I have no experience with NVRs. Can anyone tell me if the typical (I mean “cheap”) NVR allows a large amount of video pre-capture for each event? Buy “large”, I am talking about several minutes (so you can see what lead up to the event).

Background info:

As I am cheap, I originally used the free linux program called “motion: as a surveillance system. This program processed every frame, looking for motion. It allowed pre-capture, but stored those frames in memory. It therefore recommended only storing a few frames of pre-capture (which is useless). It baffled me that it did it this way (in memory), because TV PVRs had existed for a long time. A PVR would just continuously write everything to disc, and you then had the luxury of post-processing the info, including grabbing as much pre-capture as you want. I ended up writing my own software to do this. So now I’m wondering if a cheap NVR will do what I want, and I can stop maintaining my own software.

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