So I'm still noodling with the project. One camera, the most difficult, remains to be installed. I've busied myself by trying to better interface it with my home automation system. I have a Mi Casa Verde Vera that uses ZWave to operate my lights, thermostats and door locks. I want to key my floods to come on during the evening when the cameras detected motion and have them go off after about 15 minutes. Easily done but for one thing: the Lorex system does not play nice with a home automation system. It will not spit out those motion alerts except as an email. So I had to get creative.
Now, in my first pick, there's a server to the right of the TV. I receive e-mails from the Lorex upon motion detection, and the Vera can activate scenes or devices in response to HTTP calls. What I ended up doing was setting up a Thunderbird mail client on that server, and had the Lorex also send those emails to it. There are certain add-ones for Thunderbird that will filter the body of an email for certain characters. If the filter catches them, it can be set up to run a script. I created a simple script for each camera with curl, the Linux equivalent of wget, and they send an HTTP call to the Vera. On Vera I simulated motion sensors for each of the cameras and set up a scene to have the floods come on for 15 minutes when they're tripped.
Seems to work like a charm but I'm having to mess with the sensitivity and threshold values again.