Look Ma, I’m on TV — Video Monitoring over Wireless LANs

Look Ma, I’m on TV — Video Monitoring
over Wireless LANs
The heightened awareness for security has given rise to a more consumerfriendly
grade of video monitoring gear for your wireless network, too — this
is stuff that used to be the exclusive domain of security installers. You can get
network-aware 802.11b-supporting video cameras that contain their own integrated
Web servers, which eliminate the need to connect a camera directly to
your computer. After installation, you can use its assigned Internet Protocol
(IP) address on your network to gain access to the camera, view live streaming
video, and make necessary changes to camera settings.
Panasonic sells its KX-HCM250 wireless network camera (www.panasonic.com;
$750), complete with SSID filtering and 64/128-bit WEP encryption to help protect
your wireless network from illegal intrusion. (See Figure 14-3 to see the
product. We talk more about SSIDs and WEP in Chapters 6 and 10 if you need to
know more.) The KX-HCM250 allows up to 30 simultaneous viewers to see up
to 15 frames per second (fps) of live-motion video with resolution of up to 640
x 480. Through a Web-based interface, you can perform remote pan and tilt
functions and click to eight preset angles.
D-Link is another vendor that has embraced the video aspects of wireless
based video surveillance. Its D-LinkAir DCS-1000W (www.d-link.com; $329) —
shown along with the Panasonic KX-HCM250 in Figure 14-3 — gives you VGAquality
streaming video with built-in automatic gain and white balance controls.
It comes with IPView, which is a Microsoft Windows-compatible
monitoring application. IPView allows you to control all your DCS-1000W cameras
on your LAN from one location. IPView also lets you view as many as 16
cameras on one screen, supports manual and scheduled recording to an AVI
movie file on your hard drive, and supports motion detection that triggers
automatic recording.
Go to www.dlink.com/LiveDemo/ for a live demo of the D-LinkAir DCS-
1000W camera.
Installing a wireless network camera is incredibly simple. These are network
devices and usually sport both an RJ-45 10Base-T wired network interface
along with an 802.11b air interface. Installing the camera usually involves first
connecting the camera to your network via the wired connection and then
using the provided software to access your camera’s settings. Depending on
how complicated the camera is (whether it supports the ability to pan, to
e-mail pictures on a regular basis, to allow external access, and so on), you
might be asked to set any number of other settings.
You might be asked to set a fixed (static) IP address for the camera on your
home wireless network. In Chapter 6, we talk about how (in most cases) your
wireless clients obtain an IP address (when on your network) through the
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DCHP). DHCP just gives you an address
based on the next one that happens to be available on your network; it can
change from time to time. However, to access the camera from outside your
home, say from your office, you want that IP address to be the same all the
time so that you don’t have to guess what address it obtained from your DHCP
host. When setting up your camera, it will probably ask you to give it a fixed
address on your network. To do this, simply choose a number outside the range
that’s governed by your host’s DHCP client range. If you let your router assign
DHCP from within the range of numbers from 192.168.254.0 to 192.168.254.50,
you can pick any number above 50 and below 254, such as 192.168.254.100. You
need to make sure that you don’t pick a number being assigned by the router’s
DHCP, or you might find that your number gets taken by another assignment.
The wireless communications doesn’t have to be 802.11b, although we
would argue that it makes sense to use standards-based gear when you can.
Danny likes his X10 FloodCam (www.x10.com; $130) that videotapes all activity
around the house, night or day, and sends the images to a VCR or PC. That
system uses 2.4 GHz to send the signals, but it’s not standardized wireless
LAN traffic. Over time, we believe that many of these systems will move to
802.11 or Bluetooth when those chip and licensing costs continue to come
down.