How Good are Security Manager's PCs?

User's PCs have a significant impact on video surveillance systems. While video may be processed and stored on optimized dedicated servers, surveillance video is routinely viewed and reviewed on normal PCs. Many common problems arise from PCs not having sufficient resources to handle the video applications. This is one of the risks of H.264 but is a common issue with any video display or processing. The importance of this problem only increases as video is available across the network. Gone are the days when surveillance video was solely watched in a security center - now users expect to use it on their laptops, homes, etc.

I am setting up a test PC to emulate the conditions of a security manager's PC. I have selected a 4 year old Dell Dimension 8200 with a 2 Ghz Pentium 4 CPU and 1 GB of RAM. Yes, it s out of date but such machines are the operating reality for many security managers.

I believe it is critical that applications must work with existing PCs. Asking users (especially corporate users) to change their PCs is not prudent. They rarely have the ability to do so and it's completely impractical if multiple people in an organization want to use the application. It's always important to make sure your software runs on existing hardware. I plan to test this with this PC.