buellwinkle

1. Some brands do this better than others, some do it different. For example Hikvision and Dahua have playback on the camera itself. The advantage is as long you can access the camera via the browser, you can play recorded video back in a similar fashion to an NVR, but one camera at a time. Some like ACTi and Axis have Windows programs that consolidate the cameras, so you can view a group of cameras, like 4 cameras like an NVR would and typically allow playback of one camera. The app only runs when you want to view cameras, so not the same as NVR software that's actually doing the recording. 2. Yes 3. Depends on the situation. I have SD cards in my cameras at our vacation home and the only time it gets triggered is when I first enter the home, then unplug them while I'm there. Has a 16GB card that has yet to fill up. 4. I always had the best luck with no-name cheaper cards. The faster 10x or faster cards have issues sometimes. I've put expensive sandisk high end cards in cameras and works with one camera, not another brand camera, yet the cheap cards work on everything. When I say cheap, I don't mean go to China and buy them for $1 each. 5. It will only stop recording if you turn the camera off or pull the SD card out or set an option not to record. If you lose power, clearly it will stop recording. Get a UPS for the PoE switch, cheaper than getting a UPS at each camera location and I can't imagine not having a UPS for your networking equipment because to me, they are the most sensitive to power issues, lost several switches & routers over the years, even Cisco, so absolutely do this. You can also plug in your PC to the UPS. 6. Depends on the brand and model. Some have an alarm (just happened to me on a Hikvision camera I was reviewing. I put the SD card, the alarm beeping went off really load until the format of the card started). 7. If you lost power while writing a file, I would assume that file would be corrupt. I use a UPS to minimize that from happening, at least to bridge momentary interruptions, although not like a server where you can have it do a graceful shutdown when the UPS signals an outage.

For those fans of Dahua that like their higher resolution cameras and wants more frames per second on 1080P cameras and want 8 PoE ports, here's your NVR. DSD has them available. DH-NVR5208/5216/5232-P Features > Up to 8/16/32 channel with 1080p realtime live view > H.264/MJPEG dual codec decoding > Up to 5Mp resolution > Max 240fps@1080p, 480fps@720p, 960ps@D1 preview & recording > HDMI / VGA simultaneous video output > 16 channel synchronous realtime playback, GRID interface > Support Multi-brand network cameras: Dahua, Arecont Vision, AXIS, Bosch, Brickcom, Canon, CP Plus, Dynacolor, Honeywell, Panasonic, Pelco, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony, Videosec, Vivotech and etc. > ONVIF Version 2.0 conformance > 3D intelligent positioning with Dahua PTZ camera > 8 PoE ports, Plug&Play > Support 2 SATA HDDs up to 8TB, 2 USB2.0 > Multiple network monitoring: Web viewer, CMS(DSS/PSS) & DMSS

I see you got as far as me, changing the login.js file to allow English/Chinese option until you reboot. They seem to sell English version of this camera, but not sure if it's English hacked firmware or actual English. Do you have one?

To telnet, I heard use admin and the password is 7ujMko0 + your admin password, so 7ujMko0admin if it's the default admin password.

First make sure it's not a cable or PoE issue. Just get a short cable from a store, maybe a PoE injector and plug it near the switch and see if the problem persists. For me, most of the time, intermittent connection issues arei cable related. The next thing I would do is do a complete reset. Set it back up again and if that didn't fix it, send it in to ACTi. If it's under warranty, then great, if not, they will fix it for a fee which is usually much cheaper than buying a new camera. I believe the E model cameras have a few year warranty. I had a similar cube and they just replace the logic board inside, all was good.

I have the latest DS-2CD3Q10FD-IW from China and it's all Chinese, has v2.3 firmware. Anyone been able to hack this one. The IEFile.tar.gz in a cramfs read only file system. I can change it temporarily to English by changing /home/doc/script/login.js, commenting out the line with the word "remove" in it, but no easy way to change it permanently.

