Be Excellent To Each Other

Hi,

I've just got home and my wife is pretty upset. She's caught the neighbours kids throwing stones at our house and had a mouth full of abuse off them.

Also.. I've just checked and it looks like they've been on our garage roof. I can see footprints in the roofing felt.

I'll be speaking to their mom later but I need some help also... I would like to set up a webcam in an upstairs bedroom, leave it running and try and catch them in the act.

Does anyone know of any decent motion activated webcam software that is free? I've got a decent-ish webcam but wouldn't know where to start with the software.

This is quite upsetting.

Weird! I've just spent the last couple of hours putting up a new camera on my system.

I use SecuritySpy, it's aces, but not free. I'll PM you the IP address of the web server so you can have a mess about with it.

And yes, it's upsetting, isn't it, with the yobbos. As I mentioned recently I had trouble not with a yobbo as such but with a little bastard on a scrambler driving on the footpath by my house. I think I've managed to deal with that now

It is, really upsetting..

I've just had a look and is Security spy Mac only? I have a PC....

Yeah, sorry, mac only. There must be something similar for PC. Good luck!

Actually I've used this before in a previous attempt: http://dorgem.sourceforge.net/

It's free and I think it worked reasonably, but still images only.

Be careful setting up a camera to spy on kids. If your neighbours are the sort I am imagining, you will be hounded out of the neighbourhood on the sex offenders register if they find out!

Conquercam used to be quite good and very cheap (you could use it indefinitely on evaluation but since the registration was only a fiver I stumped up). Dunno if it still exists and I was using it about 6 years ago.

Not sure whether Conquercam can do motion detection according to their site, but dorgem looks like it can.

I'll give it a whirl.

Just need a very long USB lead now and I'm away!

Isn't there a limit to how long a USB cable can be?

Haven't got any webcam knowledge, but I'm sorry to hear about the troubles. This sort of thing is genuinely really upsetting and frustrating when it's happening to you and your home. It seems at the time that there are very few effective ways to stop it as well - especially when the parents of said cunts don't give a shit, and I'm guessing the police, if you've even bothered, have said they can't do anything without loads of evidence? And even then it'll be bottom of their list - if they're anything like Cleveland Police, anyway. This sort of stuff can make your life bloody miserable. Just try not to let it get you and the wife down, and keep a record of all such incidents so you can easily reel off a list if/when you do go to the authorities with it.

I seem to remember reading that it was 5 metres? I picked up a cheap 3 metre one from Deal Extreme just so that my keyboardmania controller would reach the couch. Not that it helped me play the damn thing any better.

The version I had can. You could even mask parts of the image so it wouldn't pick up passing cars etc.

That said I have no idea about the latest version. Looks like the price has gone up through.

yeah, about 5m.

Active leads should let you run your camera further but at a price.

Thanks WTB.. Good advice there. My cousin is actually a police man close to here and I spoke to him for his advice. He said he'd speak to the main man at the council on my behalf if things get worse but it's best to try to appeal to the mother first.

Hopefully she'll give the kids a round of fucks and then we'll be done with and can get on as normal.

As for USB leads, I need 13ms to make the window I'd like to monitor and the maximum length USB can take is apparently 5m.

That is... if you haven't got a repeater cable! I've just been reading about them and they can help extend the limit. It's either that, or have a powered hub every 5ms.

Or of course.. I could move the PC closer to where I want it!

move the garage roof closer to the PC. Duur.

Have you got a patio you can bury the kids under?

Leave it about three months and then quietly stab one of them in the neck. With a webcam if you like.

Do you think 3 months will be long enough? I'll need an alibi... if anyone asks, I wasn't here.. right?

No.. hang on...

I WAS here! That's better.

I have mine on a couple of 5m repeater cables, they're about a fiver each. It's a kludge but it works. Further than that I'd go proper video cam and digitiser.

I've ordered a massive repeater cable.. I think that's what its called anyway.

I'll see how I get on with that but if this carries on, and things become a big problem I'll be happy to throw some more money at it.

I've always thought about proper CCTV for the house but that's definitely a last resort option.

If you go down that route, the Avermedia stuff that RF Concepts sell is aces. The in laws have one after having previously had a PC solutions. PC's crash and get upset. The Avermedia unit has been running for well over 2 years now with no intervention needed at all. If there's a powercut it just continues on its merry way as soon as power is restored:

http://www.rfconcepts.co.uk/digital-recorder.htm

They have the older blue 1304 model. I'd give it 950 Bananas. Once you set it up, you can just forget about it. The remote makes it easy to watch the footage as well. The only gripe is the unit doesn't adjust for daylight saving so you need to take that into account when searching through footage.

The HD is so big you don't even need to worry about motion detection (which is just as well as there's a spider that insists on building its web over the camera every night).