Post office security cameras captured images of a brutal murder that took place in Philadelphia this week. Patricia McDermott, 48, was on her way to work Tuesday morning when she was shot and killed by an unknown attacker. The entire tragic scene was captured on video, and now police are hoping the surveillance footage will lead to the man's arrest.

Seems everyone is rushing to jump on the H.264 bandwagon these days, and with good reason. H.264 is the IP camera industry's latest revolution, a new video compression format that optimizes bandwidth and saves storage with much greater effectiveness than previous technologies, including Motion JPEG and MPEG-4. The latest manufacturer to offer up cameras with H.264 compression is Arecont Vision. The company showed off its new H.264 camera series at the IFSEC conference in Birmingham, UK on May 12.

The Golf Mill Shopping Center in Niles, Ill. is no ordinary mall. This thing spreads out over a million square feet. Imagine how many Orange Julius stands you could fit in there? Now imagine the challenge of rigging the facility for video surveillance. After much research and debate, it was determined that the best way to provide video security for this massive complex was to use IP cameras operating across a wireless mesh network, the same type of network that's being employed for municipal surveillance in a number of U.S. cities.

IQinVision has announced the release of its latest network camera system, the IQeye Alliance Series. IQeye Alliance is vandal-resistant mini-dome camera system that offers high-quality video resolutions from VGA on up to 2-megapixel. The Alliance series also provides exciting new technologies such as independent simultaneous video streams and H.264 compression, the new highpoint in digital video compression.

Axis announced the release of three new cameras today - the P1311, M3011 and M3014 - all representing new advances in technology and announcing the direction of IP cameras in the future.

IP camera manufacturers Axis, Sony, and Bosch have announced that they will work together in an effort to develop a standardized interface for network video products. Currently, no such standard exists for determining how products such as IP cameras, video encoders, and recording software should communicate with each other. The companies hope to deliver a new standard of specifications for video streaming, locating IP devices, and intelligence metadata, amongst others, with the end result being greater interoperability for network video products.

A new line of Sony network cameras with H.264 compression was recently released and will be supported by Milestone software. H.264 raises the bar for video compression, allowing for increased storage and optimized bandwidth without sacrificing high-resolution video and frame rates. Milestone has announced that its XProtect video management software will support the new Sony camera offerings and the H.264 compression standard.

Mentioning a "burnout" can mean many things - your friend from high school who spends his days playing video games in his parents' basement, or what your blender did when you got a little too excited about making gazpacho. In Christchurch, New Zealand, however, officials are happier about stopping a different kind of burnout with roadside surveillance cameras.

A recent study by MultiMedia Intelligence predicts huge growth for the do-it-yourself (DIY) home surveillance market in the coming years. The study anticipates the consumer DIY surveillance camera market to reach over $1 billion dollars by 2012.

Gas station security cameras usually watch over the parking lot and attached store, monitoring for loitering kids or the occasional gas thief. A camera perched atop the service station at a Sam's Club in Pinellas Park, FL recently got much more than that in the middle of the night.

Extreme CCTV, known for developing surveillance solutions for the most challenging environments, has released a new, vandal-resistant IP camera with infrared imaging. The Extreme CCTV EX36 is a rugged network camera designed for high-risk areas. It seamlessly integrates with existing IP network infrastructure, offering flexible, cost-efficient installation, and remote video monitoring. The camera uses IP Infrared Imaging (i3) to capture superior video images both day and night, even in dark conditions.

Flashing lights, pounding music, beautiful people dancing...and security camera theft? Not many people associate theft with a night out dancing, but a German man in the town of Hof (in Bavaria) thought that he'd spice things up with a little thievery.

Railway stations across Japan are expanding their video surveillance systems as anti-terrorist measures are imposed leading up to this summer's G-8 summit in Hokkaido. Tokyo Metro, which has already expanded its surveillance efforts to include 2,800 security cameras in 161 train stations, plans on increasing that number to 5,700 cameras by 2011.