Surveillance is kind of a scary word. It sounds a little paranoid and big-brotherish. But you may find video cameras mounted in and around your home that let you keep an eye on what's going on from the comfort of your home theater (or any room with a television) really useful.
Surveillance video isn't high-quality, surround sound video. In fact, most surveillance video (often called closed circuit TV or CCTV) is pretty awful to look at. But if you want to know who's ringing the doorbell or keep an eye on the baby asleep in her room while you watch a movie in the home theater, then you probably don't need a high-quality picture. Heck, you might not even want a color picture . . . or sound. You just want to see what's going on.
There are a couple of ways to get home surveillance video into your home theater system:
- A wireless system, such as those offered by X10: These systems) use a 2.4 GHz radio signal (like those used by many cordless phones) to send video from a remote location to a small receiver that plugs into your home theater receiver or directly into your TV. You might put one of these cameras by your front door or use X10's FloodCam, which is built into a set of motion-sensitive floodlights on the side of your house.
- Networked cameras that connect to your home's computer network: These systems, from companies such as Panasonic and D-Link, are a bit more expensive than the wireless systems discussed in the preceding bullet, but they're much more capable. Using a standard (wired) Ethernet network or a wireless computer network (802.11b/g or Wi-Fi), you can feed the video from these cameras into your home theater PC, and you can even view the video from outside the home theater (if you have a broadband Internet connection) by using the built-in Web server on these cameras.
- A traditional "wired" CCTV system: These cameras connect to your home's coaxial video cabling (the cable that brings antenna and cable TV connections to your home theater) and use devices called modulators that let you turn your surveillance video into an in-house TV station. To view a modulated CCTV channel, you just need to tune your TV to the right channel. If you have a picture-in-picture system in your TV, you can even keep an eye on things in a small window while you watch something else on the rest of the screen.
These cameras aren't good only for viewing, but for recording, as well. X10's FloodCam, for example, records when motion sets it off, day or night. You never know when you might need that.