I personally use the Mini 0801, not too expensive, 1080P, great video quality and small enough to fit behind even fat mirrors on some of my cars. I also use the WS300, a little larger, but has WDR which is nice and less expensive than the Mini 0801 and fits better behind the mirror in some cars. To me, the important thing is fit because if I have to have something large that's obvious, I'm not going to do it.

Not sure what your goal is but there's several online streaming services, maybe the most popular is ustream.tv and you can google to find many more. Some are free for very basic service, maybe with advertising, and pay for more features, services. Some vendors started doing this for free like Dahua and Hikvision. Have not tried it, but I believe it's called EZVIZ.com or something like that on Hikvision. Dahua is their cloud offering I think is called easy4ip.com. You can also stream from home on your PC using restreaming software that takes the RTSP feed and broadcast RTMP. Then you can create a web page somewhere to access that feed. I've done it with Unreal Media Server and it's free for limited use (less than 15 connected users, 5 or less cameras).

In theory, you can run NVR software like Zoneminder on Linux and there's articles on that topic on the internets. Would love to hear back how it works out for you. You can also get cameras that have an SD card slot. Then have them record and playback directly from the camera, no Pi, no PC, no NVR.

Most people install apps that give away all their personal phone information on their phone. How do I know, I've been in the business of capturing this sort of data for years. Same with Facebook. The information gathered, typically for marketing purposes is so staggering they built trade shows around just where to store and how to analyze the data. Even a new class of databases called graph databases that allows companies to analyze your relationships with others by using your phone list, your Facebook friends, your call patterns. Then they use sentiment analysis to analyze text messages you send, Facebook posts. The combination of the two is used to determine how happy, sad, mad you are and what other people you influence to determine marketing strategies and all that are the good guys, image what the bad guys can do with the information, geo tracking, phone lists, text message, pictures on your phone, maybe they heard of a new camera system you installed, a cool new 80" 4K TV, a vacation you are taking. All because you wanted a simple app to turn make your phone a flashlight or play a game. And you are worried about a government run camera company in communist China getting this information. Good for you standing up the new age of Big Data.

That is an amazing camera and ideal for seeing license plates at night in day mode.

Try event recording, make sure trigger channel is checked, sensitivity is higher (higher the more will record) and you enabled event recording. If you click the record button on the web interface, that will just record to your PC and put it in the c:\Users\yourlogin\Web directory.

That's if you buy direct

The problem with these OEM big box store type setups is the OEM eventually stops supporting it. For me it was Q-See at Costco, they stopped supporting firmware updates and no longer worked when I upgraded to Windows 8.1. I can get firmware updates from the manufacturer, Dahua but would not load on Dahua made Q-See cameras. The upside is these sellers offer a good return policy but there's catch. If you want to return it, it's all or nothing, so be prepared to take down everything to return it. So why IP vs. analog HD. For one, IP is limitless, you can buy 4K cameras, 29MP cameras if you wanted, where analog HD is limited to 1080P at the moment. Next is flexibility, once locked into a vendor's HD analog solution and there's a few, you are stuck buying from vendors that are in that camp. Sort of like the Beta VHS wars of years gone by. With IP cameras you power and connect the camera with one cheap Ethernet cable, with analog you need siamese coax, expensive and harder to work with. The other issue for me at least is DVR vs. NVR and NVR software. I have a lot of choices with NVR software from free to enterprise grade running on commodity hardware. If a DVR breaks, I have to go get a new one, it may be different and require retraining. With NVR software, the hardware is independent. As for ease of deployment, most NVR/Camera solutions from the same manufacturer are for the most part plug and play. Not matter what you have to setup each camera no matter what, you have to setup remote access for the DVR, so not sure the level of effort is any higher for IP over analog. Sure, there's more parameters you can setup on the IP cameras, but you don't have to. If you have no experience with these cameras, I suggest you get a brand with support, at a minimum ACTi or Axis. At least you'll have someone to call when it doesn't work the way you expect. The Hikvision and Dahua are the best bang for the buck and what's included in the OEM packages but support is dependent on the reseller or OEM which is not as good as having manufacturer support, so a trade off between price and level of support.

I don't have Chrome, but does work in Safari or Firefox.

