I hate to say this (because I do not like the Logitech company) but I'm getting the best quality video out of my Logitech cams. If you need Pan/Tilt try an OrbitAF (SphereAF outside USA). Same guts without Pan/Tilt is the Pro9000. OrbitAF is about US$130.00 around here, Pro9000 is about US$75.00.

Another approach would be to use a digital camcorder as a "webcam". Either run the digital video output of the camcorder right into a 1394 port on the PC, or run the analog video output into an inexpensive video capture card. Either way will work with AbelCam - I have done it.

My ancient Sony DCR-TRV8 camcorder, run straight into a 1394 port, has excellent video quality compared to any of the USB webcams. Processing of the DV stream uses more CPU than a USB webcam - a typical trade-off of efficiency for quality.

If you are willing to tie up your camcorder on this project then that's probably the way to go. How exactly you do it depends a lot on your particular camcorder.

If your camcorder has a direct digital video output (IEEE-1394 port, a/k/a FireWire port) you can run it into the PC without any added hardware. Cable length restrictions apply - cam must be within 5 meters of the PC.

If your camcorder has analog video output (NTSC, as found on the "yellow plug" on every VCR in the USA) you can run that into the previously mentioned Cheap Capture Card. Video quality will be good, but somewhat less that the digital method. Cable length restrictions are better than with digital - 50 meters is possible if your house is reasonably free of electrical noise interference. Analog cabling is much cheaper than 1394 cable.

As for the capture card, there are tons of them out there. I have a couple cards made by KWorld (see kworld-global.com) and they work fine with AbelCam and my analog cameras. I paid about US$60.00 per card. There's nothing special about KWorld cards - I picked them because that's the brand that was in stock at my local electronics store. There are no doubt comparable cards available for less money.

BTW - if you decide to instead use a Pro9000, remember that there are cable restrictions with it too, since it's USB. 5 meters max unless you start adding powered hubs and stuff.

That sounds like it'll work. In my experience USB capture devices use more CPU than their PCI slot relatives, but if you are only going to have this setup "armed" when you are away then I guess that CPU loading won't really matter.

One more bit of advice: if you plan to use AbelCam for recording video clips (as opposed to single frames) on motion detection, be sure to use 3.0 not 2.x. Motion triggered video recording had a bug in 2.x that's fixed in 3.0. Also note that in 3.0 you can choose between 3 different Capture Interfaces when you do the Add Camera routine. You'll need to use the VideoCapX interface in order to have video-on-motion feature available.

Good job on using videos to successfully prosecute the guy that was breaking into your tool shed!

Short answer: that error is unimportant - just hit Ignore.

The installer is either thinking a) it has inadequate security permissions to do what it wants to do, or b) there's some prerequisite file missing from your system. In any case, what is not getting installed is the "Effects" component of VisioForge. That component is more "for fun" than it is "critical" - it's a set of filters that do things like Emboss, Color Shift, etc. Amusing to play with, but not useful in a security camera application IMO.

Still... this needs to be looked into since it's a rather disturbing message that's turning up more often recently.

You're welcome.

Forgot to put this in my previous post:

In the interest of getting this fixed, it would be helpful if you - and any others experiencing this error message - would post a brief comment on the Issue Tracker:

http://www.multicamserver.com/en/membersonly/issues

It would be good to know what O/S you are running, whether or not you are installing from an account with full Admin privleges, and anything weird or special about your setup.