questions about setting up a surveillance camera system

My wife has a cousin who runs a farm. Among other things, he sells hay, sometimes in small bales and sometimes in the monster large bales. Most of his customers will show up when he's not around, load their truck, and leave a check. Unfortunately, one or more of them have perhaps been helping themselves to more than they've paid for. I offered to help design a simple surveillance system so he could say "gosh, Bob, I see you took five bales of hay, so you know you owe me $X." The goal here is to help keep honest people honest, not to defeat determined attackers. (That means, for example, that there's no need for night vision.)

From the farm house to the hay barn is far enough that it's completely out of wireless range, and the hay barn also has no power. It's probably 200-300 wire feet from the farm house to where a camera might be mounted, which is right on the edge of what you can (officially) do with a single run of Ethernet cable. Power-over-Ethernet cameras seem like the right solution here.

From playing with my own camera where a surveillance camera might be mounted, I concluded that he's going to need high-def (720p) in order to have enough detail to positively ID the errant customers (and even then, he might not be able to read license plates, but he said he can recognize each person's truck).

So... questions for the gallery:

- Active vs. passive PoE: Which one is which? If I buy a PoE-capable Ethernet switch, what's it putting out? Passive PoE has much shorter range (FAQ), which would be an issue here.

- These various camera seem to output H.264 video (example: Axis M1114E), including various fancy features like motion detection. What isn't standard, or isn't exactly apparent, is how exactly standard this stuff is, like whether you can hook any software DVR up to any H.264 camera and expect everything to just work. Anybody have experience with this? Ideally, I want to recommend some specific thing to buy and install, then walk away and not get stuck supporting him with products that I don't particularly understand.

- At least right now, most IP surveillance cameras and related recording and support stuff seem to be targeted at professional needs, like managing your museum. To make an analogy, he doesn't need Adobe Lightroom; he needs iPhoto. What's the right answer?

- Would you spec out a generic PC to do the recording or a dedicated DVR-like thing like the Vivotek NR8201. Of course, their literature is decidedly unclear about whether they work with *any* IP camera or only their own.

- EDIT: oooh, open-source software for managing cameras! ZoneMinder.

Any thoughts or advice on how to pull something like this together would be much appreciated.

(For future reference, for myself if nobody else, the semi-decent chat forum for this stuff seems to be cctvforum.com.)

Why not just rig up a camcorder with a big battery and ability to record only when something is moving? My Panasonic mini-dv has batteries good for 4 hours of continuous recording (on 2 hour tapes...) and I have a DOD car vid camera that records only when things are moving in its field of vision that could probably run all day on a makita drill battery.

SoHo NAS boxes can often deal with a range of IP security cameras. My Synology DS211 has it as a feature on the box, not that I've used it.

I'd be interested in something like this too, we had our whole apple crop stolen last year. In our case the problem is that the orchard is around 400 mtrs from the house (and any power supply)

My only experience is with a couple of cheap Foscam units managed by SecuritySpy on a Mac, and I'm pretty pleased with the setup. My understanding from following the release notes of that software and the Android app I use to connect to my cameras is that there are sets of models from each manufacturer that use the same or similar protocols, but that there's no one standard across all makes and models. Something like motion detection is generally something you'll set up in the software, and SecuritySpy has nice features like being able to mask out an area of the camera's field of view that's ignored for motion detection purposes (in case you have a busy street in front of your house or whatever.)

I think I will give ZoneMinder a look, though, since there's a module for my NAS that might simplify my setup a bit, assuming the feature set is close enough to what SecuritySpy offers.

The axis stuff is good, but pricey. Most of the available generic monitoring software will work with any camera, but it does all the motion detection back at the PC end, ignoring anything clever the camera itself is doing.

However, the axis cameras have a good range of motion detect options including covered zones, sensitivity level, and being able to save pre-trigger content as well as post trigger. They will also just FTP this stuff up somewhere safe in a date & time stamped file, so no server is really required. I have a 207MW that I use to cover the house when I'm away.

I recently installed a logitech alert 700 for outdoor coverage at home, this comes with a PoE injector/200mbit powerline network node combined power brick, but the camera itself is vanilla PoE (the difference between the starter pack and the add-on kits is just the powerline networking hub for the router end - I don't use this, just a standard PoE switch).

The nice thing about this is that you can use it with a PC/windows software, or it'll just record motion to its internal microSD slot and then download it next time you connect up. They claim "HD" but it's really just "better than VGA". The night vision has some seriously powerful illumination.

Seems like a fake camera and a sign saying "I see you" might be the cheapest way to keep these mostly honest people honest. You’d need to sell a lot of hay to pay for a full blown camera setup.

I thought about fake cameras, but so far as I can tell, they really do want enough evidence to be able to email somebody a picture of themselves.

Can the surveillance be at a location other than the load site?
Like on a drive way leading in or out.

Hopefully it isn't a customer over loading, but another that has simply found an easy score.

They suspect that the problem boils down to customers who are over-loading, but they lack proof.

How about a stand-alone trail camera?

http://www.trailcampro.com/