Home security/surveillance - best software?

[MechGeek]

There's been a rash of break-ins in my neighborhood so I'm playing Big Brother to hopefully catch them in the act. Right now, I'm using a trial version of Webcam XP Pro 5.3.4.140. It does everything I need, but it's ridiculously CPU-hungry and full of bugs. It'll do for now, but I really need something better.

Setup:
I have a networked PC in every room of the house. Each has an ATI TV Wonder or Hauppauge PCI card connected to a camcorder. Webcam XP Pro is installed on each PC, but only to provide an HTTP stream.
My main PC in the living room has a USB webcam & fetches the aforementioned video streams from the "slave" PCs in the other rooms. The main PC is powerful enough to to do motion detection, DVR, etc. on every stream in real-time.
In case the main computer gets stolen, I have it set to upload JPG snapshots to an off-site server every 2-5 seconds any time motion is detected. (upstream bandwidth is only 512kbit so I'm kinda limited there)

Is there another program that can do all this? To recap the most important functions I need:
- Support for PCI capture cards and USB webcams
- Streaming video over a LAN
- 24/7 recording of multiple streams
- Motion detection
- Capable of uploading snapshots via FTP or HTTP to a server.

Ideas or suggestions? I could probably use a separate, small program on the "slave" PCs since all they're doing is streaming video. The main PC does the hard work of motion detection and recording.

 

[defektiv]

WebcamXP is excellent overall. You're right, the newer versions are full of issues. I had been using a previous version (4.7?) for some time and never ran into any issues. I upgraded and immediately went back for the reasons you listed among other things. Search the net for 4.7 or send me a PM and I'll upload it for you later. I believe you can purchase a new version and use the license for the older versions as well.