buellwinkle

We had snow twice this season already in So Cal mountains. Can't wait for our first big blizzard. The only way to do what you want is with a PIR motion detector, but not with the entry level Hikvision cameras.

For one camera, figure 4-5Mbps upload speed required at your store and of course at least the same download sped at home. There will be latency depending on route and other traffic in your home, in the store. I have a 3MP camera but 15fps, so slightly less demand than 1080P at 30fps, and I have 4Mbps upload speed with Charter at our lake house and I get fairly smooth video from our house with 12Mbps download speed but not perfect but can see people water skiing, boats passing by occasionally there are points where video freezes but not often. If you have DSL then you are out of luck because it maxes out at .75Mbps.

So if I use a 100Mbps switch with gigabit uplink ports it will be good enough vs. getting a full gigabit switch.

I took them off the SD card on my Hikvision dome and I played them with VLC, no problems. You can also use VLC to convert to another format if you prefer to play with Window Media Player like an AVI file. It's free, it's open source, it works http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

I checked every visible square inch of mine (a Derytech version but with 5.0.2 firmware loaded on it) and I can't find a reset button. I went through the manual and there's no reset button shown for that model but other models have a reset button. The manual is here and page 42 starts Dome IV which is this dome - http://www.hikvision.com/UploadFile/image/2013051507480695791.pdf If someone does find a reset but, prove me wrong, show a picture of it. If it were me, I would go back and get the original firmware that was on it and try installing that via TFTP. If it's HIkvision branded, regardless of where you got it, I would call their support.

I finally finished my review on the ACTi ACM-1231, an outdoor camera that is 1.3MP, has built in Illuminators, vari-focal lens (3.3mm to 12mm). IR CUT filter. Will probably get one or two more. http://ipcamnetwork.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/acti-acm-1231-megapixel-outdoor-camera/

Should have their first one next Monday.

Will have the review soon. I'm in training all week and just need an hour to proof read, hopefully tonight. The ZyXel is full power on every PoE port (15.4w), so when you see 64W total, that means 4 ports are full power. When they say 8 port PoE switch, many times it means half the ports are PoE. So if you need 8 PoE ports, get the 16 port model.

Could just be a bad cable or connector. Try the cameras with a different cable, maybe a short store bought cable. How long are the cables now? Do they drop out when using the browser interface? Could still be BlueIris, try a different product, many have 30 day trials.

That's sad but I can understand at $300, there's a limit to what they can invest in. I tried a D32 with the HIkivsion NVR and while it connects as advertise, never go it to display video so again, just because they say they can do it does not mean it actually works.

Had a few of those, hated them. I would plug in 4 cameras and overload the switch because it's 30W max at the switch which really means about 24W at the camera. I believe the HIkvision cameras are like 7.5W with IR on. Also didn't like the brick transformer. For slightly more get the ZyXel ES1100-8P or if you want more, the ES1100-16P. I use both, the ZyXel is full power on every PoE port and also have the Trendnet but only can safely put 3 cameras on it.

It works if you are in Australia as everything is upside down there. Don't know what type camera you looking at but all network dome cameras I used have an option to flip and mirror the image.

Nice switch, but how are you going to power the cameras, 12V adapters? I would look for a PoE switch that way you connect and power the cameras from one Ethernet cable.

That's a good camera, have not seen the switch before but specs look fine. There's other free software, up to you how much time you want to spend testing but Zoneminder and iSpyConnect are two free open source products. There's Axxonsoft, free for 16 cameras but have not been able to get it to work for me. iVMS NVR from Hikvision is free, again not easy to setup recording. The trick with China is to pay for upgraded express shipping like DHL or FedEx or you may way a long time. Sometimes you get lucky with free or lower priced shipping, but I've waited 2 weeks once and 2 months once, so hit and miss. DHL or FedEx rarely goes beyond a few days. At least you are closer to China than I am and it's all downhill, LOL.

Maxicon, you have a good amount of cameras, are you using gigabit switches or 100Mbps? I'm thinking about switching mine out because I hit the wall on my switch with so many 3MP cameras. I'm already pushing over 70Mbps and that's a lot for a 100Mbps switch.

Yes, you can have it track events and record full time and marks the motion events. Better yet, you can just record full time and then do a bit search for motion in a specific area. For example, say you had someone steal something from your mailbox, you can search for motion just in front of the mailbox. I also had Milestone record audio recently when testing a camera that has 2-way audio, in my case the Hikvision 3mp varifocal dome (not the mini-dome) for a review I should have ready by Tuesday. Hikvision or ACTi depends on you, but I have both, happy with both. ACTi provides very good free NVR software but you pay for non-ACTi cameras. Not even 100% sure what that price is since that aspect is new, but if interested I can find out. It also can do full time recording and mark the motion detect events but does not have a search feature. Milestone XProtect Essential is $99 for the base (first 2 cameras), $49 per camera. Prices are somewhat controlled through authorized distributors or resellers, so not going to a huge swing in price. They have a concept caller SUP or Software Upgrade Plan. You can pay to guarantee future releases. You get one year free, so if you pay say for a 3 year plan, you get 3 additional years of upgrades. You don't have to take this, you may be happy with the current release forever. It's not hugely expensive, for example, 3 years is I believe $20/camera.

