The requirements as follows:

1. QUIET – Helen has supersonic hearing so anything that makes any more noise than necessary is strictly out.
2. Simple
3. Economical – to both buy and run.
4. Able to support 1080p video/movie output
5. Optical DVD drive
6. QUIET – did I mention this already?

The options for HTPC are limitless but after doing some research and looking at several reviews, I’ve plucked for an ASROCK ION 330.  The dimensions of the box are about the same as a Nintendo Wii but it’s about twice as deep.  It’s finished in black so shouldn’t look too out of place under the TV.  The system is a dual core Atom 330D system so the power draw is minimal and unlike other Atom based nettops, the ION 330 also has a DVD drive onboard.  The main attraction however has to be the Nvidia ION graphics processor onboard which allows rendering of 1080p movies with no significant impact on the main system CPU which is crucial in a HTPC.  This system also ships with a Media Centre remote control.

The box is due to arrive this week.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/vpndevc/ps2030/products_configuration_example09186a00807349e7.shtml

Perhaps a better resource: here.

The Panasonic BL-C131 Setup: (I’m assuming the camera has already been setup with an IP address, an administrative user and is accessible on the network).

• Login to the web front end of the camera.
• Click on the Setup tab at the top of the screen
• Click on the Trigger menu on the left hand side
• On the Trigger screen, select Number 1
• Tick the Enable Image Buffer/Transfer checkbox
• Select Motion Detection from the Trigger drop down menu.
• Click Next
• Under Time, tick all the checkboxes for Sunday through Saturday
• Under Active Time of Trigger select Always
• Under Image Settings, my settings are set to JPEG, 192×144 and Favor Motion.
• Select the desired value for Lens Position When Triggered
• Under Image Buffer Frequency, tick Enable Pre-trigger Image Buffer. In my config, I’ve sent Every Images to 1, Buffer to 1 and Total to 1.
• Leave other settings unchanged and then look for Transfer Method and set this to FTP and click Next.
• Set the Server IP Address field to the IP address of your TurboNAS
• Leave the port number as 21
• Under Login ID, enter your TurboNAS admin username (normally admin?)
• Under Password, enter your TurboNAS admin password
• In Upload File Name, my initial value was set to Qrecordings/alarm
• The Overwrite Setting field is set to Save as New File with Time Stamp
• Data Transfer Method is set to Passive
• Click Save to complete the Motion Detection Settings setup.
• OPTIONAL: Click on Motion Detection on the left hand menu and play around with the Threshold and Sensitivity until you happy that you won’t receive false positive motion alarms.

It’s worth noting that it appears that once everything is setup correctly, the TurboNAS changes some of the FTP settings entered on the camera including FTP file destination, username and password automagically. In the above steps, I set the FTP username and password to the QNAP admin username and password but on rechecking the settings to write this guide, I noticed the FTP login had been updated automatically to _nvrevtrpt0000 and the Filename had been changed to event00000001.

Setting Up the TurboNAS – enable FTP and Surveillance Station:

• Because FTP is used as the trigger mechanism for motion detection, the FTP Server Service must be enabled on the TurboNAS.
• Sign into the TurboNAS configuration pages with the admin user.
• Expand Network Services in the left hand menu and then select FTP Service
• On the FTP service page, tick Enable FTP Service and Protocol Type. The port number should be set to 21. All other settings can be left as default. Click Apply.
• The next step is to enable Surveillance Station.
• Expand Applications in the left had menu and select Surveillance Station.
• Tick Enable Surveillance Station and Show service link on homepage and then click Apply.
• IMPORTANT: I had a major headache getting Alarm Recording to work and the culprit eventually turned out to be a missing folder. At this point, I would strongly recommending accessing the TurboNAS via a Windows share and looking in the Qrecordings folder. Look for the presence of two folders: record_nvr and record_nvr_alarm.  If the record_nvr_alarm folder is not present, Alarm Recording will not work. In my case, the folder was missing so I FTP’d into the QNAP box using the TurboNAS “admin” account, browsed into the Qrecordings directory and issued a “mkdir record_nvr_alarm” command. Once I had done this, everything fell into place and started to work.

Finally ….. setting up Surveillance Station Software ….

• Access Surveillance Station by browsing to the IP address of your TurboNAS:8080 e.g. http://192.168.2.10:8080 and then selecting Surveillance Station from the menu. You should be able to login with the TurboNAS admin username and password.
• Click on the Settings Tab and then select Camera 1 from the Camera Number drop down menu.
• Select Panasonic BL-C131 from the Camera Model drop down menu.
• Give the camera a name in the Camera Name field.
• Enter the IP address of the BL-C131 in the IP address field.
• In the username and password fields, enter the BL-C131′s Administrator account credentials. IMPORTANT: The BL-C131 has the ability to define an adminstrator account and numerous guest accounts. The administrator account can change settings whereas the guest account can only view the camera picture. You MUST enter the Camera’s administrator account here otherwise motion detection will fail.
• Click Apply
• Still under the Settings tab, select the Recording Settings subtab
• Select Camera 1 from the Camera Number drop down menu.
• Set the remaining options to the value desired. In my setup, these are Resolution 640×480, Frame Rate Full, Quality Clarity and Audio is enabled. Click Apply
• Still under the Settings tab, select the Recording Schedule subtab.
• Select Camera 1 from the Camera Number drop down box at the top.
• Setup the schedule as required using red blocks for motion detection recording and blue blocks for continuous recording. HINT: it’s best to set this up in Internet Explorer in my experience as Firefox doesn’t seem to allow the boxes to be checked properly.
• Select the Days and Duration settings as required.
• Now click either Apply to apply the schedule settings only to Camera 1 or Apply to All Cameras depending on your requirements.
• Finished!

Hopefully that should be it and motion detection should work for you. From a troubleshooting point of view, make sure that the FTP folders exist as explained above and if you aren’t sure whether motion detection is working, try creating an email event on the camera itself and see if you get email events when the camera is triggered.  If you are still having problems, try rebooting the TurboNAS to make sure the Surveillance Station software gets a restart and also check the FTP Transfer method defined on the BL-C131 itself to see if the TurboNAS has updated the transfer settings like I have outlined above.

A general observation about Surveillance Station is that it seems to like Internet Explorer more than any other browser. I’ve also had issue playing back video within Surveillance Station using 64bit Windows 7 although it works fine from a 32 bit OS.