Hello,

Here's the deal. I'm looking for a "Surveilance & Monitoring" application that can capture several streams simultaneously (up to four streams) from different cameras and record them to the hard drive. I've googled around, looked in SourceForge and searched the forums here, but maybe i'm missing an important keyword here as i'm new to this whole video thing.

I've tried Pico2000 but it encodes to avi which results in huge file sizes. This brings me to my next question. Is there something out there that can handle four streams and encode them to mpeg in software? or does it have to be in hardware?

Finally, I'd like to note that additional features such as motion detection, alarms and stuff like that are also greatly desired but possibly negligible if the resulting file sizes are small enough (something in the neighbourhood of 1 DVD per-week).

Links to downloads, articles, How-Tos and any other pointers are greatly appreciated

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

[EDIT}
I know this is not a linux-specific question, but personally i prefer using debian/ubuntu/fedora over any anything M$ has to offer and I know that the community here is pleasant and helpful so please be patient and bear with me here
[/EDIT]

I've not tried multiple input streams and I've not tried Pico2000.

However, I have downloaded XAWTV which comes with a command line program "streamer" which allows you to specify frame size and frame rate - which could partially solve your filesize problem.

Ignore me if you wish

Ian

Thanks for the heads up, will look into XAWTV and post back with more details if it works for my situation.

[EDIT]
Well... i ran across WebCam Looker which runs on window$ and has some pretty neat features when it comes to choosing the source/destination of the video streams. It also has motion detection and archiving features, which makes things easier too.

If only it encoded to MPEG.... but alas, i think i'm gonna go with this one due to lack of options.

Thanks for your help Ian
[/EDIT]