Ok, a quick paragraph of history before my problem.

Some, maybe a lot, will know of the DVR cards being sold on Ebay, I have bought one with 4 ports and have found the software supplied with it is a copy of out of date beta software, v.1.8, that doesn't work too well and looks awful, eg a screen sized box that pops up on exit asking if you wanting to exit yes/no. Investigation of the s/w Pico 2000 reveals it is written by a company called Novex in Canada and they are NOT happy about the situation ! Unfortunately their site doesn't give a download link for the latest version ( 2.3 I believe ) nor is there any pricing info, it would appear they don't actually want to sell the s/w !

So, given all this I thought I would write my own and then make it available to all the poor souls out there that have been ripped off by unscrupulous sellers on Ebay.

My question(s) is this :-
What controls do I need to use to display the camera output on the screen, what do I need to be able to record the same data. How do I detect the pci DVR card and collect it's output. I've searched through this forum and not found info relating directly to what I want though I found enough info to tell me I may need to use the API. I'm pretty new to VB and haven't used the API before and am a bit lost with it, I do have an API viewer that I found in a corner of the net.

Any help in this area would be appreciated, I'm not actually looking for code on this as I enjoy scratching my head, pulling the splinters from under my nails and eventually getting the code to work, though some code if offered wouldn't be refused

Thanks in advance
Keith