One more thing before i lock on this camera - would you recommend anything that is better? I'd be willing to spend up to $1k per camera if it really made a difference. Granted, if I did that I'd probably only get one or two cameras. I am thinking the porch camera wouldn't need to be anything fancy as it's a small FOV and there is always light.
Well Dahua has some 4K (8 megapixel) cameras you might be interested in. At full resolution they only do 7 frames per second though, which is kind of a bummer. They cost about $360 on aliexpress or apparently $426 from amazon or ebay, through the seller "securitycameraking". Though the latter may be unbranded, they look like the right ones. Search for
4K IP camera on either site to find them. Either way those cams cost more than I would be willing to pay. I have a hard time spending more than $200 for any cam unless it is PTZ, and then I draw the line at $800. Any benefit of going higher than that price is just not worth the money to me.
should I consider only recording based on motion? I assume with
blue iris that I could set it to motion but if it detects motion save the x minutes before the motion occurred. however, I am not sure how long x could be.
Given I haven't done this before I am not sure what I'll perfer so I want to understand what you have setup.
Blue Iris lets you choose how many frames to pre-record before a motion event. It works okay in the tens and low hundreds of frames, and I am not sure if anyone has tried a full minute or longer of pre-event recording.
If you want, you can do a combination of both continuous recording and motion detection alerts.
I have an enterprise grade switch but plan on using PoE. do you recommend a particular switch? given I want 6 cameras should I get one PoE that can handle all?
Nah, I can't recommend anything particular with more than 4 PoE ports. Perhaps this one, because it is fairly cost-effective and has an extra port to connect back to your main network so you don't have to waste a PoE port on that job:
http://amzn.com/B005GAATOG
For anything more than 8 cams I would recommend a gigabit switch, or at least a switch with gigabit uplink ports. But for 8 or fewer you should be fine with a 10/100 switch like that so long as you uplink to a gigabit network before reaching the Blue Iris machine.
You can also get big managed switches with cooling fans that have 12 to 24 PoE ports. I use one such switch in my garage.
any gotchyas with installing the Camera in general? I'll be doing it myself so I'd like to be prepared for any issues people typically run into.
A few. Some dome cameras are only 2-axis adjustable which means they must be mounted on a horizontal ceiling to provide proper viewing angles. If you buy a dome cam, make sure it is 3-axis adjustable.
For the network cables, try to get cables with pure copper conductors, not copper-clad aluminum (CCA). CCA has inferior conductivity and is more brittle and could lead to trouble.
If you buy Hikvision cameras that are Chinese region (indicated by the letters "CH" in the serial number), do not update their firmware. Such cameras are hacked to English by the seller, and attempting to update the firmware will most likely brick the cam.
Most cams come with a fixed static IP address and you need to get into each camera one at a time to change it. Also change the administration password when you do this, and check for any unwanted network features like UPnP or NAT-PMP that might be punching holes in your firewall. Some cams come with a dynamic DNS address preconfigured by the manufacturer, and some are configured to connect to their manufacturer's cloud service. I often find such features enabled by default and I always disable them.
It certainly could be worse. If electricity is terribly expensive where you live, you might consider picking up a Skylake i7 system in a month or two, but otherwise I bet that will be adequate, particularly if you put in a second CPU.
Good point, do you find ourself wanting a full stream history or do you stick with motion recording? (assuming you could have plenty of storage)
Sometimes I do want a full history because I have my motion detection set less sensitive to minimize false alarms and sometimes it misses something I want to see. But I do not like the clutter of clips that you get with continuous recording, so I have a second machine also running a copy of Blue Iris, configured to continuously record the sub streams from 4 cameras. It does nothing else and doesn't even get looked at unless I want to go back and find something. This is rare, but it does happen.
A lot of people pay 3-4 times that!