Quote Originally Posted by daveboy
Why don't you connect the 30 ip camera's onto a DVR/NVR with a ip licence then sit that on the network. Just make sure your doing it on a 1gb min network as that's a lot of bandwidth your sending out there.
the network Video recorder and Multiwindow Viewer are a desktop computer - I prefer to have the versatility of a computer than an appliance.
bandwidth - the cams are 1/3 ccd's encoding MPEG4 class 2 at CIF ( 352x288pix ) and 10fps. - max about 500 kbits per sec. 30 cams on a 100 meg network is fine. The only stutters in real time viewing are because of wifi issues (minimal ) , but the recording is fluid as the cams buffer. about 20 cams on wifi with 10 APs on the network the rest 10/100 LAN.

megapixel IP cams encoding to H264 ( MPEG4 class 10 ) will get the bandwidth down 6-10x , but the corresponding need for processing power to decompress the video at the Viewing end on the fly.

Your description of the setup is a bit foggy, I understand what you wanna achieve but can't correlate it with your setup.

Why don't you use 2 dedicated routers for the cameras giving you 2x20 possible
port forwards?
I had considered 2 routers , but I know it can be done with 1 and it lowers the complexity a little of the network config

the basics are - 30 cams plus desktop on a LAN which has a connection to the WAN ( static IP ) of a 54GL ( tomato firmware ). The LAN ( static IP ) of the 54GL is connected into the office LAN.
the office LAN also has a 54GL with its WAN connected to an ADSL modem running as a full bridge with the 54GL controlling the PPPoE connection.
any requests to the cam network need to be sent to the 54GL that is the gateway between the cam LAN and the office LAN - this I expect to include ports forwarded from the internet to the IP's of cam on the cam network so viewing can be done via remote computer or mobile phone.

I will do a full flush of the NVRAM later today as I am also having issues with the VPN server that is also running on the internet router and the command route -n is not showing my static route , so I am suspecting that there is some leftover in the system from some previous fcuking with the configuration.