So you are thinking about setting up a small surveillance camera system and you want to use your current PC. Here is some advice on what you need to do, to make this process successful. First, we must advice if you are going to do this, you will need to really think about what you are trying to do. Both now and in the future. It is very common that once you add one camera, you want to add more cameras on to your system. With PCs you usually have three or four open PCI slots, where you can keep adding more DVR capture cards to your system. But you should know what these dvr cards are just no any regular PCI card for graphics, T.V., or any other gadgets. They are high-voltage and are consistently running 24 hours a day. So what we are emphasizing here, is that you need to think about what is really going on and what your future plans are. Most people that engage in using their computers as a dvr, still want to use the computer for everyday usage. Most like this because it is cheaper than buying a standalone system or PC based security system. However, if you really think you might have up to four security cameras connected to your capture card, then there are a few things that you need to consider and prep for this kind of video. First, know that your hard-drive in you computer will be eaten very quickly with real-time video recording. Most security dvr cards out now have MPEG-4 or H.264 compression and as a result you are looking at a video consumption of 6 gig per camera per day. If you know how much video you have then just do the math. With just one surveillance camera, you might do just fine. Just keep in mind that one day, the recording will eat up your hard-drive space. This is important to know, because depending on how your hard-drive was formated for your operating system, you are in risk of crashing the computer or the dvr software looping over hard-drive space to keep recording video. Writing over the hard-drive will cause system problems and potential loss of important vacation pictures, resumes, documents, and other important information. As technology grows and engineers find more plug and play methods for external RAID hard-drives, this will not be a problem. But this blog post is about those of you that do not have super advance setups and you need to be made aware of potential risk before you make a move like this. So consider yourself warned.
Now, there are some inexpensive things you can do to prep your PC to be a security dvr and still a daily useable PC. All you need to do is ensure your motherboard can first handle the stress from the cards. If you have your manuals, call the manufacture and speak to a tech. They are usually free to let you know if such capture cards could be potentially threatening to your security camera system. If not, next you need to go buy a 250gig, 500gig, or tera byte hard-drive to store all your recorded video to and stay independent of your main hard-drive. Most computers now, you can just connect your hard-drives via sata connection instead of ide connection. As a result, most Windows operating systems will recognize the drive. If not, when you reboot your computer you will have to hold down "F2" or some special button on your keyboard to get into BIOS. BIOS is the flash-ROM chip, where special booting instructions are kept to help your computer go through "POST" (a series of test to ensure computer health and Windows booting). On this chip is where all the recognizable instructions and hard-ware is kept. Upon entering BIOS menu setup, you can go in and add this hard-drive, the computer should see it. You can select it and save it and then exit BIOS. The computer should go through boot process and enter Windows. Once you are in windows you can go to "My Computer" and look for the new hard-drive, there should be two hard-drive icons there! Then load your DVR software and go through your menu setting and tell the software which hard-drive it is to store all the video. It is just this simple. The only difficult part to converting your PC into a dvr is installing the separate hard-drive. If you are still unclear on how to do this, just do a Google search! Or if you don't want to deal with it, take it to a computer repair shop and have them install a secondary hard-drive.
All in all, before converting your PC into a dual usage computer, make sure you computer can handle the capture cards first. You can call the manufacture of your computer model and probably talk to a consultant or tech free of charge. Next, you will need to add a separate hard drive to make sure you don't crash your operating system or have other important data over-written and last you need to instruct the DVR software where to store all recorded video!