Tiribulus

Hi folks, I have a BS Chinese DVR outfit that came with a power box for the BNC cameras and six leads I had to attach to the terminals. It's an 8 channel system and I have DIN cameras and adapters from a different system I'm going to put in those last 2 channels. The question is if it's a good idea to power more than one camera off each of those terminals in the power box? I can stick the 4 way DC splitter on one of the existing leads and then plug the camera that was on that lead and the other 2 into the splitter for ultra convenience, but I'm wondering it will pull too much juice off that single terminal/ Thanks

Thanks, I had a feeling this was what I was going to hear. The box actually does seem to be passable quality and it even has a pot for adjusting the current, but I'll just use the plug that came with the Lorex adapter. Not a big deal, but it would have been nice to use that box and save an outlet on my overcrowded walls. Actually I could just splice the power leads from the adapters into the remaining 2 terminals in the box as well. Didn't think of that.

That's cool. Can't argue with success.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I am not a fan of the .net framework and avoid it whenever possible. As soon as I get around to seeing if I can get rid of it in Seven I will.

I wonder if this the same package Rory was talking about. It won't run for me because of what appears to be dependency issues

It works in Windows Seven without even using compatibility mode or running it as admin as long as your video drivers support directdraw.

That was my point all along. The ironic thing is they very "chintzy-ness" of this app turns out to be an accidental boon for portability I didn't think of compatibility mode for Vista and Seven I'll have to try that, but I am all with ya there. Vista was almost intolerable and Seven does nothing I care about any better than 2K actually though Seven is a huge improvement over Vista IMHO. Fair enough and same here

And apparently you are not alone if the absence of discussion on a site like this is any indication You are clearly an intelligent guy with skills, but this just isn't true as far as admin rights are concerned and barring a severely strip tweaked OS install 99% of the machines out there are going to have those rudimentary dependencies. I just created a test unelevated user account on this prehistoric Dell Dimension 4000 I have here next to me that I have shaved quite a bit out of and it worked fine. I am not exaggerating when I say I've tried it on a few dozen machines outside of the pretty similar ones that Ford had. This is of course true. This all started for me when I was doing desktop support for Ford here in Detroit in a humongous building with 6000 users. It was great being able to grab my cameras right away on a call from my wife from any currently vacant desk. I got used to it and I also use it from customers houses. They are ready to declare me a towering techno genius on seeing that work and the effect is enhanced by it taking me like 60 seconds to accomplish which is good for business and lets me check in at the same time. Besides, it's just plain cool, but maybe not as useful for others as it has been for me.

Take it easy I think Rory is talking about my link I was apologizing politely and sincerely. If he wasn't referring to me then my mistake.

Are you saying the app I posted does all this or this is what portables or standalones do generally? I apologize about the link then. I didn't realize it was a violation of policy. The long and short of this whole thing for me is that I was using the old netviewer for like 6 years this way and it never failed me on a 2K or XP machine using Putty. I got a different system (long sad story) and the old or new netviewer wouldn't allow configuration parameters compatible with the new system and at the time the new app appeared to be incurably crashing. I came here to see what others were doing for a no install take along on a USB key solution. It appears to my confessed surprise that people aren't using that type of solution. I figured out how to get what I needed so I'm happy. I shared that here. All this discussion ensued I hope I didn't stir up a hornets nest by bringing this topic up, that certainly wasn't my intention. I simply got hooked on the ability to almost instantly access my cameras from any windows machine I've tried to date and wished for that to continue.

Then that's REALLY weird. I'm going to have to see if I can figure out why it did on mine and why the apps will run out of that new folder, but not out of the box. I tried to run the start.exe file and after getting the little menu interface the second button from the left with the blue IE E, which is the remote viewer, crashed immediately like it did for you. That is actually "netpreview.exe". When I ran it from the new mystery folder it ran. I copied to a few other machines and it ran on those too. I put it on one of my USB keys and took it to a customers house and it worked on her machine as well. I dunno. Try THIS That's the folder that it created for me.

True, no worries. However that app you posted the link to is not a portable app. I just tried to run it on a stripped down version of XP i use for my DVRs and I got 3 fatal errors and it wont run. Basically missing DLLs and such that would be part of a feature of Windows XP that i remove. However if it had an installer, those dependencies would be installed and it would run fine, as Ive not had a problem with any other apps yet, infact it is used as a GeoVision DVR server. Alot of my own apps on my site run stand alone (note not portable) without an installer, on XP, but I realize the risk of them not working on every system is very clear and would never advertise them as portable, nor would I sell them as such (they are free apps anyway). This is the mystery I was talking about a few posts ago. Look in the root of C: for a dir named "bxs_client_0709" or something like that and try to run it from there now. If you copy that folder to any other XP machine it will run and function. I've tried on 5 or 6 now. Don't ask me what's up with that new folder, the instructions which are included in the package as a PDF file make no mention of it. I stumbled over it by accident.

