What motivated you to get started

the poisoning of the good little girl on the right rear, she is holding the poisoned pig's hoof that some college spring breakers gave her an hour early, soon after this picture I had to rush her to the vet where she died the next morning. the other dogs are her father Sammy, her mom Samantha and her brother Samson. she was on her own properly, had never hurt a fly, just some dumbasses thought it would be fun to poison dogs

Coldair said:

the poisoning of the good little girl on the right rear, she is holding the poisoned pig's hoof that some college spring breakers gave her an hour early, soon after this picture I had to rush her to the vet where she died the next morning. the other dogs are her father Sammy, her mom Samantha and her brother Samson. she was on her own properly, had never hurt a fly, just some dumbasses thought it would be fun to poison dogs

Click to expand...

That's terrible. I can't imagine why someone would want to harm an animal.

I used to live in a not horrible, but could be better, part of Indianapolis. I had always wanted to get cameras around the house, but never did it. When my wife and I built our house I decided at some point to get a Lorex system and installed it. It was nice to be able to see outside and I was able to provide some footage of a neighborhood kid who was going around defacing cars.

My wife likely thought I was crazy, but I traveled a lot for work and it was also nice to be able to check in on the house while I was gone. I feel she shared this sentiment when she was at the Mayo Clinic for treatment; it made you not feel so far away. I have probably gone a little overboard now, but I also now want to make sure I have good, usable footage to provide in the event something happens. My neighbors give me shit, but you damn well know that they will be the first people to come ask if something happens.

Moving to the Andy cams with audio was also a fortunate happen-stance as I was able to get video and audio of different interactions between our daughter and my wife before she passed. I'm sure others would give anything to have had some of these moments recorded.

I also came in the backyard to find my dog laying there, not moving. I was able to review the footage to see what had happened prior to him collapsing and dying. The vet's best guess was he had a heart failure; he was only just a month or two past his first birthday.

Not many people other than the vet have seen this video.

Hard to watch. So very sorry for your loss Sir

bigredfish said:

Hard to watch. So very sorry for your loss Sir

Click to expand...

He was my wife's "beat cancer" puppy too, which made all of it just that much worse.

The vet was thankful I had the videos to show them. It helped with her thoughts on what happened.

Sorry about your pup. As BRF stated, that was hard to watch.

We had two Dachshunds for 14 and 16 years each. They were sisters from the same litter. They traveled to Lagos Nigeria with us and lived there for almost five years. When we returned to Texas and I retired, they went everywhere with us in our RV. Even to Canada and loved going with us. I have lots of video from the cams at the house and sometimes if I am up to it I look at some of them. Daphne was 14 when she passed. She was the runt. For a few years she had heart trouble and was on meds for it. One morning she was coughing a lot and I brought her to the vet. She ended up needing to be put down due to heart issues. I have the last video of her in the driveway getting into the car to go to the vet. Penny was here sister and passed two years later after a long set of issues over the course of the summer. One night she fell in the pool as I had her out to go potty. I had turned my back for a second and plop into the pool she went and began sinking, not swimming. I fished her out. I have watched that video several times. A few nights later she just began yelping in her bed in front of the TV as I was sitting there. I thought she had hurt her back as she had history with that Dachshund issue. Brought her to the vet the next morning and was told it was heart lung issues. She was not getting enough air and ended up being put down also.

When I went home, looked at the video of the night before and she had plopped down and was flaying around, much like your pup was, before the yelping. She could not walk so I had carried her to the car that morning. I placed her on the grass to pee. After a while she just looked around and began wagging her tail. She was happy for a minute! That was the last time I saw her wag her tail. Sometimes I look at that video.

For me ..

It was the adjacent drug den ..

My first camera was an indoor unit that we put in the playroom when our children were young. I picked up a couple others for outdoor use as they got older, but it wasn't until I found this forum that I started to take CCTV more seriously. Probably the biggest motivation was when our kids got old enough to start driving and we had to park cars in the driveway overnight.

The Automation Guy said:

My first camera was an indoor unit that we put in the playroom when our children were young.

Click to expand...

I had totally forgotten about that part of it

We were using a wireless monitor but then wanted to be able to go outside or across the street and still be able to check in on our daughter. We switched to a Foscam R2 in the nursery and then added another in her bed room when the nursery became the play room.

My story is boring... We bought a house that had a number of (old) Axis PoE cameras attached. Previous owner (for only a year) was a technophobe, so couldn't tell me much about them. I figured them out (installer left default passwords) and decided I needed something to record video, as before they had nothing. Somehow found this group, ended up setting up BI, and have since replaced four of the cameras (thanks, Andy!) in critical areas.

