Does anyone use any form of cctv system to monitor their car?

Have been thinking about something for home as you can get some relatively cheap set-ups that you attach to a video recorder, etc.

Does anyone have any experience/tips/recommendations of anything like this?

use an IP camera/webcam, a pc and some motion detector software. Set it up to email any images to an external account so even if someone stole your pc you'd still have the images.

Quite a good idea, better than having the camera connected to a video recorder that you have to find tapes for...

How does the camera work in the dark? Is it infared?

Which software do you use?

TIA

Try a google for Supervisioncam

It's free and very versatile, you can section off bits of the picture if you have trees etc that move in the wind. It can do all sorts when it detects motion - take a set number of stills every x secs, or take video for x secs, send you emails, upload to a server etc etc.

A normal webcam will do the job just fine but you are somewhat limited by the USB connection. I moved house at Xmas and this is on my list of things to get set up.

Bear in mind that most offenders will wear a hooded top/balaclava/woolly hat so you might not get anything usable to ID them - especially if your camera is mounted high up and looking down on a steep angle. Lighting can be a tricky issue too.

From my point of view (get it?) I just don;t like the fact that you don't know what's gone on when your car has been broken into - was it one offender, more than one, did they spend ages looking around your property........? At least you'd have some info about what's what.

Nearly forgot - good thing about using PC based CCTV is that you could have a dedicated PC for it and access the images wirelessly from another PC in the house, easy on the wiring etc.

If someone stood for election that promised to send all property-criminals to an island off Scotland for good then they'd be elected in no time. The economy and Health Service might go down the pan but hey you can't have everything.............