Re:Why do you want it (Score 1)

My research group was looking into something exactly like this.

Last spring, our million $ lab was destroyed by a fire that turned out to be the fault of some high voltage equipment. Once the fire started, it burned through an O2 line and fed the fire. How did we know this? Because the last thing we did before running like screaming girls was to grab the video tapes from out $100 walmart vcrs. We were feeding four cameras into each of four channels.

When we checked the tapes, the quality was terrible because we had been looping over the same tape for months.

Some security companies sell Linux based stand alones that do this however, the one I was looking at had some "issues." Most of these devices are set up to be "unhackable" whetever the hell that means. I didn't want to spend ~$1200 on a machine that I might be able to get a command prompt on.

With that said, the device I was looking for a had lot of good things going for it: hot swappable drives, plug-n-play USB CDR backup, four inputs, 30 fps. Software upgrades come in .tgz format which more or less begs DMCA violation.

I guess the short answer is Google: "security video digital".