1 - How Long Do You Want Your Bus Video System To Last?

The obvious response should be “As long as the bus lasts”.

The problem is most school bus video systems are made with fragile hard drive based DVRs, and buses work in a very harsh mobile environment that the common hard drive are not well suited to survive in.

Think to yourself of every time you have heard of a hard drive problem, a hard drive crash from a friend or business college. Chances are those hard drives problems or hard drive crashes occurred while they were working on the PCs in a business office environment. Some may have been sitting still on a desktop or sitting safely under a desk and simply wore out or failed due to non-environmental affects.
They are fragile mechanical devices that we trust to defend our school districts when in the worst possible scenarios events occur that require their use as a expert witness, often in court.
When you are purchasing a video system to protect your district from liability and act as an expert witness in the worst case scenarios, it seems a wise idea to make sure the one you invest district budget dollars into will not fail you when you need it most. This is the type of decision that separates those of vision from those who might look back in hindsight after losing the lawsuit due to a failed hard drive system that was damaged in the crash.

Ask your IT department staff how many hard drives they have ever replaced from a fixed location in a controlled stabile environment. It has been my experience in a harsh mobile environment like a bus; the incidence of failure and problems will be geometrically higher. I have replaced far more hard drive based DVRs that I care to remember both under and out of warranty and the costs were considerable.
Most of us have several forms of solid state drive devices we use every day, in different locations we travel, in every environment and under conditions that would damage the average hard drive in about a week. That would be our cell phones, our MP3 players or IPods, GPS NAV systems, beepers or our Blackberries. With all the abuse we provide them the recording mechanism has no moving parts to wear out or break, so they are well suited for the mobile environment.

The only digital system I am aware of with any chance of exceeding the life of the average school bus is the solid-state drive based DVR.

With children's lives in your care and million dollar lawsuits on the line when something goes wrong, can you really afford to have anything less than 100% solid-state drive?



2 - Sales Claim versus Product Reality

If it were not for the constant and highlighted occurrences of impropriety, deceit, and corruption exhibited on a daily basis by our elected politicians, salesmen would be at the bottom of the list of “those whom you can trust”.

Professional sales is an art form; combining complete knowledge of their product line, as well as that of the competition, true expressed customer needs, field applications background, patience to listen to what the customer tells you they want, and the technical savvy to clearly explain all to a potential customer.

The opposite of the professional salesmen, many claim are the used car & RV salesmen driven by commission based greed over conscience, absent the knowledge of product and apathetic to the customer whom they likely view as just another sale. These are the guys who many will attest the poor reputation of salesmen in general to those in this industry.

While the stereotype does hold some relevance, and we all know better that to trust a used car or RV salesmen, unfortunately those in that field do not always stay in that market and often cause havoc when they start promoting other products they know very little about. I have been witness to some of the most fabulous acts of ignorance, arrogance, incompetence and oversight causing confusion calamity and expense as in some cases guys like me were quickly dispatched to clean up their mess and manage damage control after the fact.

In the past I have found that those selling and promoting the products know much less than those who must work with the systems and assist customers in the use of said systems. Those who install, setup, train and work with customers in support of sales often know so much more about the product and actual features and applications than those who sell them. This is why it is important to deal only with a professional bus video vender. I refer to those reputable companies with a serious track record of 10+ years service the school bus market.
Impressive esthetical features or specifications that salesmen insist are” must have items” are sometimes either of questionable value, misrepresentations or simply false.
So many games are being played with product specifications regarding; “G” ratings, temperature rating, resolution and shock or vibration buffering that it might be possible those selling those products may be unaware they are misrepresenting their own products to your district.

The above claims are my first clue, that I may not be getting accurate or factual information on the product. When I believe I am being deceived about those aspects of the products, I can only imagine other areas that I may not be getting full disclosure or at least being provided accurate information in good faith.
Should you suspect or realize that you are not being provided accurate and factual information in good faith, you might be better served moving on to the next product vender in the hope of an honest description of the product capabilities.



3 - Massive Storage of “H.264” versus outdated M-JPEG & MPEG4

The only credible advantage of hard drive based DVRs over the solid state drives I have seen, is their ability to store massive amounts of data in a DVR for a long time before it is recycled (rewritten over).

Should the primary concern be massive memory capacity and massive data storage then you have but one system requirement to list:
“H.264 image compression”

Without compromising image quality, an H.264 encoder can reduce the size of a digital video file by more than 80% compared with the Motion JPEG format and as much as 50% more than with the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard.

The H.264 encoder was at least three times more efficient than an MPEG-4 encoder with no motion compensation and at least six times more efficient than Motion JPEG.

While some may offer your district an outdated technology like MPEG4, then bleed your district budget with upgrade costs for larger capacity hard drives, you need to know this is not necessary to get larger storage capacity.

Why pay for overpriced hard drive upgrades in memory when the largest FREE upgrade in hard drive memory storage is achieved through “H.264” compression over the older M-JPEG or MPEG4?

H.264 versus MJPEG

For example an 80 Gig HDD with M-JPEG compression (old technology) can hold 80 Gigs of images on the hard drive.

While the same 80 Gig HDD with “H.264” compression can hold approximately 6 times as much data or about 480 Gigs of uncompressed images at the same cost for the same size hard drive.

H.264 versus MPEG-4

For example an 80 Gig HDD with MPEG-4 compression (old technology) can hold 80 Gigs of images on the hard drive.

While the same 80 Gig HDD with “H.264” compression can hold approximately 2 times as much data or about 160 Gigs of uncompressed images at the same cost for the same size hard drive.

Those technically savvy or budget conscious will quickly see this as a way to increase the memory storage of their existing hard drive by up to 6 times with no additional cost or hassle of replacing hard drives. For those determined to invest funding in a hard drive based DVR, this is the single best choice for a bid specification to maximize the memory storage of a hard drive at no additional cost for larger and larger drives.



4 - Old Technology GPS Versus On Screen Mapping

In the past GPS was employed in bus video systems as a way to document the bus speed on the playback as several bus manufacturers had changed their wiring to multiplexed wiring or simply made it bothersome to tap into the speed signal.

Currently there are two methods to offer an improved GPS feature we call On Screen Mapping. Like the “Introduction to Business 101” example of IBM versus Bill Gates, one manufacturer has chosen to go the way of IBM who pursued the hardware based solutions, while Bill Gates blazed the software solutions. A reseller of Republic of China DVRs was the first to offer On Screen Mapping, a new technology application that deserves mention. Unfortunately like IBM this new feature was hardware driven through the incorporation of a large expensive mechanical solution that consumed one of the DVRs video channels. This meant the 4-channel DVR was only capable of recording 3 cameras when it had this mapping feature.
However it is an American DVR manufacturer who deserves recognition for taking notes in business school and learning the genius of Bill Gates software provided solutions providing this On Screen Mapping free of charge to all customers of their GPS equipped DVR systems.
As their path to the same goal was via software not hardware like the most successful PC Software maker in history, not only can they deliver this to their GPS customers free of cost, they also do not require a large and expensive mechanical device that can consume a valuable video channel with mapping, so their 4 channel DVRs actually record 4 cameras full time even with mapping.