Yesterday I purchased the Blue Iris camera recording software (http://blueirissoftware.com/) I Must say it works truly superb for its price ($49.95) compared to other software packages.
I'm using 5 Axis camera's and a Foscam PTZ inside my house and got the idea to use them as a motion detector.
I set up a new virtual Windows Server 2008 x86 with 1gb of RAM, installed and configured the Blue Iris software (needed to disable UAC and install the Windows Desktop Experience to make in work). The Blue Iris software runs as a service on the virtual machine so I do not have to log on to the machine.
To communicate with Homeseer I also installed the Homeseer speaker client on the server, it does not have to be running but by installing it you can use HS scripting commands in a vbscript file.
In Homeseer, create an event you want to trigger in case of motion, for example: Create a vbs file on your machine with Blue Iris installed and put this in it:
Code: Select all
strEvent = Wscript.Arguments(0)
Set hsi = CreateObject("HomeSeer2.application")
hsi.SetHost("10.111.0.2:8742")
rval = hsi.Connect("username", "password")
If rval <> "" Then
MsgBox(rval)
End If
Set hs = hsi.GetHSRef
hs.triggerEvent strEvent
I must say this really works very good, I have 3 virtual machines running with HyperV on an intel 3Ghz Core2 with 8Gb of RAM. The BlueIris software recording 6 camera's uses almost no CPU.