buellwinkle

OK, I'll do it now as a separate post

With the 16mm lens, was that on the 2032 mini bullet? Do you think their 25mm lens has a chance? Yes, 3 tiny screws and the LED ring comes off. I'm trying to get the longest focal length as possible and still fit and work as a science experiment to see if it can be used for LPR. Also, for what it's worth, the factory 4mm lens is 18mm long and the head is 13.5mm wide.

They had these at ISC West and they looked interesting. They told me it's a design look but basically the same as the cylindrical version like the ipc-hfw3300c.

The largest 2.5" drive that is 95mm is 2TB from Samsung. I had a 2TB drive before and I have it set to record events for 14 days and maybe filled up the drive 3/4 of the way. I feel I can run about 26 cameras with Milestone as a server without a CPU problem on the NUC. I say 26 as that's the max on the Essential version of the software. Of course you would not want 26 cameras with a single 2TB drive, so practical, for me, with 2 weeks events, I can probably grow to 12 cameras and maybe 16 if I cut the 14 days down to 10 or spend more time fine tuning the motion detect parameters for each camera or use higher compression.

I was running 6 cameras with BlueIris on an old i3-540. CPU was maybe 60% with 80% spikes. Used direct to disc mode, cranked frame rates down to 10-15 and minimized the window to keep CPU down. It's good for a small system. Easy to use and works.

Pounce, if you are in So Cal, let me know, maybe I can help convince them.

I would recommend the Hikvision with Milestone as there's direct support for it, you'll be able to use the motion detect events of the camera. The Dahua will work, but it will use generic ONVIF and do motion detect at the server level. Milestones server side motion detection is actually quite efficient. For example, if you had 8 Hikvision using camera side motion detect on a modern day i3 processor, you may use 5% CPU, with Dahua you may you 10% CPU. That's server processing only. Displaying the cameras takes the same amount of CPU either way. So if you are concerned about CPU load, the Hikvision would be a better choice, but on a newer computer, not sure you'll care, so get the cameras that suits you better. I'm more concerned about CPU load because I'm running Milestone on an Intel NUC i5 which ironically is not as fast as the same generation i3 from a full sized computer, but I love that it only uses about 30W of power and fits in the palm of my hand. Even then, with 1 Dahua, 5 Hikvision, 3 ACTi and Milestone doing camera side motion detect on 4 cameras, and server side motion detect on 5, it's only using 6-8% CPU and runs cool.

Has anyone here with Milestone upgraded to the new 2014 version yet. I did just now, don't see much of a difference, but I had trouble recently with the mobile client and it's working well now. And for what it's worth, no Canon logo. If anyone needs to know how, PM me, I put together instructions with the screenshots of converting the license from 2013 to 2014. I don't want to make it generally public until someone besides me tries it and verifies the instructions. Also, I'm running it on the Intel NUC, a 4.5" square i5 computer and it's awesome.

So what you are saying is that Milestone made 6m on 72m or 8.3% profit and Canon made 2.2B on 36B or 6.1% profit meaning that Milestone has a higher profit ratio than Canon as a whole, that's great. It's a cash cow, they buy something and it makes money. If John bought a single cow and made money from it's milk, the money it makes will not likely sustain him as it may represent a small fraction of his annual expenses. So John would have to buy many cows to make enough profit to live comfortably. Milestone is just one cash cow out of many cash cows that make the $2.2B that makes Canon profitable. To say one cow is insignificant is short sighted, they are all part of the greater good. Now to say that you can leverage manure from the cow to grow more corn and make higher profits in other products, sure, it can happen. I just think it's going to take a lot of bull manure to make people want to buy Canon cameras just because they own Milestone. Just one farmer's 2 cents.

I agree. Getting a professional security company in there helps with risk & liability. I put in our newsletter that the cameras are not there for resident security, they are there to protect the assets of the association from vandalism, gate accidents as well as it protects the association from liability should someone claim the gate him them, their car, their kid (kids love riding the gates, but who is a mother going to blame when their baby gets hurt?). Just a hit to one side of a dual gate costs over $4k to repair, does that justify a camera?

