Haven't read the thread but this is a very low budget choice.
There are 8 cams and each is precoded to the receiver/recorder. You just stick the cameras where you want and plug them in. Now there IS one trick involved. You need to set up the receiver someplace where it's roughly in the center of the perimeter defined by the placement of the cameras. In my case, I had get small aftermarket mast antennae. Even with those I sometimes see a camera drop out for a while and then come back.
I got it because it was 2 bills + change. I thought that was ridiculously cheap. The cams are 980p though, so don't plan on doing a lot of close inspection of the video.
The tech support, in China, was quite good at getting back to me whenever I shot myself in the foot. The only real problem I recall was that a couple of time I had to reinitialize a camera. Took like 10min.
If I didn't care about dropping a few grand on a system though, I would have gotten one that could interface with an alarm system. A lot of those will probably be proprietary though so I'm not sure that I'm missing much.
Oh, the only other thing I need was an hdd. Since I have a half dozen 2Tb drives, no problem.