10 minutes in front of his house and someone can be in regardless if it's on the net or not. Wireless is great but it does make everything open to hacking. Best option is to run wires, yes they are a pain in the ass but hard to hack into a wire.
I think I have been in IT security to long and have become jaded.
Yes I agree, & suggested he run a seperate network that is not online, one that also has "Wi-Fi disabled", only I should have written this more clearly as I failed to point it out!
I like the Idea of a hard-wire only install for the entire setup.
That's the most secure way, the downside is he will not be able to remotely view his home from anywhere.
if it is online so he can watch his home from anywhere, he doesn't run a huge risk, just change the default admin passwords on any hardware involved, good to go for 98% of the time!
I'm with w9cll, wire it.
$300 is a tight budget. My son is into flying drones and they use the small security camera and old dvd screen to fly. Couldn't you make something up where you could wire it an have the data go to a laptop to view later?
Just a thought.
Absolutely ,you could reuse a few old cameras and do it for much less than 300$!
The issue is that's a hacked up/cobbled together setup that is prone to have issues because it's not a dedicated stand-alone system, and has many possible failure points. (They could be ironed out...)
A capture card on a laptop/pc would do it, get a big hard drive also, add some DVR software then you could use any old camera with an RCA output!
Depending on the # of the capture card's input/total # of capture cards & the computers hardware capabilities & software, the system would work. I think it will take a "beefy" computer with plenty of ram, video memory, and CPU head room. (Also use a battery back-up PSU)
You
might be able to get away with using an old Windows XP "Junk" computer, that hardware may be dated by todays standards but could work..