That's one way to look at it, but I'm comparing Milestone's revenue to Canon's network camera business and it's not $36B. First, the division they call Industry & Other business units that includes network cameras is 10% of the $36B pie in their last annual report. Then that's made up of 11 business units that are more significant and they don't show it down to that level. I doubt that Canon is selling $72m in network cameras. Then Canon bought it via it's subsidiary, Canon Europa N.V., not sure if how that fits in as Canon does not show that separately in their annual report either. That division has been on a steady decline dropping ~10% over the previous year's revenue. They promised their shareholders 20% growth in that division and it appears they are doing it via acquisition as they can't do with the products they have now. My guess is they doubled their network camera business revenue by buying Milestone. So to that tiny division that handles network cameras, this is their revenue cow.

It's normal now that cameras are packaged so tightly and without fans.

Works remotely too using DDNS and the HTTP port. I guess I'll have to make sure no private area cameras are port forwarded. Didn't Dahua fix this is more current firmware releases?

So far they are saying they will let Milestone run autonomously. I doubt Canon will kill a cash cow to sell more mediocre, yet expensive Canon cameras. The most I see happening is maybe a Canon branded NVR with Milestone on it.

HOA attorneys at the communities I've consulted on never said no to cameras. Their only concern was to make sure we did not record audio as that's not allowed here. Legally, where I live, we solved 100% off all incidents at our gates with the help of law enforcement. Has lead to good sized insurance claims. We even collected from the Orange County when a Sheriff accidently hit our gate during an emergency call. One case led the arrest of a crime ring operating in the area. It definitely paid for itself. We also put the cameras on the website for homeowners to help us look for trouble. We also realized people were hitting the gate too much so we are getting spikes for our entrance. When the gate close, the spike rise, a car hits the gate, the cameras will have plenty of time to record the car being towed away, Doh!

Never heard of Dahua "Chinese firmware" before, where do you get it, sounds exotic. They have NTSC and PAL and for N. American you want NTSC, if you are in China or Europe or just about anywhere else in the world, you want the PAL version. People have asked about the NTSC firmware update from April of this year, but when I requested it, they said it's buggy and still doing testing and will release it when it's ready.

Find someone that works with metals, maybe your wrought iron / gate guy and have him do the job, get the pole because to do it right, you'll need welding anyway. You want him to weld a flange with holes and then have them pour a concrete foundation for the pole with studs coming out with conduit going through it. Also, have them weld a j-box to it so you can access any wiring (camera, illuminator, whatever may be needed). Also, tell him you need a pole that is thick walled or it may sway in breezes. Some people use square poles to minimize this. Get it painted black so it doesn't stand out. Don't forget to pull permits as any vertical object you install, even on private property likely requires that. If access to the pole by ladder is difficult, have them put a hinge on the base of the pole so you can tilt it down to work on the camera. Your electrician should be able to get an outdoor rated nema enclosure for the NVR. Just make sure it's insulated fiberglass enclosure as the metal ones will fry the hard drives the first time it gets over 90f outside. Also get one with a big fan or set of fans. Try to find hard drives rated for over 95F unless you live in Alaska and that's not an issue. We could never get hard drives to last through summer no matter what we tried. We are looking at temperature controlled enclosures now with A/C units for one remote location.

The problem with getting these in China is they are too large so they have to ship China post and that can take a month or longer. Besides that, when Dahua gets an order for these, it takes about a month to fulfill. You are much better off going to a U.S. source.

