jrmymllr

Ok, yeah I only looked closely at the first message. Upon looking at subsequent posts that appears to be true.

Now hold on. tomcctv probably checked this out, but I want to bring this up just in case. Is this cat5 cable carrying NTSC video? That DVR doesn't look like it does IP. Also, do you have power being transferred over the cat5? If either of these is true, that device will not work.

I second getting an IP system. If the one with BNC jacks is standard analog, you won't get very good resolution with that.

Two problems: 1. Massive amount of storage required. How much depends on the bitrate coming off the cameras, etc. 2. Disk failures will be a problem. You'd need a RAID-5 array and have to replace failed drives occasionally. Plus the power consumption of this would add up to something. Another issue, which may not be an issue at all, is you'd likely have to use a PC-based DVR, not an off the shelf DVR. In my opinion this is preferable anyway, but there's some technical knowledge required to do all this.

its not normal at all... I can't imagine why I'm having all 3 cameras lock up within a week of each other after running perfectly for so long. I chalked it up to unreliable firmware; I have no other explanation.

I reported several months ago that I have 3 identical IP cameras that all locked up within about a week of each other. They were continuously powered for about 4 months, then in a span of about a week, each locked up, requiring a power cycle. No telnet, no ping. They're powered with a good midspan (PowerDsine) and in turn connected to a UPS. It's happened again. This time it took about 5.5 months, and I thought they were freezing when hitting a specific amount of uptime. That proved to be almost correct, but it wasn't entirely predictable. Although the first one froze when hitting about 3550 hours uptime, the next froze a few hours beyond that, and the last one, a few days beyond that. Besides they ran more days this time compared to the last run. The freezeups aren't corresponding to weather or anything else I can identify, and everything else on that UPS (server, modem, router, switch) continue running uninterrupted. The UPS is plugged into a dedicated outlet with nothing else on that circuit. Has anyone else seen Hikvision cameras freeze unexpectedly on a semi-regular basis?

Good to know I'm not the only one seeing this.

A network camera has an ethernet interface, so yes it's digital. And many of them are also powered over the same ethernet cable. They can plug right into an existing LAN.

Knowing the model would help, but my guess is a lot of these DVRs don't have any functionality like what you're describing.

I wouldn't touch cloud storage with a very long stick. For one, it relies on your Internet connection. If that goes down for a period of time, then what? What if the company providing the cloud goes out of business? What if they decide to start charging everyone or raise the price? I'm a firm believer in any networking equipment being as independent as possible. In other words, don't set yourself up to rely on another system that's out of your control. You'll be happier and better off long term with an NVR (preferably one built from standard parts).

Happy to answer questions. The link I provided is my write up. My pictures, my equipment. 1. Yes I used Ubuntu Linux. The VMS I used is available for Windows and Linux so if you went with that one, Windows is fine too. I just wanted Linux because it's more flexible and can be much more lightweight. I think Ubuntu, and I'm sure other distros, are fairly easy for first time users. The web has lots of information, especially for Ubuntu, and installing the VMS I used on Linux was an absolute no brainer. The nice thing about doing your own server is you can try it out, and if you hate it, install Windows. 2. So, each camera streams video straight to the server where it's processed. The router and therefore Internet is not involved, unless you're doing some weird setup where the server is not on the same LAN as the cameras, which would be messy. If the cameras and server are on the same LAN like they should be, remote viewing works simply by opening a port on the router so it can get to the server. 3. My server also behaves as a network drive, a completely separate function from the camera stuff. It's a drive I can map my Windows computers to, like in an office environment. That's convenient because I can also connect to this remotely and access my files. 4. I question if a 'surveillance grade' drive is really a legitimate thing. I know they exist, I've seen them, but in my opinion, as long as the drive can handle the load, it shouldn't matter. And with my three cameras set to 3Mb/s bandwidth, even if all three are writing to the drive at once that's nothing, only about 1 megabyte/s. That drive gets 10-20GB/day written to it which is within the range of 'average desktop usage' so at this rate it'll last decades. But any HDD would be just fine too especially if using a regular computer with gigabytes of free RAM for buffering. My guess is those surveillance grade drives are more appropriate for a off the shelf NVR containing as little RAM as possible, meaning the drive must be read to accept data at any time. Ask me anything. I think this stuff is great.

My advice, and what I did, is to buy good IP cameras from wherever you want, including eBay, Amazon, etc. Then build your own NVR from a standard computer. This way you're not locked into using a specific brand of camera and not locked into a terrible NVR system.

That's simple. Any hard drive that physically fits and is high enough capacity for what you need. A 4 camera 960h system isn't going to be that demanding.

Try setting up a VPN server at the camera location and connecting with VPN. Or, try setting up a proxy server at the location and setting up your browser to use that.

Fisheye lens do 360 degrees.

The camera came with a sticker on it stating ip 192.168.1.88 I changed that on their software to 10.0.0.10. Im not really sure what programs to use to find its local ip etc is there a step by step guide that you may be able to point a lamen like myself on doing this? Thanks That would be it's local IP; sounds like it's now 10.0.0.10.

How do you think your camera was setup ? Did you add it to your router or did you load the p2p disc ? Did you do all the port forwarding on your router or did you let the software auto set Do a scan on your network and you will see the ports open and IP addresses that connect. But if your happy with someone watching your camera in China then it's $60 well spent HI Tom I set it up using their disk, but I would also like to know how to set it up on my own home network. Look I'm not an expert guru but I'm willing to learn is there a how to or instruction step by step on how to do this surely its not impossible correct? I'm guessing you just need to be clued on with routers networking etc, I'd be curious to see if everything still works without a connection to the Internet. Then, if it does, depending on your router, you might be able to use your router to block the camera from accessing the Internet.

Are you connecting directly to the camera, or going out to some website to view the camera feed?

Good thought about scanning, however he has tried connecting only the camera, DVR and computer to its own switch. But yes, I never thought of the smart switch thing.

Now try pinging each individually with the other disconnected to make sure there's nothing weird going on there, which I'd expect nothing surprising there. Then try a different browser or clearing the cache. The original issue is so strange that it almost seems like the browser might be doing something odd.

What happens if you try pinging each one?

If you are accessing these on the internal network, the LAN, DNS and gateway won't matter. But what you describe is strange. You aren't trying to access this from the public Internet, right?

It's probably best to instead say something like x.x.x.x. There's no need to state a real IP, even if it's not yours.

Get Xeoma. Runs on Linux, Windows, Mac, and a 4 cam license will cost you $20 period. I've been using it and it does its thing well enough.

You should add Xeoma to the VMS list. I've been using it and think it's worthy of consideration.