I was hoping that 5.2.3 fixed plugin issue on Mac's where you see only 1 FPS, but no, still the same. 5.0.2 remains the only version where it worked at full frame rate. BTW, I have Yosemite, no problems with the plugin other than what I noted before. Just download it from the Hikvision.com website and install it on your Mac. Click Support -> Download and select the Tools tab and it's the first thing there.

If you increase NR to 100, you'll get tracing on moving objects, so a trade off. Definitely turn down sharpening and WDR. Also try setting gain down from 100. It will make the image darker but less noise. Some of that movement in the noise is caused by the iframe. Noise seem to drift and iframe snaps it back causing that effect. The other problem is the black pavement, it is what it is, it's black and noise will happen most on black surfaces. To get a cleaner image at night, you may want to consider getting external IR illuminators to light up the area better.

Decoding high resolution h.264 streams is CPU intensive, it is what it is. The way Milestone deals with it is by allowing you to record at high resolution but provide a lower resolution live stream, but it's not the default. The other choice with Milestone is to setup views of a subset of cameras, for example you could separate indoor from outdoor cameras as two separate layouts or front cameras vs. rear cameras or even as simple as most watched cameras vs. those that are less frequently watched. To set a camera to display at lower resolution in the live view, select the camera in the Milestone Management app, click on the video option for that camera and at the bottom there's a check box for using live view. Not home now so don't have the specifics but if you can't find it, call support. To setup views of different cameras, do that in client app and click setup.

1. Cameras with built in motion detectors are typically limited to indoor cameras. I like the Hikvision ds-2cd2432f-iw for this, has PIR motion sensor, is WiFi and has 1080P or 3MP resolution. For outdoors, it's hard. The only one I know of with built in motion detection are Mobotix cameras, like the D15 or M15. Most people rely on video motion detection done by the camera or DVR, NVR or software. Not very accurate, but more common. The only WiFi outdoor camera I can recommend is the Hikvision ds-2cd2532f-iws. 2. WiFi is awesome, just wish I can afford to have an electrician put an outlet by each camera, especially outdoors. What you will need is to setup a WiFi mesh network in your home, like from Ubiquiti to make sure you have perfect coverage at each camera. To stream 1080P video, you need a consistent reliable connection and a WiFi router that has a fast processor, not a cheap consumer grade router. It's so expensive and difficult to do WiFi properly, so I applaud you for this effort. Most of us have no clue so we rely on power over ethernet PoE to connect and power the cameras because anyone can run Ethernet to say an outdoor location, but having an AC outlet like next to your front door or under eaves, that takes skill. 3. I've seen battery operated cameras. They are used mostly for hunting. Look at the Bushnell Trophy HD. It can run on a set of batteries for a year, very cool. You don't need WiFi or an DVR, just wait for something to happen, take the SD card out and see what it captured. 4. Most cameras have IR LEDs to light up the area at night. Not a fan of motion detect lights because it takes a while for the camera to react to the light and all the frames before the light came on will be dark. It's best to have lights that come on at dusk and off and dawn 5. It's much easier than that, just unplug the DVR or NVR, then it can't record. 6 With an DVR, NVR or software, you can have many cameras, look at them together on one screen or by themselves. 7. If you want easy, hire someone to do it. Camera selection and placement is an art. Setting up cameras and DVRs or NVRs to record properly, alert you and do what you want takes time to learn the system and a lot of trial and error, not what I would call easy, but doable. What's easy to one is a nightmare to someone else. Adding WiFi makes it even harder as you have to configure the camera to Ethernet first to set the SSID for WiFi. 8. Most products have the ability to playback recorded video on a smartphone. I do it all the time with using Milestone XProtect software. Some cameras even have built in SD card storage and you can play back directly from the camera.

This may be the wrong forum, unless you are using a camera for access control. For example, I use a camera for LPR and grant access based on plate match, but even then, most on this forum are discussing access control like RFID card readers and such. If you have a question about how your cameras works, your best bet is to discuss this with the people you bought it from.

