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I wonder if they did this to get the heat out of the camera body. Several of the older cams I've used generated the most heat from the POE board. As for the connectors, I just got a Hik 2332 from China, which had the mating waterproof connector and no big box on the cable. Manufacture date was 1/15 on the box.

With a new cam, it's always good to try a different cable and switch port. If that doesn't make a difference, you may have a bad one.

That's another good looking image. Makes me want to put one of these on the front of my house, except my previous experiences with Arecont have not been very good.

I can't help with the standalone NVR questions, but if you want to build a PC based NVR, 2 popular programs are Blue Iris and Milestone Xprotect. BI is inexpensive, but requires a good bit of CPU horsepower. Xprotect is free with some limitations or per-cam licenses with fewer limitations, and requires less CPU if you view the cams on a client PC and not the NVR.

Lol! I thought you were one of the gurus! cctvlks, for region changes, contact CBX. He'll tell you if he can help with that model.

Blue Iris has a setting called object detect/reject that is supposed to help tell the difference between a moving object and random motion like leaves in trees, shadows, rain, etc. It can cause problems with sensitivity, and most people turn it off rather than work out the settings that will work for them. For telling when one moving group of pixels is a bird or bug closer to the cam vs a human further away, you'd need a much smarter level of software than you'll find in these inexpensive systems. I have no doubt there are packages out there that will do that, but I'd expect them to be pricey. Face recognition is probably the best starting point in less expensive systems.

It depends on the software you run. Recording only doesn't usually require a lot of horsepower, but if you're going to view on the same PC, that usually needs more. Blue Iris is inexpensive but requires a lot of CPU power, depending on resolution and frame rate. Xprotect costs more if you want more capabilities than the free version offers, but doesn't need so much CPU if you use the client on another PC, so there's a trade-off there. Others can chip in on their favorite software. Dedicated NVRs are stable and robust, require little maintenance, and are usually pretty light on power usage. They don't have much flexibility; you're out of luck if any features or cameras you want are not supported, or if the company drops support for them. PCs are much more flexible, with lots of different software packages you can try, storage options, etc, but require more fiddling, updates, etc. If you're comfortable with technical support of PCs, they can be the best bet overall. For non-technical people, dedicated NVRs are often a better bet. I used to run dedicated DVRs that would stay up for years at a time in an industrial environment. For my home systems, it's all PCs.

If you're buying cams cheap, like aliexpress, you'll get much better self-support with Hik. Dahua's support outside of official vendors is pretty much non-existent, while Hik lets anyone download the firmware and such. You'd need the CBX region fix for Hiks if you want to update the firmware on aliexpress cams. The brands are pretty close to equivalent for cams, with Hiks being somewhat cheaper, and I like the Hik images better, but some of the differences may be more important to you than others. I have both, and prefer Hiks over Dahua, but some people prefer it the other way around.

That looks pretty good! My company uses these in the parking lot as well, since they can monitor wide areas with single cams that stream the data back to the building with a ubiquiti wireless setup. It definitely looks less Big Brother than a cluster of 4 cams would in the same location.

Blue Iris lets you set up AVI or WMV format for output containers.

I see 2 main problems with reliability, and neither are specific to a type of cam. - Moving parts, like IR filters, will tend to wear out over time. My oldest Vivoteks develop issues with this, but none of the newer cams have yet. - IR LEDs dimming or burning out due to poor heatsinking. All my cams (Dahua, Hik, Messoa) have developed this problem more or less, except the Vivoteks. No failures on them at all. IP cams are more complex, so there's more stuff to go wrong that you wouldn't see on analog cams. One of my Vivoteks had the POE circuit fail, but still works fine on 12Vdc.

Makes me wonder how these cameras will work this summer. If the IR lamp is going to attract bugs like an incandescent bulb the camera will be recording most of the night In my neighborhood (silicon valley), the IR doesn't really attract bugs like white light does. They fly across now and again, but never flock around them. Spiders are a bigger problem because the cam provides a framework for them to build their webs, and the IR lights up the webs strung in front of the cam. Others have reported bugs flocking around their IR, so it may depend on what kind of bugs you have and what part of the light spectrum they like.

