Announcement From An Endangered Species – An Independent PSIM Vendor

Mitch Vine gives his take (registration required) on the future of independent PSIM vendors.

IPVideo Corporation, of Bay Shore, NY, an independent PSIM solutions maker is a long time veteran in the PSIM business. With 15+ years of experience in the game, they have a lot of experience to offer. Like many PSIM companies their initial products have been heavily influenced by the needs of a small number of large clients. In their case a large project for Con Edison was big influencer.

IPVideo announced a C3 Fusion^TM PSIM, a new release of their product that tracks alerts and alarms, helps plan new procedures, gives operators a work list for a specific alert situation, tracks open tasks, and generally provides tools to help deal with a busy operations centre. After a situation has been resolved, C3 fusion keeps the data in a database for later review or forensic analysis.

Their product can be used to supplement a 3rd party VMS, or used with IPVideo’s own VMS.

Although software functionality is the center of the IPVideo’s announcement, we believe that the real story is in the integration expertise that the company brings to a large end user. Any Fortune 500 company integrating video, access control, intrusion etc. across many large properties is going to need some serious customization/integration work. They will have a ton of legacy issues that will defy any simple off-the-shelf approach.

The functionality in the software demo is only a starting point for a large project. Focused vendors like IPVideo will do anything to make a large client happy. We suspect that the flexibility of their approach, and the motivation and ability of their staff to accommodate the wishes of a large client is worth at least as much as the base functionality.

In spite of the title of this article – we think that independent PSIM vendors will continue to play an important role. Even though we view them as software vendors, their role as system integrators is critical. We expect to see more of these service oriented vendors emerge.

UPDATE:  John Honovich  tweets: any vendor who sells VMS and PSIM is not independent, ipvideocorp is no more independent than verint/rontal.

I think John missed the point here.  IPVideo Corporations  independence creds are based on the companies private ownership and open business model, not the fact the they do or don’t have their own VMS.

Password Security and Attacks

Most models of IP Network cameras and many associated devices use basic authentication that transmits login information including passwords in plain text over the network and often over the Internet. There are significant risks involved in this type of operation. This article details common types of attacks.

http://www.infoworld.com/print/90521

The IPVideo PSIM Display Console uses a hashing system that is very difficult to crack and never transmits the passwords over the network. Passwords are never stored on client machines and stored in the PSIM router as encrypted hashes.

Megapixel Evidence

Most are familiar with the process of exporting captured video archive as an AVI file using the facilities built into DynaView. This process becomes a bit more challanging when dealing with megapixel archives. Often the area on interest is only a small part of the entire image. Converting a large number of complete megapixel or multi–megapixel images can result in unmanageably large AVI files.

A better process can often be used as follows:

1. Export the desired time interval from DynaView vPlay as a series of JPGs
2. Perform a batch crop operation using a program like XnView to select the desired area
3. Convert this cropped sequence to an AVI file using DynaView vMovie

Some further notes:

Try to use a standard crop size like 320 x 240 (CIF) or 640 x 480 (4CIF) to capture the area of interest.

It is possible to “follow the action” by cropping various sections of the exported JPG sequence with the same crop window size postioned differently.  This will appear as a jump cut in the final movie.

When converting a small crop area to AVI, try using vMovie to up-sample by 2X (for example, using 640 x 480 as the output size for 320 x 240 cropped JPG’s) during the conversion as this will often produce better results than expanding on playback.

Use the (free) DIVX codec from within vMovie to create smaller high-quality AVI files. DIVX is also an extremely fast compressor in comparison with any standard Windows codecs.

Always keep the original  video archive aside as part of the chain of evidence and bear in mind that the basic validation will be human affidavits confirming the continuity of that chain of evidence. Complete the entire process in one session and do not leave a window of time where someone else could make changes. Burn the results including the original archive on a DVD and keep it in a safe, with a lawyer, or on your person.

XP Service Pack 3 blocks .NET security patches

Many IP network solutions run on Windows XP and some of those use Dot Net. This article is worth review

http://windowssecrets.com/2008/12/04/03-XP-Service-Pack-3-blocks-.NET-security-patches

DynaView does not use Dot Net and DynaView SOC does not use XP Pro, so we neatly avoid this problematic issue.

Help From Afar

The ability to administer a network video system from a remote location is a great time and cost saver. Windows remote desktop is commonly used for this purpose but does not work well with IP video environments. There are several available solutions that do work and an open source remote control package we highly recommend is UltraVNC.

UltraVNC consists of a server part installed on the machine(s) you wish to control remotely and a client part installed on your local machine. The machine(s) running UltraVNC server must be reachable by an IP address or Domain. Note that this IP address or domain could be temporary as long as it does not change during the remote control session. Complete installation instructions are provided for UltraVNC.

By default UltraVNC requires ports 5800 and 5900 to be open in your firewall. These ports may be changed if need be. You should not expect video viewed through UltraVNC to be of good quality – this package is meant for control and admnistration and will serve the purpose very well.