title: Recording video feed from an IP camera over a network
body: <p>I am building a camera security system for my office however we do not want to keep the DVR on site.</p>
  
  <p>We looked at NVR (network video recorders) and they are too expensive. I thought of an alternative to this. I do not know how much feasible it is but would surely like some inputs here.</p>
  
  <p>Here are my thoughts :</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Buy a regular IP camera</li>
  <li>Buy a server or an AWS instance and write a program to download the streaming feed continuously to the server.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Now I have some questions about the practicality of this solution and the technicalities involved with building such a system :</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What format do most IP cameras stream feeds in ? What frame rates are they transferred at ?  </li>
  <li>If i were to write a program that could read this feed and download it and store it on a server, will I get the same quality as a live feed ?</li>
  <li>Will I need to again encode the data realtime to some other format (like flv.) before i store it ? </li>
  <li>Can you suggest a best possible architecture for this ? I was thinking an amazon instance and s3 for storage of video feeds. </li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>There are some sites which already do this (like <a href="http://www.mangocam.com/">http://www.mangocam.com/</a>)</p>
  
  <p>Thanks and I hope this question meets the SO guidelines since this might be a gray area between programming and non-programming related. If not, I'll move it to some other stackexchange site (suggestions please)</p>