My wife is the leasing manager at our apartment complex. She is being harassed by two of our neighbours for doing her job. The guy upstairs is urinating on our door and the guy across the way is peeping in our bedroom window. I need to catch them on video so I can get the cops involved and get the property manager to start eviction proceedings.

Even though she's a manager here we have to comply w/ the rules, same as everybody else; which means nothing in the windows.

So I need something like a button cam. Something very small that I can put in to the corner of a window and it won't be noticed. I need some kind of an adjustable mounting bracket so I can angle it down and to one side several degrees so I can capture the areas I need to film.

I know very little about cameras or streaming video in general; much less spy cams. I need something that is engineered well enough that it can film through a window, around the clock, in variable lighting conditions up to at least 10 feet away with resolution clear enough to obtain footage that will be actionable in a court of law.

I'd like to get streaming wifi cams if I can so I don't have to run CAT5 all over the house. Also something with a changeable long term battery that will last for a fair while running 24/7.

I have tons of junk so I can build a dedicated streaming server.

The basic idea is to wifi the cams in to her router on my segregated network and pull a wire off the router for a dedicated server. The hardware I have should work with any current distro. I prefer the .deb branch. Does anybody spin a distro that is specifically geared towards monitoring multiple cams? Preferably in a headless scenario with X ported to a remote system (my main workstation in a different subnet)? If not I can build it. Any advice on front ends or programs to look at to build it out, if need be?

And do the cams need to specifically be *nix compatible? Or just run a FOSS streaming protocol. Or will any streaming protocol work?

I have everything needed but the cams. I have no problem spending money to get quality hardware. But I'd like to stay under $200 for both cams if I can.

Any advice from folks who know more about this than I do is greatly appreciated.

You can buy a battery powered motion activated spy camera for $150 or so, methinks.

motion
...has movement detection and can easily be used together with cheap and small webcams.

I can't tell you anything about the streaming protocol.
The outside-cameras we work with have a web-gui to watch the stream with a browser; watching the stream via VLC works under Linux and Windows. They also have a feature to transfer single pictures into an ftp destination, when a movement is detected (which makes the motion program obsolete), so we prefer that over the streams.

I got it figured out (like usual). I think. I have parts on the way.

I prefer *nix whenever I can. But in this case I had to go doze.

To get cams as small as I need I'd have to build everything out completely. I'd have to build the cams from rPi's, route them all manually and set up zoneminder with a custom LAMP to run it all.

By going with a doze setup (as much as I hate to, sometimes you just have to do what works) with everything prebuilt I can cover the door and all of the windows for the same price as covering just the door and one window building it all myself from rPi's and *nix.

I got a HS203USBx47X64 from the thehomesecuritysuperstore dot com.

It's doze w/ a USB wifi receiver. I spun up an old junk doze server, dropped it on my LAN and set it up on my domain for RDP from my main *nix terminal.

When the parts get here I'll finish out the setup. I've got enough room on the drive to record ~110GB of video. Hopefully that will last a while?

The cams do 680x480 @ 2 lux. I looked around the web and found some example pics w/ the same specs with lighting conditions that didn't look too awfully different from what we have around here and in ~95%+ of them I could have positively identified someone in the pic. Hopefully these cams will be at least that good.

There's not a lot of documentation on these. So I don't know if the recording is motion, streaming or still. But, they have a 90 day money back guarantee if I don't like them. And I put them on a CC, so if they give me grief about a return I can always dispute the charge. But hopefully all of that won't be necessary.

On the upside though, since the world is addicted to doze, it will (I *assume*) be auto encoded to work w/ media player.

I need such a set-up, but this time for my old mother's house. It would be great to see how you've finalize this project and whether you're happy with the outcome a few weeks down the line. Also, any input on your budget/cost for this project would be great.

Cheers,
DD

I went different route, I started with two Panasonic BL-C140A IP cameras, the cost was $100 each years ago. I have a FreeBSD multipurpose router/server, cameras load pictures into it over FTP when they detect motion. I can see these pictures remotely or locally. Over years I have added a few more IP cameras to cover the area around my house - and inside of house. The advantage of this approach is you do not need any centralized software to manage your camera network. Downside is probably higher cost per camera.

We have two Nest cameras at our house...granted, they're about $200 each, but do 1080p, with infrared capabilities for night, motion activated, wifi, and upload to a cloud server. Hardly anything to set up at all.

That said, One of these:
https://jet.com/product/detail/e5fd3...v_VxoCzkvw_wcB

..just inside your door, with one of those nice metal decorative mats will do far more for the front-door guy.

And ANY camera, inside your home, pointed OUT the window will catch the other guy. You can put it a foot or so away, behind some curtains...the only way it would get his face, is if he was close enough to your window to look in.

This has actually turn in to a nightmare.

The first system I got (above) just didn't work when I set it up. So I returned it and got a "traditional" wired system.

There were a bunch of tech issues to resolve. Then when I went to mount the cams they were too big to fit in the windows. So I took it back.

Now I'm on my 3rd system. It's a wireless Dlink system. The first thing I did when I got it home was to make sure the cams will fit in the windows. They do. So now I have to go through all of the set up and testing issues.

The wife wants "plug and play". Happy wife, happy life. But I keep telling her that if she'd just let me buy a bunch of rPi's that even though I'd have to compile, build, debug and test *everything* from scratch that I'd probably be done by now. But, hey, what do I know? I'm just the mechanic.

Zoneminder should be able to do what you want if the hardware is compatible. The Zoneminder hardware list at the link below.

https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Hardware_Compatibility_List

It's a pretty complex piece of software. The distributions named at the link below list the ones which have it in their repositories and it includes Debian and the Ubuntus.

https://zoneminder.com/downloads/

The page below has links to instructions to install on several of these distributions.

http://zoneminder.readthedocs.org/en...allationguide/