Looking For Mobile Recording Recommendations

1) is live streaming required?

2) will the data be recorded locally or pushed to central storage server once the buses are back from the routes?

3) how many days of storage and what kind of resolution?

4) how many buses?

To add to the 'more questions' is the anticipated resolution and FPS of the cameras as that will determine how much storage you need.

Also bear in mind the POE power that such a unit will need to provide (I assumed a POE connection to the mobile server).  The units we work with have up to 16 POE ports,  but you would use the x8 unit instead. 

The mobile units we config can have as many as 4 2.5 drives...and those should be SSD due to the vibration and temperature effects.  Many units come with 2 drives.

The camera load and the size of SSD, coupled with the endurance factor of the SSD will determine how often you would need to proactively replace the drives.

I have seen a few transit companies deploy XProtect Corporate such that they have a central Management Server with one or more Recording Servers, and they install an "all-in-one" Management/Recording Server on the buses, using the Interconnect feature to add the buses to the central Recording Server(s).

With the Interconnect feature, the buses effectively become multi-channel "cameras" as far as the central Recording Server is concerned. The buses are entirely independent and the software can be used standalone if needed, but operators can queue up video retrieval jobs centrally for reported incidents, and when the bus enters the yard and jumps on WiFi, the requested video gets pulled out and duplicated onto the central Recording Server. I typically see that the buses run on battery for one hour after the ignition goes off then a timer shuts things down gracefully.

From the operator's perspective, they create a retrieval request in Smart Client where the mechanics are similar to performing an export - highlight the desired time period, choose your cameras, and hit retrieve. When the bus is in the yard, the "edge storage retrieval" jobs execute, and pull the video off the bus the same way you might pull video off the SD card of a remote IP camera.

As for the hardware, I'm not sure exactly what they ended up with. From what I understand, there's a specialized router / WiFi bridge, GPS and cellular data setup, then a server which I'm not sure is part of the package deal or just added on later. Whatever you end up with, make sure you go with hardware designed for mobile applications. Mike's comment about using SSD is spot on here.

I have found, after building and integrating solutions including a rugged mobile PC and VMS (Milestone) with Axis cameras that a bespoke solution is generally the way to go.  

The features and capabilities baked into a dedicated product are usually enough to justify these approach and can be very difficult to replicate in an elegant way.  With mobile installations there are a lot of requirements for integration, user interaction and ruggedness that add significantly to the complexity.  Also there can easily be that one needle in the haystack customer requirement that just isn't easy to replicate without cobbling together a mismatch of technologies or those that require cludgy customer interaction to work correctly.  

So based on that you could look at companies such as:

- March Networks

- SafetyVision 

- Seon

- AngelTrax

Hanwha has some mobile recorders. They have it integrated with Genetec.