Looking for video survaillance solution

I have been looking for a while for good solution for surveillance software and it has been quite hard without putting lots of money into it. First try was using the build in solutions of the cameras, i.e., FTP uploading. This was proven quite hard as it introduces a lot of points for errors. Each camera had to be controlled separately for settings from the webui pages. The most issues were caused by the old D-Link DNS-323 nas running 2x500G harddrives. The NAS was chosen over E-mail uploads as the e-mail uploads need constant network connection as well as lots of bandwidth if one extends the cameras up to 8 that is the current plan. Also because some of the cameras will watch home yards which have lots of trees and bushes that move in the wind, it makes quite a lot of traffic which is not really suitable for e-mails.

After all the problems with the solution above I started to look for NAS solutions that have surveillance features such as QNAP or Synology, the cost on those would be quite high as the hardware itself costs hundreds of € and then the license another X€. This would also mean that one would be on tight to that hardware and new requirements in the future would mean buying completely new hardware without possibility to really just do e.g. cpu or memory upgrades. Similar problem would be also with devices like dahua NVR's which have limited hw specs and in the end as the plan is to try different type of cameras buying NVR from one brand could limit the cameras that can be attached.  So the plan changed to have dedicated computer to run on these.

After the decision about dedicated computer I found out about iSpy that have been using for a while. iSpy is quite nice solution and one of the best thing is that it is free and open source (excluding some special services). After using it for couple of months it still feels that it is not the best and seems to be a bit too complex for and hard to use. After some time one of my friends pointed out xeoma which seems like an interesting option, which I will test next.


Currently I have 3 cameras in the network, Dahua IPC-HFW3200SP PoE, 2Mpix Full HD camera, Foscam FI8918W VGA WiFi camera and then one unbranded 2Mpix PoE bullet camera. More cameras will come later when I get the base of the system done and running. Only one of the cameras is currently in the final position at the moment with proper cables etc.