Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Crime Catcher
Iain Laskey looks at a nifty security tool for the home
| Product | Crime Catcher 3.1 |
|---|---|
| Company | New-Software |
| Web | www.crime-catcher.com |
| Price | $25-$49 |
| We like | Works well, lots of options, well thought out |
| We don't like | False readings with cheaper webcams |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
In the UK there was a recent news item about someone who had been burgled. No surprises there. What was different in this case was that the police knew exactly who they were looking for. The home owner had developed their own security system which used a webcam to monitor any movement and then email out a series of pictures should anything suspicious happen. The result was, even though their PC had been stolen, it had spent its last few moments emailing out some clear images of the miscreant in question. This got me thinking it would be nice to see what was out there as an off the shelf solution.
Crime Catcher was one such package that caught my eye. Installation was straightforward and within minutes of downloading the program, it was up and running. Crime Catcher is available in two versions. For $25 you can buy the basic version which supports a single webcam. The more expensive or 'Pro' version at $49 lets you work with four webcams at once which is ideal for a small business with multiple locations to keep an eye on.
When run, the program displays the output from your webcam. It does nothing until you click on the start button at which point it gives you a countdown to get out the way before it switches on. This is to prevent you causing it to trigger motion as you walk out the room.
What happens when it detects motion is down to you and here Crime Catcher truly excels. You may want to just save the images to your hard disk. This is fine if your PC is secure but if that gets stolen... You can also have the images emailed out so they'll be safe if the PC disappears. Options abound here and you can limit the number of emails (useful as they can soon create a lot of images very quickly). You can also set a maximum number of images to be sent over any given period. If you don't fancy email, Crime Catcher can also copy the pictures to an FTP site where you can either store them or use them as part of a webpage for easy remote viewing.
The images themselves can have text overlayed showing the time/date plus an optional message. The colour of the overlay is adjustable to suit the background ensuring you should be able to read it.
Crime Catcher has various adjustments to help control how it detects motion. You can control the sensitivity and how big an object needs to be to be of interest. If something in the field of view is likely to change such as trees outside a window, you can create a mask to tell Crime Catcher to ignore movement in certain portions of the screen which is a great idea. For completeness, the program can also play a sound if it detects motion such as a dog barking or launch a program, perhaps to call you mobile or play a CD nice and loud.
Finally, if you have the bandwidth, you can stream the video straight out for remote viewing although we didn't test this functionality. Note that it assumes you know your PC's external IP address so either a fixed IP or the use of a service such as DynDNS is a must.
In Use
Initially I had some problems as I was using a fairly cheap webcam and despite tweaking as best as I could, there still seemed to be a steady stream of emails going out with false positives. The author was able to suggest a few things including the possibility that the noise inherent in a cheap webcam could be causing the problem. I swapped over to a better camera and had much better results.
Once up and running, it was interesting to receive a steady series of emails triggered by people wandering in and out the office at home. Now I knew what they got up to when I was out!
For additional safety, you can set up a password to prevent anyone fiddling with things or trying to stop the program recording temporarily.
The developer has a useful website with tutorials and a forum to supplement the online help although in practice everything is so easy to use you'll probably be able to work it all out just fine.
Conclusion
Apart from the need for a reasonably good webcam, I was extremely impressed by Crime Catcher. The range of options is impressive and the flexibility it offers is amazing given the low price. If you have a webcam and a PC that's always on, this is a great way to protect your property from burglars. At worst you'll have a nice set of images of the bad guy(s) and if you're lucky, the sound of barking dogs or sudden burst of your favourite CD may well frighten them off altogether. Highly recommended.
