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Surveillance System Help

CubisticWings4
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Good Morning and Happy Friday Eve, Everyone!

 

This is a completely new area for me, so I apologize if I don't completely understand everything at first.

 

We run a very small (single brick-and-mortar store) with a computer-based surveillance system that runs a Linux (Fedora) based embedded OS (which is complete black magic to me.) I believe that the system has been struck by lightning and I am looking to get a more updated system.

 

I guess where I need to start is:

 

1. Can any motherboard have an embedded OS, or only certain ones?

 

2. If only certain ones can run embedded OS's, what motherboard can you recommend?

 

3. We have a limited budget (No more than $600.)

 

4. Where would we even get such a system from?

 

Thank you for your help!

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which motherboard and OS was it actually running? Usually your issue isn't the motherboard, but the video capture cards or chips on the motherboard, which might be proprietary and only fully supported by the proper OS.

Looking to buy GTX690, other multi-GPU cards, or single-slot graphics cards: 

 

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I'm embarrassed to admit, but I have no idea. I barely ever touched it. We originally bought the system from DVRUSA.com, but they went out of business. All I really know is that Fedora was embedded into the motherboard so that if a HDD ever went out, we could shut off the PC, swap out the HD, and it would never know the difference. But if I had to make an educated guess, I'd say that it is plain old Fedora. Because the DVR program was separate. One could back out of the DVR program and potentially do other things on the machine if they wanted to.

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Just now, CubisticWings4 said:

I'm embarrassed to admit, but I have no idea. I barely ever touched it. We originally bought the system from DVRUSA.com, but they went out of business. All I really know is that Fedora was embedded into the motherboard so that if a HDD ever went out, we could shut off the PC, swap out the HD, and it would never know the difference. But if I had to make an educated guess, I'd say that it is plain old Fedora. Because the DVR program was separate. One could back out of the DVR program and potentially do other things on the machine if they wanted to.

But if your motherboard has failed, then you would need a way to get that DVR software reinstalled, or something similar. And I would bet that there was more than just the DVR software that was in the embedded OS - it probably had little tweaks here and there to make it work well.

 

The way I see it, unless you have an image to install that embedded OS, you will need to find another software that works with the capture card. Is there any markings on the card?

Looking to buy GTX690, other multi-GPU cards, or single-slot graphics cards: 

 

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Are you sure that's a 32 channel card? each of those chips handles 4, and the card has "16" channels marked. Here's the info on the chips - http://www.intersil.com/en/products/audiovideo/security-surveillance/video-decoders/TW2864.html

 

The rest of the numbers on the card don't bring anything else. As I expected, this isn't really a name-brand card. But going off of the chips (TW2864A) we are able to look and see what might work with it. Based on some searches, it looks like it may work in linux out of the box, and might be usable without too much effort in ZoneMinder - which is a great open source capture software.

Looking to buy GTX690, other multi-GPU cards, or single-slot graphics cards: 

 

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