How long will it take

Setting up a security system, regardless of the manufacturer or style of system, requires a bit of planning and time before even purchasing any equipment. Following this guide will make it a breeze to figure out just what you can expect when choosing and installing the physical devices.

Although StreamShuttle provides a way to view and monitor the devices, there is still the act of physically installing the cameras themselves. With a little bit of planning, most external build outs can be completed in a few hours. After that, it's just configuring the devices themselves and adding them to StreamShuttle to start monitoring! This initial setup only happens once, so after installation day, you won't have to worry about it again!

I got it! show me the hardware

How to design your system?

Generally, the most difficult part of setting up your security system is determining how and where to begin. It is very easy to get overwhelmed with the information most manufactures put out, and at the same time be underwhelmed with the lack of information they provide about the features and functions necessary to decide what you need. Below is a simple overview of the key things that will determine the needs of your system.

There is no definitive method to determine what works best for everyone and their specific requirements, however, there are some guidelines that apply to most scenarios. We first need to figure out where we need coverage; then we can determine the best way to get coverage in that spot (wired / wireless). Then we will look at camera specific features that may matter (night vision / audio). Once we have these questions answered we will know how much storage or any other equipment we MAY need.

The basic hardware components of any system are the cameras themselves, a computer to store the footage, and any additional equipment that may be required for an optimal experience. Additional equippment may include routers, power over ethernet (POE) networking switches, separate wireless access points, etc., which provide performance and security improvements.

Lets start by deciding where we need coverage

The most obvious coverage areas are entry points. In addition to just having a camera that is covering the area, you will want to ensure these areas also have a good angle to capture the things that matter, likes faces, license plates, and other things that could be useful when reviewing the footage.

• For instance, if your front door entrance is at the center of the house, you may have a camera on a corner of the house that covers this area, but it may not be close enough or at the best angle to capture these necessary details. Instead, adding an additional camera right at the door, like a video doorbell may be necessary.

Once we know what areas we are interested in covering, we next need to determine how many cameras are required and from what angles are best to cover that area.

Determining how a camera will cover an area

It's tough to try and picture this without have some type of plan. Luckily this is easier than it sounds and soon we will have a tool to help more easily generate these plans.

For the sake of simplicity we will use a simple four sided house.

If you have a more complicated house plan don't worry too much the dimensions don't have to be 100% accurate. It's slightly more important to get any angles of the house plan correctly, again this doesn't have to be perfect we are just trying to get a good estimate.

Basically, all we need to-do is draw a simple square and create a couple paper cut-outs of the "Field of view" you cameras have.

Then simply overlay these cut-outs where you envision the cameras going. Doing this can really help you determine what area the cameras will actually cover.

- (guide using cutouts)

Camera connectivity types (wired / wireless)

Both wired and wireless cameras have advantages and disadvantages. In most cases it is recommended to install wired cameras if possible. Using wired cameras actually makes the system much more resilient to external factors, like interference and network saturation. Going wired can help to eliminate those types of issues, which can be really tough to figure out.

Considerations when choosing wireless cameras

• Wireless cameras can be jammed - Most people don’t think too much about this, but it's actually pretty trivial for someone with the right knowledge to jam WIFI signals, rendering the cameras completely useless. This is not a concern with wired cameras.
  ex. Toms Hardware | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_aTSUma14E
• High resolution cameras require high bandwidth - Wireless systems are much more limited in this regard. The network may be OK when using only a couple low resolution cameras, but you will quickly run into issues when trying to add more cameras and still expect to have a stable wireless network.
• Wireless cameras still require power - People often assume that wireless will be easier because they will not need to run new Ethernet (network) wires, however at the end of the day, wireless cameras still require power. Therefore, at a minimum, power would still need to be run to the installation point if it doesn't already exist.

Wireless isn't all bad, it just takes a bit more care and planning to ensure there is enough bandwidth to support all your devices. If more than a couple wireless cameras are required, it probably makes sense to purchase a separate wireless router dedicated to servicing just the cameras, on a channel different from the primary WIFI. This will prevent the cameras from bogging down you day-to-day internet activity and vice versa. Again, this is something you don't really need to worry about with a wired setup.

Most wired and wireless cameras can be powered using POE (power over ethernet). POE allows you to send low voltage power over ethernet wires. This makes running power and networking to the cameras much simpler as there is no need to tie into mains power at each camera location. Instead, you just run simple ethernet lines back to a single POE switch which injects power into the ethernet lines, meaning there is a single wire which carries both the power and network data.