I'm not trying to tell anybody what to do. I'm just saying that having a fully portable solution has been a godsend for me and unless I'm am one unique individual I thought others would too. Not to sound the wrong way, seriously, but I am very surprised it's not common practice. I joined here originally just to ask what people were doing for this, in essence. I also am no programmer. However, it seems that if some probably back room bargain development outfit can make something like this work for XP without even trying that a fully staffed and funded development team could do it for Vista and Seven on purpose even if it wound up being quite a bit bigger. I mean VLC runs in both as a no install portable and it can stream remote video in a couple dozen codecs and containers and weighs in at 30 megs. I'm new here and not trying to be an @$$, sincerely, I'm jist thinkin out loud.

By "portability", I was referring mainly for windows machines as they are everywhere. Certainly a full featured outfit like Luxriot would be a nightmare if not impossible to write for portability. However, most people wouldn't need or expect much more than a bare bones feature set in a portable remote viewer. I doubt if this small suite I'm using now was even written with portability in mind. It's just works that way by accident because it's cheap, but it DOES work. Any windows machine in the world and I can start an SSL tunnel with PUTTY, which is also portable (and free) and run this rinky dink suite as localhost and there are my cameras. I can switch between camera views, adjust color, brightness etc. for each one, record over the net, convert to AVI, view existing recordings, save them locally, the main things people would care about in a portable app. The whole thing is 6 megs and a little change. It might be worth considering a portable version that's included with the main full featured version, but separate. A segment in the install routine that asks if you want to dump the files in a folder that can be copied to an external device for portable use or something. I stuck the package that I've been talking about HERE if anybody wants to take a look. It doesn't even have a name.

Could you give a few more details on how you're trying to connect both from home and remotely? Those are 2 very different things. I assume at home you have a "router" (which is actually a gateway) either one you bought or one your ISP gave you. Even inside your own small network the IP address, gateway, subnet mask and port must be correct. Away from home you'll need to forward the port/s to the ip address of the device AND use some sort of tunneling client to establish a connection to the device through the router. Putty is perfect for this and free. I don't know how much networking experience you have, but this is all actually pretty simple. I've had to wrestle with this with cheap dodgy remote apps a few times and did eventually get things working.

Developers of remote viewing/admin apps may want to think about portability. I can't be the only one who finds the ability to stick a usb key in any machine with web access and being able to almost instantly use my cameras useful. Here's a good one. That goofy no name app that came with this outfit created a folder in the root of C: with a copy of itself there. The instructions do not mention this. They say to copy the folder off the cd to anywhere and run it from there. That does not work, but must also create the additional folder. Anyway, I copied that folder, the new one in the root of C: to one of my usb keys and it now runs on any machine from the key where before it wouldn't even run on the machine I originally copied it to, or any of the others. HMMM. Create an SSL tunnel with Putty and run the viewer as localhost and it works from anywhere like I needed. Go figger.

It has to be installed. Is there a generic remote viewer app out there that doesn't require installation? Netviewer is like 5 files and worked great with my last setup but even when I trick it by editing the ini file to allow more characters for the username, it still will not let me use a password over 5 and the dvr won't allow less than 6 The new version insists on ports over 10,000 and the new DVR only allows to 9999.

I did this, but I was just thinking if this outfit won't run from a usb key without installing it won't help me even if I could get it to work here.

Did you actually start web server? Looks like you havent started it. I'm not sure what you mean. I'm running it as a client inside my lan on the same subnet as the DVR.

I can't get Luxriot to work. It keeps saying "operation aborted" or machine "actively refused the connection". This is over a lan. The IP address, port, and credentials are absolutely correct. The client app that came with this cheap outfit doesn't run in XPSP3 though SP2 does work. I was looking for something else that would allow me remote access to the cameras, but it is a real pain getting anything to work. Our old DVR came with netviewer which while basic worked fine even on a USB key with putty. The IE deal is basically useless. I need something I can throw on a key and use with any computer without reconfiguring the machine like I had before. Didn't mean to get off on all that, but if anybody has any suggestions I'm all ears (eyes?). I saw this thread hadn't been posted in for a few days so didn't think it would hurt to sorta hijack it. Thanks