buellwinkle

Only because my supplier in China, DSD Shenzhen wanted that much + $40 shipping, ouch.

That's what I thought, but are they less expensive too?

I have not tried using their app, but IP Cam Viewer on Android works well with Hikvision. I believe it only wants the RTSP port for it (vs. 3 ports via a web browser).

Then lets see the bake-off then, call Avigilon out, lets see a side by side with popular cameras. If it's so good, what would they be afraid off?

While I don't agree with Avigilon's marketing practices, it would be good to see a bake-off, would love to do one but while Avigilon keeps telling me they want to, they have not delivered.

You can get the ACTi E33, 5MP bullet. I believe the 3MP Dahua I have is 20fps, I'll have to check when I get home, don't have that one setup with remote access.

It's probably the same as the IPC-HFW3300C that I reviewed a while ago, but the smaller mini-bullet version.

Would it be possible to find the unicode for say Saturday in the binary? In Chinese that would be 星期六 but in unicode, hex would be 661F 671F 516D if you can change that, maybe you can have it say Sat.

I would bet the firmware is identical once loaded in the camera, but the camera checks the language code to figure out what to display. If that's true, then finding the needle in the haystack would be where it checks in the firmware, and modify that. If only they provided the source code The other is to change the unicode for the days of the week in Chinese to whatever language you wanted, that would probably be way easier to find.

What's the eBay link, maybe one of us can identify the camera.

Actually Hikvision is pretty mac friendly, works well with Safari and you probably already know this but OS X runs on top of BSD Unix, so NFS is already installed and works on OS X, so no reason you can't have the cameras write to an NFS share on your Mac. I haven't tried it, but the camera did recognize the share and showed the space for it, but I have a small Macbook Air with an SSD drive, didn't want to use it for that purpose. I will give you that their SADP camera finder program only runs on Windows, one reason many Mac people keep Windows on the side with Fusion or Parallels.

What NVR version were you running. The older NVR2 software relied on Windows IIS and MS SQL Server and has good, but had issues. The new NVR3 software seems more stable and is better all around.

Hikvision does some weird stuff with browsers and holds some stuff in cache, so when you make big changes, it may still have stuff in memory. I tried everything with IE to clear this but still linger. I actually have better luck with Hikvision using Firefox in Windows or from Safari on my Mac.

Again, for each camera, you must setup 3 ports for this to work. So let me give you a real world example. I have a camera at 192.168.0.86, I want to view this remotely. So I setup HTTP port to 9000, the SDK port to 9001, the rtsp port to 9002. I then port forward this range, 9000-9002 to that IP address of 192.168.0.86. The second camera 192.168.0.87, set http port to 9003, SDK port to 9004, rtsp port to 9005 and then I port forward that range to 192.168.0.87. Then go to whatsmyip.org, it will tell you the wan address. Say is 75.75.75.75, so from a browser, outside your home network, go to http://75.75.75.75:9000/ and it will show the first camera, then go to 75.75.75.75:9003 and that will show your second camera.

Avigilon, Milestone, XProtect all have different versions at different price points and you have to read through the lines to see which fits as some limit client access on cheaper licenses, they have different number of users for different price levels. First go to each companies website and they usually have a chart that lists all their features and then has check boxes or quantities for each version. Once you know what version you want, it's easier to get pricing. Milestone for up to 26 camera is about $50/camera, Exacq, last time I checked has similar pricing for their Start version but only to 16 cameras and one client, so going over means getting their Pro version and last time I checked was about $150/camera. The reason you don't see Exacq and Avigilon pricing is they won't allow online sales. When I asked them, they felt it should be only sold through an installer as part of a project. You should be able to install trial versions of all these and see which you like.

If the firmware is the same except for 3 bytes, why is the day of week in Chinese? So even if you change the 3 bytes and load Euro or U.S. firmware, it's likely that it will remain in Chinese, meaning the running firmware is checking that language indicator, even if you put the euro/us firmware. Also, recently, Maxicon posted the link the Euro firmware and it was 18mb, the U.S. site shows the same firmware version as 12mb, so clearly more than 3 bytes unless the there's a euro/metric/celcius conversion on how they count bytes, LOL.

I'm a little confused, so let me tell you what you have to port forward from default settings. You need to port forward ports 80, 8000 and 554. You can change these but in the end, if one of these ports is not forwarded, it won't work.

If it's pulling something from the hardware, then it has to be some sort of jumper or trace on the circuit board. Would be interesting to photograph the circuit boards side by side, chinese and usa to see if there's a trace or jumper being used to define this setting. First I thought there may be a set command, but to make this persistent through firmware updates may require a more permanent approach like a jumper or trace.

Those are all need to haves, but let me throw in a cool to have feature which is License Plate Recognition (LPR). A feature that has been asked about several times on this forum and one that is financially out of reach for most hobbyists. Also, another cool to have feature would be integration in to home automation, like MiCasaVerde devices. For example, the ability to trigger a response based on motion detection, like have lights come on, curtains open, siren goes off, balloons drop. Frankly, I just want it to play "hail to the chief" when I come home

Well you know the old Russian proverb, "Doveryai no Proveryai" that President Reagan used to say, "Trust but Verify", LOL

I tired to find that camera through various sources as a Hikvision camera, but no luck.

It's hard to compare a product that's very good for $50 to one that will cost about $1,000 so you have to figure out your budget. I run BlueIris and Milestone XProtect on the same PC. BlueIris with 20 modern megapixel cameras at full frame rate is going to tax an i7. Exacq, Milestone, Avigilon won't put much of a dent on the same box, or like thewireguys said, an i5 is fine. To me the biggest drawbacks for BlueIris, is no multi-camera playback, web interface is lacking with only low resolution viewing and playback and no other functionality. I have not tried their smartphone apps, but I know Milestone has good apps. Also, not sure if you are 100% a Windows guy, but I like that Milestone's web interface work on many browser like on mac, so does BlueIris. Also, because the client and server are the same program, you can't separate it out, like have one PC as the server, then manage it from another PC as the client. As for timeline scrubbing, it's odd in BlueIris. It stores events into clips that are by default 8 hours long. You double click on a clip, then you can scrub within that clip, not really a timeline, but large bucket of events back to back. It's sort of odd, and looking for that needle in the haystack one camera at a time when you have 20 cameras, not sure it's good solution for 20 cameras.

It could very well be the sensors in the Panasonic are not that sensitive to 940nm. Do you have any other cameras you can test this with?

940nm wavelength is just a fraction of the effectiveness of 850nm, so it is what it is. What people have done in the past, I believe on this forum was to use 35mm exposed color print film to create filters over their camera's LEDs. This would block most of the visible light but still let something like 85% of the invisible IR light go through and was more effective and cheaper than using 940nm, assuming your goal is to be more covert.

I want it to work with my older ACTi cameras that used to work with it. I would like smoother recorded video. I would like a web interface that had the option of full resolution images, not low res versions. I would like a web interface that was close to their normal PC interface and had the same functionality. I would like multi-camera playback. I would live a timeline to scrub and would playback at least 4 cameras at a time. I would like it to use the camera's motion detection instead of doing it in the server. Would like them to separate the server from the client. I would like it to have missing object or more advanced search options. I would like it to have some basic analytics, like cross a line counter, detect a human form vs. a tree shadow. I would like it to find all my cameras and auto-configure. I would like a CMS component so you can have multiple servers and view them from a single interface. I would like it to use very little CPU when doing server side video motion detection. I would like to recognize alarm inputs from cameras. And most important, do all this and keep the price the same