Thanks to all who replied. The consensus was that SDD reliability wasn’t a concern given my bandwidth, but performance wasn’t worth the money. Justin, You hit the nail on the head regarding an “older cpu.” I’m running a Pentium3 (single core) @ 730Mhz (1461.97 bogomips) with 500mb RAM but recently procured an i5 @3.5Mhz (4 cores at 6997.97 bogomips) with 32gb RAM. I will report performance improvement once I get everything working. FFMPEG installation is always a bit of a chore. Marc, I’ve used a variety of inexpensive “ip-cameras” that invariably include wifi and web-server so I can pull images on demand. Some support scheduled or triggered image uploads via email or ftp. They all sell for about $100. I started out with plastic indoor cameras from D-Link pointed out a window, but have switched to weather-proof night-vision cameras from Foscam. These features work well together since the IR emitters reflect if pointed out a window. They aren’t rated down to Minnesota temperatures but I’ve not experience any cold-weather problem. I had to return one camera in warranty when the mechanical IR filter got stuck, yielding poor daylight colors (you can hear the filter “snap” into place when IR is on). The replacement, now out of warranty, needs an occasional reboot. Also a 5v transformer failed, but that was easily replaced. In hindsight, a commercial system with dedicated wiring would have been cheaper per camera and not consume wifi bandwidth. -- Craig A. Smith mailto:craigallynsmith at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20150122/1a07e324/attachment.html>