Blue Iris
I’ve recently done some work with a IP Camera security system. Got some Zonet cameras that work great, however the included software is pretty lame. It does great for realtime view, but the motion detection is pretty bad, and since I can’t really record all the time, I’ve been looking into alternative programs.
In the process of searching, I came across Blue Iris. It’s a program that can monitor and record up to 25 IP cameras. It was pretty cheap too, so I picked up a copy.
It installed pretty painlessly, and adding webcams was a breeze. It supports my cameras out of the box, so all I had to do was enter the IP address and the login info and I was set. It offers an insane number of options for the cameras, ranging from multiple motion detection zones to scheduled snapshots.
In addition to the camera recording support, it also offers remote uploading of the clips and a full server app, letting you view the cameras from the browser on another computer on the network or anywhere online with port forwarding. It’s quite impressive.
The only real downside with it is that it’s pretty CPU intensive, so the realtime view doesn’t work so well on the lower end systems with more than 6-7 cameras. To fully use the functionality of the program, a fast dualcore or quadcore system is highly recommended.