buellwinkle

How about the Bosch low end, the 5MP vandal mini dome that's about $200.

You have to setup motion detection on the camera itself and then it just works.

All easy if you have the parts.

I have both the Dahua and Hikvision NVR on my desk and I can tell you the Dahua is much better. For one, you can use Dahua or Hikvision cameras with motion detect recording with Dahua where I can not get that to work the other way with Hikvision NVRs. The web interface is much better with Dahua too.

Brilliant. So what you are saying is run alarm out off the Axis to alarm in on the Avigilon. Set the Axis to trigger alarm out on the event, and set the Avigilon to trigger recording from alarm in.

double post

I do license plate capture at 15m with a ordinary Hikvision 2032 mini bullet and it's built in LEDs, 1/200 max exposure and 12mm lens and front license plates to boot.

To embed live video on a web page you need to convert RTSP from the camera to RTMP. I've done it various ways, but yes, you can continuously stream to a service and YouTube offers that. If you want to do it yourself, the best software I've used for small scale projects is Unreal Media Server, free for up to 5 cameras, 15 concurrent users. If this is big, you can use a more commercial grade solution like Wowsa. I've also done with BlueIris software, where I modified their web page that shows multiple cameras and made my own web page out of it. It actually pretty efficient doing this if you don't try and do motion detection and recording with it. Keep in mind this will use a lot of bandwidth so make sure you have what it takes in terms of upload.

Maybe so but it works fine with Axis Q1604 in H.264 mode, so odd. The weird behavior with Avigilon with h.264 is I only get 1 fps when I set the camera to 5 fps and when it does capture a plate, the LPR time can be 30 to 90 seconds off from the timestamp from Milestone for the video. Changing it to MJPEG made it the correct frame rate and the video time and lpr time where the same. The other weird thing that Avigilon does it give you odd resolution choices, no D1, no VGA, just some odd numbers, maybe the Canadian exchange rate for U.S. bits.

That's one of the shortcomings of Avigilon, they don't publish a URL command manual, so you don't know if it's even possible to send an URL string to the Avigilon to start record. You may be able to call support but I was not successful with getting this out of their support. If you do, please let us know. If you had this, then yes, Axis has the ability to send an URL command on a triggered event. The other way is with the NVR software. I know with Milestone XProtect, I can have a camera record based on another camera's hardware events. We use Milestone with Avigilon and Axis.

Yes, from the solar panel you can measure it but it would require a camera he didn't want to buy until he was certain of the power draw. I can't measure it because I don't have a spare solar panel (all on the roof) so reliant on a 12v power supply and I would have to cut the wires or open the camera up to measure.

That's just something that happens with Hikvision, the fatal flaw, it's Achilles heel, it's chink the armor, it's frailty, it's foible. If you look, it's timed exactly to how you set the I-frame interval. Set it to twice the frame rate, then you'll see this every 2 seconds. The only way I know to fix this is to buy a different brand, but I enjoy it, brings life to an otherwise dull scene. Most don't even notice but once you do, you can't unsee it. So for those that don't see it, count your blessings and stop looking, for the rest, there's Dahua.

Finally got our Milestone LPR working with an Avigilon vandal dome. Doing pretty well, high recognition rate at about 35' with their 9-22mm lens set to 22mm. It's triggering gates to open on a plate match. My guess is we could have gone about 5' further if we had to with this camera. The trick with this camera is to set it to MJPEG. For some unexplainable reason, it did really bad with it set to H.264.

Not that easy to measure 12V current load on the camera without taking it apart, so not sure you'll get an answer on this, specially on that model where you have to take it apart a bunch to get to where power is on the circuit board. Based on PoE with a smart switch, I don't even see 5W during the day. All my cameras run on solar panels, 26 of them, LG280 But I use PoE. Also voltage out of a typical solar panel is not 12V, you could burn up the camera if you plug directly to a solar panel as most 60 cell panels put out about 30V or even the small panels can put out 18V

Those two options are unrelated. But did you try putting the camera in day mode from the image menus to see if it switches to color?

Just being cautious before trying it.

What does it cost per camera? What's the specs for plate capture, like frame rate, resolution, plate number pixel height? Has anyone tried the very, very cheap iSpyConnect LPR solution for $50?

I have not found that using slow HDD has any effect on the recordings. Heck, I'm running a slow 5400RPM 2TB 2.5" drive with a dozen cameras and no problems and that includes the operating system.

Only one way to guarantee that he will never get a false positive, hire a security guard. With that said, indoor, with my two cube cameras I have with PIR motion detectors, I get maybe 1-2 false positives in 3-4 years. From a Hikvision point of view, you could have installed ds-2cd2432f cameras that have PIR motion detectors. Dogs/cats in the house will trigger it though. Outdoors not many cameras have built in PIR except Mobotix but if he's not happy with Hikvision, the image quality on Mobotix will be inferior and may not justify the $1,500/cam price. With Hikvision cameras with alarm input, you can setup your own PIR motion detection. Figure $100ish for the motion detector and a few bucks for the 12V power supply. Outdoors you will still get some false motion detects from birds, squirrels, cats, dogs, but far, far fewer than video motion detect you get now and you can block out the area close to the ground to minimize motion from 4 legged creatures. Would Dropcam help, sure, you can get more false positives and really test the capabilities of the email system, see at which point your ISP locks your email account for spamming.

Are you providing us the hacked 5.2.5 firmware?

Have you tested to see what happens if you have a cameras with your region code fix and then install the new V5.2.5 over it? I heard it can brick the camera, so nervous about the one camera you did your region code fix for, is it safe?

Yes, 5.2.3 is slower, but that's how the new cameras are coming.

We use an Avigilon 9-22mm and works great at 30-35' but that's the limit. You have to get an image where the plate is at least 4% of the image for LPR to work. Just because you can read the plate does not mean the software will. We reached the limit of a 5-50mm lens at 70-80' at another location. My guess is you'll need some badass telephoto lens and then the problem will be atmospheric distortion and reading plates that far may not work well. You should consider moving the capture closer to the camera, either by capturing the cars closer as they pass the camera or moving the camera to a better location. Also, most software wants D1 resolution for LPR, but check the manual for the LPR plug-in. So having a 8MP Avigilon won't help. Does it have to be Avigilon, will Bosch or Axis work with their software?

I can image the price is not cheap, but for a community, not a bad investment. For example, Milestone LPR is $1,299 list price per camera + $299 for each license region (USA is one region) per server + the NVR camera license costs. I would imagine that Avigilon is more expensive. We actually have the opposite problem as Avigilon is just an ONVIF camera with Milestone. It works for LPR, but we can't figure out how to trigger alarm out.

Doesn't work in 5.2.5 as the file system is cramfs, meaning it's read only.