Setting up a simple home security/surveillance system.

TehSloth

Hi, wanted to see if anybody had any familiarity with software for home security/surveillance. Basically, I'm in kind of a crappy situation, my house has been broken into a couple times this week, almost certainly the same person. They busted out the sliding glass door behind my house, which I boarded up as a temporary solution, but it wasn't enough of an impediment to keep them from coming back. The house I'm in right now is in pre-foreclosure, and has been for quite a while, no idea how much longer it'll be, but I'm not interested in investing a lot of money to set up any particularly fancy monitoring systems, and won't be around long enough to get any good rates from alarm companies looking to set up long-term contracts, even replacing the back door is going to be more than I want to spend on this place, but I don't have a lot of choice there.

I have a very private back yard (which I think is part of the problem) which would normally only see anything at all when I'm doing laundry since the machines are in a detached garage that I need to pass that way for and maybe some small animals running around (I have two indoor/outdoor cats), which made me think that an easy solution would be to set up a camera in my room which overlooks the back yard, I've already got some decent software for recording and streaming, but I'd like something that could shoot out SMS or even e-mail alerts whenever it detects motion. I could easily just turn it off or ignore the alerts when I'm doing laundry and would like something intelligent enough to ignore small animals but I could deal with the occasional false positive.

Expand-ability would be great, but definitely isn't necessary, my primary concern is covering the back side, although there's one other entrance I'd like covered if possible. I'm also not worried about night performance, someone is almost always home at night and the entrances are all well lit. Hardware recommendations would be great too, I was planning on peaking up an affordable ($50 maybe) web cam to run the system, no need for weather resistance or wireless or anything like that, just decent picture quality during the day.

Thanks!

Djeet

Cameras aren't much of a deterrent, they are for proving identity or to reactively change policies or see how breaches were made.

Given your situation I'd just get renters insurance.

IIRC @Thomameles has experience in monitored security.

ceres

Alternatively, if you're moving shortly anyway it might be cheaper (depending on how much stuff you have) to put anything valuable in a storage unit until you can find somewhere else to be.

Irredeemably Indecisive

You can also try putting a dummy security camera up, anything that looks like a camera with a visible red light may scare off whoever is breaking in.

There are software that will start recording video (or pictures at a set frequency) after motion is detected on a webcam. Something like this: http://lifehacker.com/5233052/motion-detection-is-an-effective-dead-simple-security-camera-app

zepherin

You can put a shatter resistant film over a sliding glass door that makes it difficult to get in. The price is generally reasonable, especially if you know an installer or are good at DIY. 3M has a pretty decent product for governments, I don't know how good their residential stuff is though.
http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Window_Film/Solutions/Markets-Products/Residential/Safety-Security_Window_Films/

Logitech offers a good security system that is pretty reasonably price, it even comes with apps to watch your house from your phone or tablet, along with being able to record.
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-security-systems