[jamesatfish]

A few thoughts for anyone setting up a similar system based upon my experience:

1. Cameras don't work well in the dark, regardless of how much you spend on them and how low their Lux rating goes.  If you want to ensure clear images from your cameras place them in conjunction with a motion-sensing light source, so that someone walking into the camera's view at night will be lit up.

2. If you're serious about capture quality (both resolution and frame rate) consider building a solution around a desktop PC / Mac rather than buying a DVR-in-a-box system.  Mega-pixel cameras running at 10+fps require a decent amount of performance to re-code/compress the incoming video and store it to disk, and it doesn't take many cameras to reach the limits of simple in-a-box systems.

3. Build a system with at least 2 weeks worth of historic archive for each camera.  We had one break-in at a commercial building where the footage from the night of the break-in wasn't quite good enough to identify the number plate of the vehicle, but the same vehicle visited the site during the day about 10 days prior to look around and we could grab the plates from there.

4. Think about how your video footage is backed up in the event of a break-in.  There's no point having a CCTV system if the DVR part of the system is one of the items stolen.  As our system is IP based and we have a multiple site VPN we actually capture all the remote cameras at each site, so there's always a copy of the video offsite from the moment it's taken.  A similar outcome can be achieved with a system that automatically emails or FTPs copies of the video files to a remote location when motion is detected.

5. Remote access to view your system is fantastic, but remember it means that your camera system is exposed to the internet.  This means you need to make sure everything is locked down with quality passwords and that software patches and security updates are applied regularly.  Also try to use a system that supports SSL connections - otherwise your password details are flying through the air in plain text every time you check your cameras from the free WiFi at the Maccas.