The first thing to check is what the CPU utilization is. If that's OK, you might be having hard drive speed issues. Network problems seem unlikely if live view is good. Process Explorer from Microsoft can show a short history of CPU, I/O, and hard drive writes that can show if any of these are causing problems when you have dropped frames.

The other solution is to go with a separate IR illuminator. Mounting one even a few inches to the side will prevent small floaties from triggering your motion detect.

The Hik 2032 has about 30 LEDs, but that doesn't mean much. What you really need to know is the IR output power (not input power) and illumination angle, and few vendors spec that. They usually state the number of LEDs (relatively meaningless without the output power specs) and the marketing spec for effective distance, which you should usually cut in half for real-world performance. The LEDs on many of these inexpensive cams tend to dim and die over time. All of my Hiks and most of my Dahuas have dimming LEDs, and some have gone out completely. This is in the moderate Silicon Valley climate, where we rarely have super high temperatures. In general, designs using a few high power IR LEDs outperform the ones using lots of low power LEDs; the Hik 2332 turret is an example of this. There's not a lot of data on lifetime on these yet, but my inexpensive 3 LED illuminator is much brighter and has worked much longer than the lots-of-LEDs illuminator it replaced. BW has a recent review of a high power 3 LED illuminator on his web site. This one uses 2W LEDs, and doesn't spec the actual output power, but this is about as powerful as you'll get in affordable LEDs. Here's a post showing the improvement of switching from onboard IR to an inexpensive 3 LED illuminator. The main problem here was reflected IR, but illuminator has far more reach than the on-board LEDs. http://www.cam-it.org/index.php?topic=7429.msg44057 For serious LED illuminators, be prepared to pay more than the camera cost. ETA: BW's snapshot shows 75 ppf for the plate, which gives a pretty readable image with good illumination and a head-on image. That's about as low as you'd want to get for reliable reads.

Blue Iris had issues with that many cams in the past due to the 32 bit memory limit, but the new version is 64 bit, so that should be improved. However, 32 MP cams can be a big load on even a powerful I7. By tweaking fps and resolution, it should be able to handle 32 cams, but I don't have a good feel for what frame rates you'd be getting. You might want to ask at the BI community forum, cam-it.org, to see if anyone's running 40MP of cams and what frame rates they're getting. Your HD requirements will depend on the bit rates and recording times for each cam. 4096 kbps is 512 kBps, or 1.8GB/hour per cam; 2048 kbps would be half that. Full-time recording capacity is easy to calculate, while motion detect will depend on how many events there are, how long they last, and how long the pre- and post-trigger times are set for.

The youtube video is worst case, and BW's image is best case. The youtube video is catching the entire scene, and the plate is a small portion of the field of view, so you'll never get anything. There's some motion blur as well, but that shouldn't be an issue at 1/200 sec. It's all about pixels per foot and illumination. You need 80 ppf minimum, and 100 or more is better if anything's not perfect. A US plate is 1' wide, so it's easy to tell how many ppf you have by creating a snapshot with the plate in the position you're hoping to capture. Open it in Paint or similar, draw a selection box around the plate, and see how many pixels you have. IR intensity, like any light, drops off with the square of distance, so doubling the distance gives 1/4 the intensity. It then drops more on the way back to the camera, doubling the distance again for 1/4 the amount of light that actually hit the plate. With BW's pic, the car's close enough to get good reflection from the on-board IR. As you move further away, the lighting from the LEDs drops of quickly, so you need enough to get good illumination back to the cam. There's no easy way to tell for sure without trying it out.

I can't see it either, but I'm guessing it's the i-frame, depending on your setting. Each i-frame is a complete image, and the rest of the frames are p-frames, just showing the changes from one to the next, until the next i-frame comes along with an entire image. It's pretty common for the i-frame to look like there's a little blink or glitch in the image.

