Motion Activation

[SageMother]

I want to get a CCTV system for the exterior of my home. Is it better to have one that i motion activated, or is on at all times?

[PeterK]

Well this would all depend on the type of DVR you purchase and the type of compression you're running your video at. Basically, the higher resolution of your video, the more space it will fill up on your DVR's harddrive, thus you would have less backlog of video. Running low resolution of your video will sometimes defeat the purpose(blurry, pixelated or distorted).

If you have a DVR that has terrabits of harddrive space or if it can handle H.264 compression, then don't worry about it, leave it on all the time.

My suggestion is that if you have a small amount of harddrive space, then yes, run motion detection to capture the important events. The other option is to set the video at MJPEG and take 3 pictures/ second. It's always better to have higher quality video than lots of poor useless video.

[InterwatchSecuritydotcom]

I think its best to have motion activation/detection, we can't see the point of filming needless events as this just takes up disk space and when you actually need to go back to view an event it can be a pain!!

Have you decided on anything yet?

[iStorm]

Im with Simon on this one, I would reccomend activation only recording. It just makes life easier is you need to go back to an event, what is the point of having video of cars going up the street, Particion the grid you want to be activated or set up some activation perimeters!