Yes, most were written long before Win 7/8 back in the Win XP days so should run fine on Server 2011. Installing is as easy as any Windows software. No matter which way you go, you have to setup motion detection parameters, alerts notifications, remote access, camera names, NTP server or time and DST settings, layout settings and that's what requires the majority of effort. My guesstimate is it will take about 12% more effort to setup NVR software over a hardware NVR but everyone's skillset is different, it's a learning curve either way. I would say the biggest differentiator in level of effort is you'll have to setup the cameras one by one for IP address where the NVR assigns them automagically. But there's also advantage to the PC and having cameras on their own switch, for example, being able to connect individually to each cameras to tweak parameters not available via the NVR, to troubleshoot problems and you can't do that if they are attached to the internal PoE ports. Not to mention future expansion, an 8 port NVR can never have a 9th camera, a Swann NVR cannot have say an Avigilon camera attached to it. So say a year from now, you find the perfect camera, made by someone else, so at that point you switch to software, but you have the learning curve all over again. The bundles are a good value but limits your camera choices to what they have. Also typically limited to 1080P.

This switch is not 802.3af compliant but you can set a port to 24v or 48v and it seems to work for people with 802.3af cameras in the 48v setting but I have not tried it personally but looking into it because I'm having bandwidth issues with my 100Mbps switch. My only complaint with this switch is that you can only have 7 cameras because you need one part to go to the NVR or router.

Yes, that's it. I like the Dahua PTZ and have used a few of it's bigger brother with 18x zoom. I can send you a link to those. How much detail do you need at 6-8 feet? With the 3X PTZ and 1080P, I would imagine you can read newsprint.

PTZ can be expensive and the only 3MP I know if Dahua and it's about $1,500. I would recommend an ACTi E96 for that room. It's 5MP fisheye that gives you a 360 degree view of the room and the images are corrected to look like you have 4 cameras. Costs about $260 shipped for short time while they have a promotion. PM me if you are interested. The best value at the moment for a PTZ, is the 1080P Dahua mini PTZ, has 3X optical zoom and runs $599.

The E96 is a day camera, so he would have to leave lights on at night. You would be surprised how much light a single LED bulb puts out. I use the Cree from Home Depot, costs about $12 and puts out 60W equivalent, better than most built in illuminators, you'll have color at night and in theory the light deters criminals. If he has can lights, I love the new Halo LED R30 floodlights. Sure, not practical in someone's home but in a business, no reason not to leave some lights on. There's several brands of fisheye cameras, none have illuminators built in. If you want day/night with illuminators, indoors, looking at an exit, I would get 1MP camera like the ACTi D54 or a few bucks more for the D55 that is 3MP but not needed close to a door. Indoors at my house, I use 1MP cameras and never had an issue ID'ing someone day or night. Indoors the lights reflects off walls, is more effective than when placed outdoors.

It's probably not working because you have an IP conflict, not a good idea to give another router the first DHCP address. So to get out of this pickle, turn everything off, when I say everything, anything that can possibly auto connect to the router when you turn them on like a phone, tablet, printer, anything. Turn the MiFi on, turn the laptop on, connect the SSID of the MiFi and reset the gateway IP to what you had before. Do the same for the other router, go in via Ethernet if you can and put that back to the way you had it before. Then explain what exactly are you trying to accomplish by having two routers? Is it that; a) you are trying to extend the reach of WiFi? b) the camera is not WiFi and you are trying to connect the camera to the second router through Ethernet because the MiFi clearly does not have Ethernet ports c) the camera connects to a PC running streaming software to a web server and one is on MiFi the other on the router Then how do you plan on having people view the camera, embedded on a website or just direct connect to the camera's web interface? If embedded on a website, what streaming software are you using?

What specific PoE switch and how many cameras per switch, what camera compression and are multiple switches daisy chained or go to another switch and what switch is that? Two possibilities. Some NVR software is sensitive to network overloading, like trying to put 8 1080P cameras using MJPEG on one 100Mbps switch at 30FPS, may work for a while but then a camera loses a connection for a split second and the NVR software drops the camera. The other is power per port. While it may seem switches advertise 15.4W, but some have a lower aggregate like half power if you use all ports, so 7.7W per switch but that's at the switch, after power loses from long runs, it may only be 6W and for many IR cameras, that's not enough. You would notice this by a camera dropping out at night about the time IR illuminators come on, usually the one with the longest run.

These inexpensive Hikvision domes/bullets do not have audio. Just finished testing the next model up with audio and it has mic-in and audio-in, the DS-2CD2732F-IS cost you about $259 for the dome and way better than the mini dome at the same place RayT got his from. I'll have the review up in a few days, maybe Monday/Tuesday, just waiting for time to proof-read it. The single LED bullet I've reviewed that I like is the ACTi D32 also 3MP, fairly inexpensive for an ACTi. Also, Hikvision has the DS-2CD2332-I with 1 LED, same place as before for $169. Some people really like it. In theory you can run the Hikvision iVMS software for free, some people got it working, I could not get it to record. ACTi provides excellent software for free but mostly for their cameras. On the low end, you can get BlueIris Software for $37 on eBay, but download the trial version to see if you like it. There's a free version of Milestone XProtect Go, 8 cameras, 5 days recording but is commercial quality software. You can use an old PC, I run an old i3-540, works fine for my 8 cameras.

Should be on their site at http://www.lorextechnology.com. They are made by Hikvision, but neutered to 2MP (Hikvision branded version is 3MP). I recently did reviews under the Hikvision brand name, ds-2cd2132-i mini dome and the ds-2cd2032-i mini bullet. The domes are 2-axis, meaning you can only really mount them on the ceiling (not surface wall mounted), so I would recommend their next model up in my original response. The bullets are real nice but not sure you want them indoors as anyone passing by can shift them, move them with a broom handle. Domes are inherently more vandal proof and look cleaner, more professional indoors. Also, for what it's worth, there's absolutely no relationship on the number of LEDs to how effective they are. There are some new cameras with 1 LED that are equal to cameras with 25 LEDs. Also, they are better because with 1 LED, the LED and lens are separated, no chance of IR light bleed. With a ring of LED's surrounding a lens, there's a chance of IR light bleed as the foam around the lens that separates the two hardens.