The Genetec Autoview SharpX looks great, is color (so no IR) and pulses the white LEDs, so effectively a flash. Looks like the way to go. Wonder what it costs and if it works as an IP camera without the LPR processors backend device for LPR, I'm guessing not, it's a package. They even show an Illinois plate (red numbers), but only in a daytime demo. I would venture to guess this costs several thousand for the complete package. The Bosch is not seeing red at all as it relies on 850nm IR LEDs, never going to happen, forget Illinois )or Alberta for you Canadians). You can tell from the video because the state name is not showing. Like California, I get great plate capture at night, but you'll never see California on a modern plate because it's red. You don't need a camera purposely made for LPR, because a) the OP want to do LPC, not LPR, b) just about any decent camera can capture plates day or night if configured and installed correctly. When I went booth by booth at ISC West talking to LPR software vendors, I asked what camera should I pair up with their software and 100% of them said the Axis Q1604, ironically even the guy at the Samsung booth, LOL, but he was an LPR partner, not a Samsung employee. Although Samsung does make a good low light 1MP camera that would be good for LPR.

Is your budget for shipping or the cameras in total. I'll assume shipping. Check out the Dahua SD59230, 1080P has 30X zoom, IR that can reach 200-300', you can pan around to check on different areas, automatically on a patrol or manually as needed. It's priced well for under a grand including shipping. This would require mounting it outside. They make a less expensive (about $500) 12X Zoom PTZ without IR, but not sure if you will have enough light outside for it. It would work on my suburban street because of street lights, but will be grainy. If you want to mount it inside with great low light capability. the only camera I can recommend that has the low light capability you need is the Bosch Dinion Starlight 8000mp, with lens about $1,400 for indoors. It's 5MP, can see in almost total darkness. If you really want to go cheap with a fixed lens camera, first get a Google Map overview shot of the property, print it out and draw a line from where you want to mount the camera to each side to it covers the area you want. Then measure the angle between the two line using a cheap protactor. Then find a lens that matches that angle, called the FOV, Field of View. Most camera manufacturers publish this number and associate it with a certain millimeter lens size. Once you have that, you have to determine your goal, for example, do you want to see the activity going on or be able to recognize or ID faces, license plates, car make or model? If you get that far, let us know what you determined. If the angle is only 10 degrees, the 16mm may work. If you need maybe 45 degrees, you may need a 6mm lens camera. Maybe you need 90 degrees, and a 2.8mm will be best. But the wider the angle, the lower the pixel density and the less ability you will have to ID someone or something.

The iPads are getting cheaper. They had the 10" Air (not the latest Air2) around for $319 during the big sales which isn't too bad for that sized tablet if it works better than the Android app. They had the original Mini for $199 which isn't too bad. What app are you using on your iPhone that's stable?

I prefer 3MP only because I prefer the square image that's taller, so personal preference. The extra resolution mostly goes to making the image taller, so it's not going to help you ID someone any better. With most brands, you do lose frame rate when you from 1080P to 3MP. The nice thing about 1080P is if you upload video to say YouTube, it will load it as 1080P. Load 3MP and it's 1080P in resolution but you lose maybe a 1/3 of the image with gray bars. So for commercial installs when they ask me to go in and find what happened, I set those cameras to 1080P so I can export them to YouTube to show them what happened and it looks good in 1080P, would not look as good in 3MP.

It's not that you pay 10x more for Axis to get 10x better camera. Sometimes you pay a lot more for a little gain but that little gain means more to some than others. For example, you can be very happy driving a lower end Kia or Hyundai car from Korea and you can buy a higher end Mercedes for 10x. Does that mean it's 10x better car, clearly not as you can do the same thing with both, but maybe it's twice as good and that may justify the 10x price differential to some. In the U.S., if I'm an installer buying from a U.S. distributor, say a mini-dome, the Axis equivalent will cost 3X the Hikvision and I feel that there are things the Axis can do like 3-axis adjustment that the Hik can't that may justify the price. In offering a customer a solution, I usually give them 3 tiers of quality and let them decide if paying 1x, 2x, 3x is worth the brand differences.