There are various applications that can be used on a personal computer, turning it into a surveillance system with ease. Each application has different features and are often used in different ways. Some are designed for more advanced users while others are more user friendly, so it’s important to decide which piece of software will work for the user in mind.

Camera Viewer Pro

Camera Viewer Pro is popular choice, when considering how easy it is to use and it’s system resource usage this comes as no surprise. It comes with several features that can be configured to suit the hardware available.

Genius Vision NVR Community Edition

This is an enterprise grade IP camera recording application. A free version is available called the Community Edition, this comes with all of the available features but is limited to 16-channels with 4-channel intelligent video. This is often all that’s needed for the average user so this version may be perfectly sufficient.

One of the advantages of modern TVs is their ability to connect to many different external devices. One way they can do this is in a similar fashion to a PC, using a USB port. Just like a PC, external storage devices can be connected to the TV through the USB prot. This allows the TV to play movies recorded on the drive, as well as the ability to use USB recording.

USB recording enables the TV to record programs to an external storage device which is directly connected to one of your TVs USB ports. To do this you will need a USB connector as well as an external HDD. When connected to the TV the external HDD will then function in a similar way to a videorecorder, allowing you to record or even pause live TV programs.

To make use of this, first check if your TV supports USB recording. Note that only European TVs allow for external USB recording. TVs from the US have this feature disabled due to legal reasons.