Expanding further: Generally, the cam image is scaled for your screen by whatever you're viewing with - browser, NVR software, whatever. If the cam resolution is higher than your display's resolution, you can zoom in to see the full resolution, do screencaps of the full resolution, etc. For instance, with a 3MP cam viewed on a browser with a 1080p monitor, you'll see the full image scaled to fit the screen and the browser window. Most viewers have a button to let you see the image at full resolution, which makes it bigger than the screen and gives you scroll bars to be able to see the off-screen bits. The recordings should always be full resolution if that's what you've got set, as Don says.

Blue Iris lets you record to AVI format as an alternative to its native BVR. I've never used it, and I don't think the demo supports this feature, but you can find people who have used it over at the community support forum at cam-it.org.

Yeah, knockoffs are a problem. Best bet is to follow the dashcam forums and go with the recommended vendors. It's a lot like buying from Aliexpress - you take your chances with the random vendors.

That one won't do the job either, as it splits out 48Vdc from an 803.2af connection. Here's what your basic choices are: - Cheap passive injector and splitter, best bought as pairs so you're guaranteed the wiring matches up. You put in a voltage at the injector (usually 12Vdc), pull it out at the splitter, and plug it into the DC jack on the cam (after making sure it has one). Here's an example: http://www.amazon.com/HCP05-Passive-Injector-Splitter-Connector/dp/B00DZLSRJC - Cheap passive injector that puts 48Vdc into the cable so the cam thinks it's getting standard 803.2af power. How cams respond to a unit that doesn't handshake depends on the cam's firmware, so you don't know unless someone's tried it. The unit you linked to implies that it works for this, but you just never know with Chinese gear. It might work with less than 48Vdc, but I've never tried it on a Hik. - Better passive injector that will power 8 cams if they don't exceed the PS rating. This is a better bet than all the above if budget is critical: http://www.amazon.com/WS-POE-8-48v60w-passive-Ethernet-Injector-cameras/dp/B0086SQDMM You can also get a good quality single cam 803.2af injector, but by the time you've bought 2, you might as well have gotten a switch: http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-PoE150S-Gigabit-Injector-compliant/dp/B001PS9E5I/ref=pd_cp_pc_1 - POE switch - the safest and most reliable route, and only a little more expensive. As MindTwist says, this is the best way to go, especially if you're not familiar with POE variations and willing to experiment. Here's a good bet for a 4 port version: http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-SF1008P-100Mbps-8-Port-802-3af/dp/B003CFATT2/ref=pd_sim_e_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=00JJE005V19JQKG7DCX8

Same with PC based systems. Some, like Blue Iris, let you use as many cams as you can support with the hardware for no extra cost, while others require a per-cam license fee.

Yes, you'll need power supplies for that. The defacto industry standard for power connectors is 5.5mmx2.1mm, but you won't know for sure until you try it, since they don't specify. The Chinese generic manufacturers tend to stick to the standard to keep costs down, so it's probably good. You'll either need a PS for each cam, or a larger PS with multiple outputs that will handle the full power draw for those cams with IR on. Since there's not a splitter, just an injector, you'd need a 48Vdc supply to run it as standard POE. It's possible the Hik will take whatever voltage, down to 12Vdc, and convert it internally, but I've only used mine with 802.3af POE, so no experience there. It says it's 802.3af standard, but I find that doubtful at this price range. I could be wrong, though.

The other option I've seen people use for choke-point LPR is using IR with an IR-only filter on the camera; that is, a filter that only passes IR light. This lets you expose for just the IR reflection without worrying about the white light exposure changes. Whether ambient daytime IR is a problem would depend on the strength of the IR illuminator and distance to the plates. I've never tried it myself. Not so common, and requires either a lens threaded for a filter or a box with the filter built in, but it helps with the variable exposure issues.