buellwinkle

Sorry, my typo, you can't record from one to another.

It's all the same, all made in China, same everything. The only difference as several of us figured out is the country code is burned into the ROM, so for now, it will not be possible to load firmware via the browser for the wrong country code. As for who gets firmware first, it's weird, 5.0.2 and 5.0.5 came out on Euro site first, 5.1 came out on the U.S. site first and not yet on the Euro site. From China, they are not pro-active, so if you know 5.1 is available, I have to make a request to China, and they send it to me in a few days.

Seems like it's struggling to focus. With that camera, can you set presets with preset focus like you can do on Axis PTZ so you can quickly go from preset to preset with it already focused by the time it gets to the location?

If you use the OSD feature on the camera to put the date/time, camera name and other text on the screen it will show up on recordings in BlueIris. But BlueIris also has it's OSD, so you would have both unless you turn one of them off.

That's what's being done but because PTZ's are 2-axis, as you pan, the image tilts.

You can't record from one camera to the other. If you want to use SD cards to record, you need that each camera have that feature.

It's the same firmware, just country code is different. If you apply firmware via TFTP it does not prevent you from using the browser firmware update in the future. The US and Chinese versions of the 5.1 firmware are available, why use TFTP?

Not the first time I've seen this. The Axis Q60 ($4,000 camera) had this problem but was fixed in a firmware patch.

Must be a euro thing but Mobotix and Axis both hide options that can be edited in their configuration file.

Danke

Yes, ACTi has POS integration but don't believe it's in the free software, may have to get their Retail NVR. This is the brochure on the ACTi Retail solution. http://www.acti.com/Solution/ACTi_Retail_Solution_Guide101221.pdf You can send text to the ACTi camera for the on screen display via URL commands, but you would have to develop the script code to that. For example, if the register allows you to send text as user configurable URL, then you may be able do that easily. Also, besides Avigilon software, there's Milestone XProtect Retail that can run on Milestone Express Edition. Neither solution will be cheap, but they will likely do what he wants to do which is show the register receipt in the image. Here's the link to the Milestone Solution http://www.milestonesys.com/Software/Add-ons-for-XProtect/xprotectretail/

Great, and they have the official 5.1 release of the firmware there.

Send me one and I'll test it without snow. It's not going to be a white Christmas this year, even at the local ski resorts, 77F predicted for the 25th. The problem I had with their large PTZ's is they don't go up far enough. So on a high-rise looking down, sure, works great, but say on a pole mounted camera, 10-12' up, you zoom in 30x and you can see ants on the ground, but you can't see the horizon. In a perfect world, would love to see at least the horizon at mid screen. You would think with the external ball design of their PTZ, they can point slightly up. I get it that it would be hard on a PTZ with an internal dome, but the Axis Q60 does it, why can't Dahua do it? Has anyone worked around this issue, a hack maybe?

Then that works to, just for a picture with Firefox, not IE. http://admin:12345@192.168.1.99/Streaming/channels/101/picture

Very nice. Whatever files are available from Hikvision I usually find here - http://www.hikvisioneurope.com/portal/ I too have a mac, never had trouble viewing any Hikvision camera with Safari but didn't do anything special to do it, just worked and all have Raptor firmware although I heard the 5.0.5 firmware does have issues on a Mac, so try 5.0.2 (don't know about 5.1 yet).

Don't know, that worked for me with the password embedded in the URL using VLC player to do the streaming. Browser don't support RTSP streaming, but most software does. rtsp://admin:12345@192.168.1.99:554/Streaming/Channels/1

Is that the final 5.1 or the beta version?

To answer two questions with one answer, the Hikvision DS-2CD2632F-I, runs about $259 shipped and is varifocal down to 2.8mm or 105 degree viewing angle. Also has an SD card slot and can record and playback from the web browser client using a timeline, very cool.

I know the M302x series is cheaper, but doesn't have the lightfinder feature for low light sensitivity. The M24 at Lake Louis shots really fall off early, that sensor needs a lot of light, that's why they sell models with a color and b&w dedicated night sensor in the same camera which is what we use, the M12, D12, D14, D15. The P33 with lightfinder like the P3364 will let you see about 1 hour earlier and 1 hour later. Also, the M series has a 1 year warranty, the P's have 3 year warranty. Also there's other features lacking on the M like the motorized focus and focal length. The image you show from Lake Louise is not even 1MP, it's 1280x480 and a 720P camera is 1280x720. The Hikvision is a good buy, goes down to -30C and know of someone that very recently had it down to -22C in Canada without a problem. Has very good low light sensitivity and is 3MP. You would have to get the Varifocal version to get down to 2.8mm wide (same viewing angle as the Axis P33, or 105 degrees), the low end bullets only come as wide as 4mm which may be too narrow for you. The model number is the ds-2cd2632f-i. But the Hikvision and also Dahua, the two popular brands on this forum do not do FTP of images on an interval like Axis or Mobotix. You can use software like BlueIris to do that, but now you need a PC. But you can stream from the camera to a website using typical re-streaming software like Wowsa, Unreal Media Server, even open source VLC or use a service and there's lots of them that do this. Just wanted to show you an Axis Lightfinder camera from one of my reviews. This is the P3384-VE, same as P3364-VE but has WDR which you don't need. This is in my driveway, no other lights other than street light across the street. If this was an M24 or M25, it would be black with a slight glow in the general direction of the street light. You say you don't need low light performance, but those pictures from Lake Louise are dark even during the day. At the slightest sense of sunset they get very noisy. This is the same shot but during the day, you can click on the pictures to see the full resolution shot.

