buellwinkle

Ubiquiti, from what I understand uses Zoneminder, an open source project and has their own skin that makes it look better. The hard part will be finding software that works with those camera. You can download BI for a two week trial and see if you can get it to work. Their community forum is cam-it.org. You can also try commercial grade product like Milestone Xprotect, ExaqVision, NUUO, Luxriot and maybe one of those work. Also, check out the forum that Ubiquiti has, I believe their website is ubnt.com and the forum should be on there and ask there to see what other people have used that works well.

Not to burst your bubble, but the Dahua NVR only supports up to 2MP. You can run a 3MP camera in 2MP mode though.

The ACTi domes are available, but as with any new camera, supplies may be limited until the catch up with demand. I'm waiting to get a few to do reviews on but this is about a 2-3 week process of getting approvals, will keep you posted.

When you buy no-name cameras, you will have to invest a lot of time to figure out how to make it work with any NVR, may not work with any. Also, you do know this camera is not PoE, meaning you have to separately run power to it, can be annoying. As for price, that's average, not too high, not low for a Chinese camera. Check out IPSCam and Aote, both make 5MP cameras in this price range. Is one better? Who knows. I would ask them if they offer a PoE version of this camera and if they will let you connect to a demo cam to view what it's like during the day and at night. Most will. Also ask what NVRs or NVR software will work with their cameras. Also ask what their warranty is, how pays postage, what's the turnaround time if the camera breaks. If you want a name brand 5MP camera, check out the new ACTi cameras. The ones that start with "D" are their lower cost cameras. I think some of them are in the $250ish range. ACTi is supported by many NVR's and NVR software. They also provide very good NVR software for free for their cameras. Also, from my experience, 5MP cameras have pretty poor low light capability as the pixels are smaller to fit on the same sized sensor as say a 1MP camera. So it's a trade off, not just a price difference.

How are the cameras connected? If they go to the Costco deal NVR, then you don't, you connect to the NVR via it's web interface, PSS or smartphone iDMSS apps. You need to open up a bunch of ports on your router to do this, the tcp port (37777 by default), rtsp port (544 by default), and the http port. If the cameras are on your home network, not using the NVR's ports, then you have to open up the ports on your router for each camera. Some routers let you change the ports in the router, for example, port 80 on one camera can be referenced at 8000, another cameras port 80 can be 8001 or you can change the port numbers on each cameras. There's 3 ports for each camera. Maybe you can get away with 2, but I found opening all 3 works better. Again, you can access the cameras remotely via iDMSS, PSS or IE interface. Then you reference the cameras or NVR using the WAN address.

That's funny. They just recommended that I update the camera firmware, although I'm pretty sure I just have a bad ethernet cable. The instructions say to run the "config tool" to see the cameras. I only see the NVR when I run the config tool. Any idea how I can check the cameras firmware version? It's tricky because the cameras are DHCP and connect to the NVR via it's internal router/POE ports, so not connected to your home network. The NVR is connected to your home network so clearly you can see that. Never liked the NVR with the internal PoE ports because of this, but many like it, but it is what it is. You can plug you PC into one of the PoE ports, then you would have access to the cameras via the web interface to update the firmware. If you want both, then don't use the built in PoE ports and get an external switch.

It may be your IE setting. Install a program called VLC and try entering the RTSP steam URL and view the camera that way. Also, you can tray the ONVIF URL to see if you get a snapshot. Certainly. the person you bought it from can provide support, no?

Try the Bahama Yellowpages forum, I believe someone there might have cracked this.

An IPC-HDB3200C is not like a camcorder, for one, there's no microphone, no audio in. Do you need audio? Second, it's going to write video in it's own propriatory format, so you need to use their player app to view it and use it to convert to AVI. It will also write to it's internal SD card slot, but you need to use their PSS software to view it. You can FTP but it's a complex directory structure so you'll need to find the event and find the recording by playing each one until you find it. Also, how will you trigger the recording? You can have it automatically record where there's motion but I would imagine it will record all day long as people move around the studio. It does not have alarm inputs so you can put a switch in your studio that activates recording. Your best bet is to use a camcorder.

Yes, there's no security for that snapshot feature and no it doesn't work on all Dahua cameras, depends on the firmware release. And yes, you can telnet into the camera and it has it's own user/password, not one you can set, (Oh snap, he didn't just divulge another security hole). The problem is you can't change much because it's a compressed read only file system that contains the code, believe me, I've tried but didn't push it to the point if bricking the camera. You would have to find a way to decompress onto the SD card, change the code and compress and move it back but the decompressor and compressor commands are not on the camera.

Don't have a clue if you can have it FTP snapshots on a schedule, like every 5 minutes. Nothing on the interface allows for that. You can FTP snapshots on motion detection or alarm input. Using the URL you provided displays an image on a web browser. You can right click on the image and it saves as JPG. They have an API so you can write a .net app to do what you want to do. Check the Bahamas Yellowpages forum, they have more info on this.

You can use Dahua cameras to write to SD or FTP to NAS and then use PSS to view the recorded video.