Picking the right cameras

Now that we know where and what type of cameras we need, the last decision we have to make is to determine which features are required at each camera.

Outside of the base coverage areas requirements, which we have already determined, there are a few other features to take into consideration when narrowing down what we need for each camera.

• Resolution - More isn't always better. Resolution is one of the primary factors in determining how long we can store recordings, and how many cameras the network can handle at once. Additionally, higher resolution doesn't necessarily mean better picture quality.
• Audio features - Do you need to record audio? Do you want two-way audio to be able to "talk back" through the camera like an intercom?
• Night vision - Most cameras now come with night vision (infrared) by default. It's usually pretty solid for indoor cameras. However, the viewing distance is much less when cameras are operating in "night mode". It's possible to get a further viewing distance with supplemental infrared lights.
• PTZ (Pan Tilt Zoom) - This is the ability to move the camera around.

The last thing we need to consider when picking a camera, is to ensure it will work with StreamShuttle. You will need to see if it supports RTSP, RTP, or the ONVIF discovery protocol. If the camera advertises any of those features it should work. Checkout our Recommended hardware to find out which brands are known to work.

Unfortunately today, many of the "super cheap / no name" cameras on the big consumer retail sites will NOT work. Instead, many require you to utilize their apps to access the camera features. This forces you to trust, utilize, and pay for their cloud services on a "per camera" basis. Head over to why do it yourself | Why Choose Us to find out more on why this matters. If you are unsure if the camera will be compatible you can send us email and we will get back to you ASAP with confirmation.

It may be best to find a company you like and use them for most, if not all, devices. This is NOT a requirement, and one of the features of StreamShuttle is being able to support a wide variety of devices. However, the reason for this recommendation is to help simplify things a bit more. Today, many of the popular camera manufactures require you to utilize their apps to configure the actual device settings, like setting the timezone, changing camera resolutions, and frame rates. There nothing wrong with combining manufacturers aside from the fact that you may need to learn how different apps / ecosystems work, even if you only have to use the app once for initial configuration.

Determining what we need to actually run the StreamShuttle software

To run StreamShuttle itself you only need a computer with enough disk space and processing power to handle all the cameras you have. Trying to pick a computer to run the system can be overwhelming when comparing the specs across different scenarios. Although StreamShuttle will work with most hardware, if you don't want to worry about that too much you can head over to the recommended hardware area to find equipment that is known to work well.

When determining the computer itself there are a few things to consider.

• How long will we need to retain the footage? In most cases, it’s not required to store footage more than a few weeks. Once you decide on the cameras and the resolution of each camera, this becomes a pretty simple calculation.
  (Frame Rate x Resolution x Number of Days x Number of cameras ) + (storage required for archived events)

Checkout Storage Calculator to get a rough idea.

What types and how much storage do I need

You will generally run into performance issues with the storage disks before anything else. So something to look for when deciding on a PC is the number of disks it can house.

The drive the OS is installed on ideally will be separate from the footage storage and cache drives. It only needs to be large enough to hold the operating system (120GB) and would ideally would be an SSD.

The drive where the footage is stored should be at least a 7200 RPM drive, most types of SSD would work as well, however, generally regular hard drives are much more economical. Luckily disk drives are pretty large these days, so in most cases a single drive will be more than enough to handle most home systems (6 cams for 30+ days) (2TB-4TB). If you think you may expand in the future, then just make sure the computer has space to add another drive.

If you are concerned about losing footage in the event of a power outage, you may want to add another drive to use for caching. This drive should be an SSD and it also does not to be too large, just enough to hold any temporary data (120GB).

• In testing even using a cheaper USB 3.0 SSD drive for caching seems to work well.

What type of memory and processor do I need

As a general rule of thumb, you will need one processor core and 750MB of ram per camera; This should be more than enough to cover object, motion, and audio detection on a pass-through stream. If transcoding is required (adding timestamps, cropping video, changing frame rate) then another core per camera may be required.

Other hardware that is useful but not required

• Does the computer support power on after power outage.
  • This feature is not usually advertised, most servers will support this, but home PCs may not. It will automatically turn the PC on once power returns after an outage.
• A UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply)
  • This is basically a battery that will allow the server to run for a few minutes after a power outage. If after a few minutes the power does not come back then it will be "gracefully" shutdown.
• Do we want 2 network cards in the device? If so its, we can easily block all cameras from accessing the internet without worrying too much about configuration.
  • With a separate AP/router we can ensure all devices on this network never have access to the internet at all.