1000 project!
Wilson.tech 