Surveillance

[Jim Higson]

How about an old analogue camcorder plugged into a basic tvcard?

Redhat/Fedora has great support for the WinTV style cards.

This won't give the best results but will be really cheap and still a lot 
better than most surveillance system.

Regardless of the device used, I'd encode in divx4, with vorbis for the audio 
- will give very good compression for minimal loss of quality. However, It'll 
need a fast-ish machine to do it on the fly, test first and if it drops 
frames try mpeg2 instead.