The blog is in my signature line, click "general" category on the right, it's the first article. From my understanding, the price difference may be more from VAT and other import duties that your country imposes, not the cost of the camera. Maybe there's some deals to be had on eBay in the UK. The other problem is the U.S. dollar is weak relative to the Pound so that plays into pricing so everything in the U.S. must seem like a bargain. When the tables were turned and the Canadian dollar was 0.75 to 1, it seemed like Canada was on sale.

You can telnet in, the password is the same as the web interface password or admin/12345 by default. You can define motion detect zones and then trigger recordings based on movement in those zones. You can record to NAS, but it's not easy, only NFS is supported and even then, only seems to work with some NFS devices, not all. The latest release which is still in beta testing is supposed to make this better. I had the best luck with Synology NAS devices and wrote and article on my blog. There are Hikvision distribution partners in the UK, four of them - http://www.hikvision.com/EN/distributionPartner-india.asp?leftmenu=open&cid=14&countryId=190011

Where did you get this release? One of the official Hikvision sites? Which firmware did you install? The Raptor firmware for the 2000 series (like the ds-2cd2032)?

I agree, live streaming is the way to go. The problem with Mobotix is they are incapable of putting out a standard RTSP stream so most streaming software won't work with it, I tried different products that work with 99% of all cameras. They do have the ability to stream directly on a website which most cameras cannot do. It works, but haven't figured out how to embed the user/password into it. meaning anyone that looks at it has to enter the user/password, sort of dumb and it didn't work on all browsers, it worked with IE and Firefox, not Chrome. Also, it makes the camera do all the work, which may be OK, but I would imagine that if you put a few active people looking at it, it may or may not hold up, don't know. I was going to try and use BlueIris to stream as they support the camera and can do RTMP re-streaming to a website. Also, they can FTP images to a website. Actually pretty efficient at it because it's not doing normal NVR stuff and motion detection. There are some streaming services that accept Mobotix cameras and provide the service which is probably the best way to go if this is of interest. You just pay them a monthly fee and they take your camera stream and restream for flash and html5, very cool to have on a website. Here's a cool one in San Diego - http://www.SunDiegoLive.com, 1080P streaming from 3 cameras. His company provides streaming services and he's got serious bandwidth.

You are not using it because you don't want to, or just didn't know? Anyway, I'll assume the latter, correct me if I'm wrong. You download the software from their website, acti.com, click Products on top menu bar, click "Video Management System" on the left and on the right, select NVR 3.0. You install it on a PC you want to be the server, pretty low CPU requirements, may have used 2-3% on my first gen i3. Then you have it find your cameras, set them up as you wish. This is all browser based. If you run the official client, it's the same as the browser version, so I would not install the workstation anywhere, just use Internet Explorer from anywhere. I was using it when traveling in other countries. The only downside is it has to be IE so on my MacBook I travel with I had to run Windows. By default, it's set to record 24/7, so you may want to change that to record only on motion detect. To access the NVR software outside your home, you need to do some port forwarding on your router. You need to port forward port 80 and video port 6002 and possibly the control port 6001, don't remember. Then you can use a web browser or the smartphone apps. You can port forward individual cameras, but it's way easier to see all your cameras on one display through the web browser on your Android device and tap one to see it full screen.

First, let me tell you, the M24 is a good camera, the M25 is a piece of poo. Their new 5MP sensor which by the way is really 3MP (marketing genius, let people believe they are getting a real 5MP camera but give them 3MP images, nobody will ever figure it out) and the image quality is not in the same league as the older M24 or the Axis cameras. It has a harshness to it that's hard to describe and the image looks like you took a 1MP image and blew it up to 3MP because it has jagged edges and pixilation. I would compare it more to a 1MP Foscam that you took and made into a 3MP image. Yes, that's how bad it is. If you really want 5MP and I have no idea why you would ever post a 5MP image, I would get the Axis P3367-VE, best 5MP I've used. But honestly, how are you going to display a 5MP on a website? I would be concerned with a 1MP image on a website. As for price, yes, $100 difference, but the reality is, that Mobotix is day only not day/night like the Axis, it's a fixed lens, to change you have to buy a whole new sensor and lens, a few hundred. The Axis is varifocal, you can set the viewing angle at the click of a button. Also, the Axis P3364-VE has a 2.5mm lens, that's very wide at 105 degrees. You can go hemispherical, not sure Axis makes an outdoor one and the old Mobotix Q is pretty good, I used one, but I would not get the new one with that horrible 5MP sensor. The problem with hemispherical is that when you FTP them image, you will get a circular image, like a fisheye, cool effect but may not be what you want. It's misleading because you would have to view it through the browser or decent software to see the corrected multi-image output. If you go Mobotix and I have a bunch of them, so not trying to talk you out of Mobotix, see if you can get the older models even if you have to pay more, like the M24. Trust me, at sunset the M25 will be very noisy, was just going over it with our installer, how bad it was and he had to have it switch to the night sensor sooner than normal.