Also consider that some camera companies provide free NVR or CMS software like Mobotix MXControlCenter, Axis Camera Companion, ACTi NVR, Brickcom, Vivotek, Geovision. It may limit you to one brand for that implemenation, but it allows you to offer a lower cost solution overall that you know will work. It's not like analog where all cameras work with all DVRs, with network cameras, each camera company and even each model has to be supported by the NVR or NVR software you chose.

The ACTI NVR software comes in two pieces, the server which runs transparently on the PC in the background and they also provide client software that you can install on any PC to connect to the server. It also has a built in web server where you can access the server in the very same way the client software works, I see no difference between the two except one is running inside the browser, the other is a standalone program. And yes, it is running on Windows, so you have to open up the Windows firewall or turn it off and you have to port forward that PC on your router for access from the internets.

I think the biggest thing in the news this week that affects camera sales is the Dorner incident in the past week or so. When they said Dorner was holed up in a random cabin in our local mountains, the first thing I did was check our cameras to see if it was ours (wasn't). I think people that have vacation homes are thinking, maybe we need a camera now. Nothing like a mass murderer to keep things interesting. Although we don't get a lot of meteorite activity in So Cal, we do get earthquakes and the cameras come in handy to see what happened to our home while we are elsewhere.

Russian meteor strike caught on surveillance cameras

Sort of conflicting request, which are best, which are best bank for the buck. If money was no object, I would go with Mobotix or Axis, both good quality cameras, built to last, good support. It's what I used in my commercial projects. If bang for the buck is the priority, I would say ACTi, they have a good mix of cameras, well build, good support. They just replaced almost their entire line of cameras in the past month and some good pricing. For example, they have a 5mp IR bullet in the $500 range. Are computer based solutions viable, yes, better, maybe. It depends on your school of thought. Clearly an NVR is a PC with software already preloaded, so less work, but is limited to the task at hand and many are not expandable, meaning if you get an 8 channel NVR, you want to add two more cameras, may not be possible. A PC offers the expandability factor as most NVR software is sold per camera. Also, it seperates the two investments. For example, in an NVR, if it broke or you outgrew it, you toss it, 100% of your investment is lost. With a PC and software, the investment is seperated. So if you PC breaks, you can easily get it fixed at many places, including big box stores like Best Buy, who can you take the NVR to when it doesn't boot up? You can also replace the PC without loosing your investment in the software. For example, a new PC comes out, twice as fast, half the money and you want to add more cameras, you have the option to repurpose the old PC and preserve your investment. Lastly, a PC can do more, for example, if you wanted to run LPR software, if you want to attach multiple monitors to it, if you want to control it remotely, if you want to embed video into a webpage, the extensibility is there.

What do you want the browser to do? They have different permission levels, so you can control who has access to what. You can view multiple cameras at the same time in playback mode and scrub the timeline and all the cameras scan in unison to quicky find the event you are looking for, works really well. I would also recomend Axis and Mobotix but will definately be out of the price range, both come with free CMS software and the cameras do the motion detection and recording.

Check out ACTi's new indoor 720P domes, they are under $200 and the ACTi NVR 3.0 software is free and very good, comes with a free IOS app, full web browser interface and is best I've seen and you can run it on a very low end PC, I had mine running on an Atom processor Nettop without any problems with 6 1.3MP cameras.

Yes, in that screen is where you add cameras or NVR to PSS. For the web interface, yes, it's blank when you first start. I forgot what you click on because I ony borrowed the NVR, but there's a button you click that adds all the cameras to the web interface or double click on each camera and it brings up, something like that. No, internet speed has nothing to do with this, you are viewing on your home network. I think what Q-See might have thought is you are using PSS to view the NVR remotely which is how many people would use it.

Mobotix is a little different in that they sell the lens and sensor together as one expensive unit. The Mobotix M12 lenses are glued in place, but their domes have interchangeable lenses. I believe the new M15 (replacement for the M12) will have interchangable lenses from the S14. Of course if you can afford a $1,500, why mess with Dahua Bikerider I believe used 12mm and 16mm lenses from dx.com, pretty cheap, only major downside is it will take a while to get. Maybe you can buy one of the lenses from Bikerider that he's not using.

OK, maybe I misunderstood. So you took a 100Mbps switch, put 90Mbps workload through it, you connected your PC to a different router/switch that is Gige and connected the two switches together and the speed is about the same. I'll give you that, why would it be different, you haven't added your normal router network traffic. Is that spin, maybe, but I think it's what I brought from the start, the added traffic on the router would affect your existing router use, not the cameras. Besides the 90Mbps from the cameras, now I'm watching an HD movie on Netflix, kids are downloading music from iTunes and my wife is picking up her emails and all PCs are backing up to my backup NAS, my 4 Tivos/DVRs are getting live schedule updates, my thermostat is sending IP traffic to it's mother ship and my tablet are receiving podcast and software updates regularly, some as large as few hundred MB.

I believe it's a big jump in price when you go from the start edition. I've seen Pro for $114 at voipsupply.com.

Maxicon, did your new I5 PC resolve the dropped frames, jittery issue with BI? Also, now that you have more power, did you crank up the fps and what is your CPU % busy now compared to the older i3-540?

Thanks for that tip, I love it in that mode, sort of Andy Warhol look. Now if I can only get Mick Jagger to look into my camera