Have any of you used the new face detection feature in 5.1.6? I must have missed it but as I upgrade more cameras to 5.1.6 is caught my eye. How about the traverse a virtual plane that triggers motion detection if it crosses a line in a certain direction. I tested it briefly and it identified my face anywhere on the screen, pretty cool. This is similar to the face detection on point and shot cameras. If you enable analysis, then a green box shows up around your face. Have not played yet with Traversal, but it's cool in that it detect objects traversing a line in a particular direction. Since it's direction specific, it won't likely be affected by shadows that affect typical motion detection. This is what you get from the help button - FACE DETECTION If you enable the face detection, once a face appears in the surveillance area, it will be detected and the linkage method will be triggered by the detection. Check the Enable Face Detection checkbox to enable the function. Check the Enable Dynamic Analysis for Face Detection checkbox if you want the detected face get marked with green rectangle in the live view. Configure the Sensitivity of face detection. Set the sensitivity higher will decrease the false alarm rate. TRAVERSE VIRTUAL PLANE Choose to linkage method as Notify Surveillance Center, Send Email, or Upload to FTP, and multi-selection is supported. The traversing virtual plane function detects whether there is an object going across the pre-defined virtual plane. And a series of linkage method will be triggered if any object is detected. Check the Enable Traversing Virtual Plane Detection checkbox. (Optional)Check Dual-VCA checkbox to enable the intelligent analysis in the data flow. It enables the record files retrieval by both the front-end devices and the back-end devices. Click the Draw Area, and a virtual plane will show on the image. You can click on the virtual plane to move it on the image to the desired position. The two arrows show the direction rule of the virtual plane. When you choose the direction as A<->B, only the arrow on the B side shows; when an object going across the plane with both direction can be detected and alarms are triggered. When you choose the direction as A->B, only the object crossing the virtual plane in from the A side to the B side can be detected. When you choose the direction as B->A, only the object crossing the virtual plane in from the B side to the A side can be detected. Choose another virtual plane on the dropdown list to configure.

It's hard finding such reviews.

If you use NOIP for free or paid DDNS to access your cameras remotely and try to connect to a NOIP domain, it’s not working. The NOIP.COM site is also down. Microsoft filed for an ex part temporary restraining order against NOIP and basically shut them down today without even a hearing. So the millions of people that use NOIP are screwed. Thanks Microsoft for shutting down NOIP without even allowing for a fair trial first. I can't believe judges are so dumb as to allow this to happen.

I can only speak about IP cameras, but I would imagine an DVR is like an IP camera in many ways. IP cameras send video in RTSP and that is not a valid protocol for HTML, I know, WTF. So if you want to embed video in a web page, you need to have a protocol that HTML supports like RTMP. There's several video servers that do this, the most common in commercial use is Wowsa but I've been happy with Unreal Media Server and some people like VLC, mostly because it's open source. Can IP cameras be used as security cameras? Well that's the point because analog cameras can't be used as security cameras without something else to process the video. IP cameras do all the processing and have web servers built. You connect to the web server using a browser and you can view live video, some with SD card slots can even record internally and you can view the recordings from the web interface, you can configure the camera and the camera can act on motion detect events, for example if it detects motion it can record, it can send an email, it can FTP an image or video, it can trigger a circuit like an alarm. You can in theory embed the webpage for the camera in another web page but it's not that easy as it will require the person to log in and install an ActiveX control or a plugin and it will look sloppy with all the controls and menus.

I would not buy an 8 port 100Mbps switch without a GigE uplink with today's high resolution cameras because it's going to cause problems. Either find one with a gigabit uplink or just get a GigE switch. Managed means you can manage the switch remotely. Say you fly to Brazil to see the World Cup and you have a power brown out and some of your cameras are stuck. With a managed switch you can see the network traffic stats, you can see the PoE power consumption and most importantly, you can toggle power for the port and see if you can bring the camera back online. Managed is what I use everywhere, at home, projects and such. Expect to pay about $100 more for a managed switch, give or take. If you are starting off with 1 camera, here's what I would do. Pickup a cheap PoE injector, I use the wall plug style that is a 1/2 amp or about 25W. When you grow, keep that injector to test cameras, see if there's a bad cable, see if the switch went bad. I use mine more than I want to as I've lost more PoE switches than cameras in the past year.

It's back up. I just hope noip is able to get some money out of Microsoft for their poor judgement.

I find 1.3MP cameras in general have better low light sensitivity so I personally would not use a 1080P camera for LPR. The better cameras for this are box cameras like the Axis Q1604, Bosch 733 and Samsung Wisenet III. The problem is you used the same exposure settings and you should turn gain down and maybe use a higher shutter speed with the ACTi. This is Dahua SD59230S-HN with HLC turned on, about 100m away, did pretty well considering it was 1080P.