I just love security cams. Always have from watching James Bond as a kid. Now I have 30+ cameras around my property....because I can . Haven't really needed them yet but I'm sure they've deterred some shitrats off when they see a couple big tracking PTZ's at the front entrance, surrounded by a few other very noticable bullet cams plus 600 watts of external LED lighting in the area too. I've heard a neighbor comment "your yard is like a prison yard". I take that as a compliment lol

bradner said:

I just love security cams. Always have from watching James Bond as a kid. Now I have 30+ cameras around my property....because I can . Haven't really needed them yet but I'm sure they've deterred some shitrats off when they see a couple big tracking PTZ's at the front entrance, surrounded by a few other very noticable bullet cams plus 600 watts of external LED lighting in the area too. I've heard a neighbor comment "your yard is like a prison yard". I take that as a compliment lol

Click to expand...

I'm VERY tempted to throw up a PTZ. I have absolutely no need for it but just for sh*ts and giggles, I might!

C.S.Tech said:

I'm VERY tempted to throw up a PTZ. I have absolutely no need for it but just for sh*ts and giggles, I might!

Click to expand...

PTZs within a well defined fix camera system is an incredible added benefit. Especially using the fixed cams as spotter cams to tell the PTZ where to look and then start tracking!

My daughter had a bad breakup with her boy friend. Got some Arlo (Pro?) cameras to to watch over her car and our property. Never had any problems with the ex-boyfriend but he turned out to be very expensive and started my camera addiction. IP Cam Talk was the enabler that made my addiction very expensive.

Actual use of the cameras has been one break in to a car parked on the street and two hit-and-runs involving a neighbors property/car. Most common use has been to find where skunks were getting into our backyard and spraying our dogs when they took a bathroom break in the middle of the night.

The reason I’m here, a pile of poo topped with a mountain of toilet paper - in my front yard.

That pile got me looking at cameras, a mention of ipcam on snipershide brought me here and this forum got me educated enough to make a move on some cameras. I have a long way to go but I’m in the right place and I know I‘ll have help when it’s needed.

I used to do a lot of contract work and contracts were always 6 to 18 months. So I'd rent an apartment far away and usually would be gone for 4 or 6 weeks at a time then would come home for 3 days then fly back out until next time. I never really had any major issues and was usually pleasantly surprised the house and yard looked good when I'd get back. There were a few times when an irrigation pop-up was broken or an infestation of insects caused some lawn damage. I always wished I had the ability to look at my house remotely instead of relying on neighbors.

But the technology really wasn't mature enough and cost effective enough for me to pull the trigger. About 5 years ago I felt that technology finally caught up enough where I should look into it seriously. I test drove a couple of boxed IP cam systems from Sam's Club but was disappointed mostly in the NVR systems. At the time I didn't know enough to realize the boxed cams were just "okay" not great and that there were much better options out there.

I wanted to find a cam forum so that I could ask for recommendations on a better NVR system than the two I test drove. I did a quick Google search for security cam forums and the first one that came up was Ipcamtalk. Lucky me! I asked my question about better boxed system but was taken back a bit by some of the responses. LOL. Was advised to look into Blue Iris which I never heard of. The rest is history. I never would gone down this path without this forum and never would have gotten my system up and running and tweaked correctly without the help of everyone here. I still rely on y'all all the time for info and recommendations. Thank you @fenderman for making this forum such a great resource. And a big thanks to everyone here for your patience and guidance.

I wanted to get a good system after my car got totaled out in front of my house and my blink cameras did not catch a thing. However, my blink system caught the trash truck an hour later!!

For me it was after retirement. We bought a Class A diesel pusher and would be out and about for 4-6 weeks for two to six times a year. Was always worried what we would find every time we returned home. Those last couple of hundred miles for me was always stressful. At one of the RV rallies, we heard a talk about using old iPhones as cameras and an app called Alfred to view the iPhone cam. I set up a couple in the house when we would leave.

Monitoring front door Monitoring back door

Came home from a trip and found this open on the side of the house. This got me to looking into cams more seriously.
It takes a star bit to open and I had it secured with a zip tie. So it was not blown open by the wind. I doubt if ATT had opened it and not closed it while we were away.


After that, I found LaView ONE cams. They are indoor cams that are good pet monitoring cams but really not great. They look like this.

Was using the surveillance software on my QNAP NAS to monitor the LaVew cams that I placed at the front door windows and inside the house. Used the LaView app to look in on the house as we were away. Had one over the front door that Halloween when we were on the road and caught this:



But it became obvious that these pet cams were not going to cut it. So I bought a true IP cam from LaView. After having issues with it that their support could/would not address, I found IPCAMTALK.

Bought Dahua cams from Andy and got BI and have never looked back.

A few months ago my nextdoor neighbor asked for my help figuring out a lightbulb wifi camera he wanted to put in his driveway ! For helping him he gave me a previous camera he bought but could never get going. Well I got it going and now I have I have 10 wifi camera's ! Wanting to view them on my computer led me to research blue Iris which led me here !

bigredfish said:

For me it was having our home burglarized while we were at work in 2012. By 2014 I had 8 cameras around the house.

Click to expand...

Same.