Swann specialises in all kinds of security hardware for the home and small business. Its USB 2.0 DVR Guardian is a USB version of its four-port video capture device, which can take signals from cameras - a £90 Swann Bulldog camera with LED night illumination was supplied for testing - and display them on a PC screen. More than that, though, it can relay the video via the Internet to any Windows PC capable of a broadband connection.

The DVR Guardian has a single USB connection at one end and six co-axial connectors at the other. The four yellow ones of these are composite video and the two white ones are audio. There's software compression of the video signal to MPEG 4, if you record it. The PC replaces a video recorder, though this does mean you have to tie up a £300 computer rather than a £50 recorder.

One of the claims made for this device is that it's a DIY solution, and it is, if you have a good level of networking knowledge. To judge this, decide for yourself whether the following set up - which is only skimpily covered in the single-page installation sheet - sounds daunting.

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Assign the PC that will run DVR Guardian and its software a static IP address (you could use one assigned dynamically via DHCP, but risk the camera going off-line if the server assigns it a different address next time you turn the PC on). Point a browser at your router and open four designated ports for access. Create new inbound and outbound rules for those ports, using the static IP address you assigned at the start. Swann points you to www.portforward.com, a third party Web site specialising in port forwarding, to help with this.

Now go to another third-party site, www.whatismyip.com, and discover your system's IP address, which you'll need to sign into the camera software from the remote location. This applet downloads from your PC and isn't digitally signed, so you may have to lower your security level to get Windows to accept it. On one remote machine this software hung when we ran it, but it was fine on another and colleagues said they could see us waving.

The picture quality is fine in daylight and at night you get true Bill-Oddie-with-a-badger night vision, so you can still see what's going on. Up to four cameras can be connected to the device at once and you can view these as a mosaic, or boost one up to full screen. The maximum resolution of 352 x 288 (PAL) makes it look a bit rough round the edges, but no more so than a conventional VCR recording.

Swann's USB 2.0 DVR Guardian does pretty much what it says on the blister pack and once you have it installed and running it can provide a good way of remotely viewing anything your cameras are aimed at. It isn't a plug ‘n' play installation, though and with the scanty documentation you should consider carefully whether you're sufficiently geeky to take it on.