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Discount Security DVRs, Surveillance DVRs, and CCTV Digital Video Recorders
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About Discount Security DVR
Discount Security DVR seeks to provide you with low cost solutions to your surviellance needs. We can help you select the right Digital Video Recorder for your surveillance or CCTV systems.
How to Select a Disocunt Security DVR
Step 1: How many Channels do you need in your discount security DVR:
The first thing that you need to do when selecting a Discount Security DVR is to determine how many surveillance cameras you will need. Each camera will need its own channel for your DVR. You will need to think about this not only for what you need currently, but also considering potential surviellance needs in the future. Will you need to add cameras to your CCTV setup later? If, so you will want to buy a security DVR with enough channels for your surveillance cameras and room to add more later. We have CCTV solutions ranging from 4 channels to 64.
Step 2: Choosing a PC Based DVR or Standalone Digital Video Recorder
The next step in determining the right digital video recorder for your surveillance setup is to determine whether a standalone or PC based discount security DVR will suit your CCTV needs better. Standalone DVRs are generally more stable and, being plug and play solutions, are easier to setup. A standalone DVR also enables you to remotely operate the DVR and easily view your surveillance video over the internet, without interrupting your recording.
In contrast, PC-Based discount security DVR solutions are significantly more complex and unique. Many times, people are forced to choose PC-based DVRs because Standalone digital video recorders don't usually support more than 16 channels. Being that PC Based DVRs have expansion slots, expandable memory, and expandable processing power; they can support many more surveillance cameras. PC-Based DVRs, although, much more complicated to setup can have significantly more options. Lastly, a PC-based discount security DVR can support much higher hard drive capacity, especially with our 4U rack-mount server cases. (Don't worry we will explain why hard drives are important in Choosing a CCTV DVR in Step 4.)
Step 3: Choosing between a H.264 or MPEG 4 Discount Security DVR
Surveillance camera video can be recorded in a number of formats, but there are two types of files that are generally used by DVRs to record surviellance camera footage. Those two types of are H.264 and MPEG 4. H.264 is a slightly better quality video format for surveillance as the way that the video is encoded (turned into digital data) is handled by the hardware, whereas MPEG-4 DVR's software handles the compression.
Although not being as high quality, a MPEG-4 DVR's surveillance video is still a great option. A MPEG-4 discount security DVR also is significantly less expensive. Functionally, H.264 DVRs really shine when you are recording multiple channels at the same time, as the hardware -- not the software (which can have bugs or crash) does the encoding.
A last option is the MJPEG DVR format. MJPEG DVRs have the lowest quality of CCTV video. MJPEG compresses the surveillance video to the point that it may appear grainy or distorted. Don't choose a models with MJPEG compression unless you are really looking for a cheap DVR.
Step 3: Calculate how much record time do you need for your discount security DVR:
The last thing to consider when choosing a CCTV digital video recorder, is to use our DVR Hard Drive Calculator. This tool will help you calculate
the right amount of hard-drive space need to record and store all your surveillance footage for a set amount of time. Each one of our security DVR models has different hard drive that can be added to your DVR, ranging from 300 Gigabytes to several Terabytes.
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