Features

The average UK household spends £311 a year on electronics, according to research from GfK, giving the country's burglars a £7.8 billion stash of digital cameras, games consoles and laptops to choose from. And with the bubble-wrap barely burst from Christmas, you might want to keep a closer eye on the valuables that glimmer invitingly from the front-room window.

Burglar alarms and window locks are a sensible way to protect your home from intruders, but in this feature we'll show you how to tighten your security further - by rigging up a home surveillance system using your PC.

Traditional surveillance systems involve hooking up a CCTV camera directly to a TV or recording its feed on to VHS. Not only will it cost a packet, you either have to constantly watch the TV or fast-forward through hours of tape to see if anything untoward has occurred. With a PC, you can leave the monitoring to the software, which will alert you by sending a message or even a snapshot to your mobile phone, or by sending you an email if anything happens.

A home camera setup can do more than keep an eye out for intruders. It can also provide a monitor for your sleeping baby in the nursery or see who's at the front door when you're working upstairs. Whatever your budget - whether it's £20 for a USB webcam, or hundreds of pounds for CCTV or IP cameras - it's possible for a PC-based security system to alert you of anything untoward, as well as enabling you to keep tabs on your house from a PC.

Basic webcam protection

The cheapest option for surveillance is a webcam. You can buy one for as little as £10, but if you want a high-quality lens to help capture detail such as faces in the distance you'll have to spend at least

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twice this. Logitech and Hercules both offer 1.3-megapixel webcams (such as the Hercules Dualpix HD) that capture significantly more detail.

However, without software that can detect motion, a webcam is largely impotent as a security device. Few come with motion-detection software; Logitech made the decision to remove this useful feature from its software a year ago.

Fortunately, you can download the free Dorgem application (from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dorgem), which can detect motion in one or more webcams attached to your PC. Dorgem is flexible, too: it can save an image to a file on your hard disk, or upload it to an FTP or web server. Saving the file to a remote location is best, as you'll lose any files saved on a local hard disk if a thief makes off with that, too.

One slight limitation to Dorgem is there are no options to set for motion detection - it's a simple on/off tickbox. This means you can't disable detection from certain areas of the image that contain known movement - cats walking across the floor, for example. Nor can you adjust the motion detector's sensitivity, meaning that trees gently swaying in the breeze will trigger the alarm in the same way as a burglar smashing through the back door. You can adjust the time between each check for motion, so your disk isn't cluttered up with thousands of images, but you'll have more control if you pay for motion-detection software.

Domia's Harmony CCTV Server (£55 exc VAT from www.simplyautomate.co.uk) will monitor as many webcams as your PC can handle. As well as masking off certain areas of the image that you don't want to track, it can also record video when it detects motion. The downside is that it's tricky to configure; you have to choose which video codec you want the software to use, for example. We'd recommend installing the free DivX codec from www.divx.com, as this will keep down video file sizes. Unlike Dorgem, Harmony provides RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol), which means you can keep an eye on what's going on when you're out of the house. You can also use Harmony as part of a more advanced system incorporating CCTV cameras (connected to a USB or PCI video-capture card) and IP cameras.Dedicated IP cameras