gb5102

Not much you can do with the equipment you have. With a managed switch/business class router you could create a VLAN for the cams and control access between the 'cam vlan' and your main network. I prefer ZyXEL switches and the ZyWALL routers are great, but you need some networking knowledge or it will be very frustrating to use any 'business class' equip.

http://www.geovision.com.tw/english/5_8.asp The video management software is free to use with Geovision IP cameras. If you want to add 3rd party ip cams to the GV-NVR you need a license.

Can't you just export it as WMV using Viewlog on the DVR? Otherwise try this: -Download/install Remote Viewlog -In the %ProgramFiles%\Remote Viewlog folder, find GVSinglePlayer.exe - simple standalone player which I believe will play back the file without having to install the codec. -If you do need the codec, copy the GeoCodecReg folder to the desired PC, then run (as administrator) GeoCodecReg.exe file inside the folder

just checked my personal dvr and it looks like there is ~6 days of old empty folders for each cam, personally I wouldn't even worry about it as long as the video is recycling

Its normal for empty folders to hang out for a while in my experience, they will dissappear eventually. On the other hand if there is video files in the folders that are not recycling and not showing in ViewLog that would indicate database corruption.

This can all be done with Geovision. GV-NVR supports i/o triggered recording(contact closure, etc) and the Geovision ViewLog playback software allows you to export a quad-view as a standard .avi which can be played back on another PC.

Your total project budget is only $150? That barely even covers 1 good camera!

i've seen many strange issues with generic dvr's, often caused by the no-name, el-cheapo power supply failing. Or maybe the hard drive is failing.

Since I am a 'Geovision guy', I would suggest a GV-VS14 video server which will basically convert your analog cams to IP, then you can use the free GV-NVR software on a Windows virtual machine.

I've seen this issue on 8.5.6, fixed on 8.5.7 I would avoid 8.5.8 as I have had issues with it during testing, but 8.5.9 has proven to be stable for us so far h.264 is the most bandwidth-efficient codec

Did you format the SD card in "Storage Settings" menu? motion detection is in the web interface under "Video and Motion' section. also I believe it can only work with Internet Explorer browser.

hmmm...not sure but I usually check 'rebuild all information' option

I have a Spectra Mini and had to reverse it when connecting to USB-to-RS485 converter

shut down Multicam and Viewlog server then run the db utility. It will take a while to scan for files. Once its done, you should see the 'missing' files show up in viewlog, they should be deleted the next time the software 'recycles', usually a couple of hours, depends on activity.

have you tried reversing the RS485 polarity?

If these files are not set to 'never recycle' then its probably database corruption, I've seen this a few times, seems to coincide with improper shutdown(power outage, etc). Do these files appear in ViewLog? You can either manually delete them, or run database repair utility to make the DVR 'aware' of the files and they should be recycled eventually

also another thing- you have to add the protocol you setup in the VS11 to the NVR. So if you have the VS11 setup to use Pelco-D, you need to go to 'add/remove PTZ' in the NVR and add Pelco-D protocol.

Attached a couple of screenshots showing some of the relevant config

well technically you can use a mapped drive, but I had some issues with recording randomly stopping and recycling not working properly, and support@geovision.tw advised iSCSI. No problems since switching over ~ 2yrs ago and I've used it on a couple of systems so far. So it seems iSCSI is the more reliable choice

GV System will stream a copy of the live video to cms, can set cms to record 24x7 or just motion/io/etc events. Also video playback would have to be done thru cms, at least for the oldest video, recent video would be available on the DVRs local storage just like it is now. AFAIK viewlog can't access the video stored in Center V2. Instead of reinstalling the OS, what about imaging existing OS onto new drive using Acronis or something similar? You could also check out multi-bay eSATA enclosures, but the proprietary internal power supplies in the cheaper ones scare me, and the commercial-grade rackmount units are kinda expensive you could put a few of the new 4tb drives into USB enclosures, connect to DVRs and leave them copy, come back in a day or so to install the drives internally. I would use Unstoppable Copier so the transfer doesn't die halfway through which would be pretty annoying...

Bandwidth and disk requirements can vary greatly...you could set up perfmon on the DVRs to determine the avg/peak disk bandwidth over the course of a day(s). But realistically I don't think 1GB ethernet will have any problem with 96 analog cams. If you figure real throughput of ~900mbps on Gig-E, that gives you ~9mbps per cam which is a pretty high bitrate for compressed d4 video. But some kind of load-balancing/failover could help with reliability. GV System can only record to NAS via iSCSI, which makes the network storage appear as a local-attached disk. Just be sure to create separate iSCSI LUNs on the NAS for each DVR- with NTFS filesystem there can only be 1 read/write connection per LUN or you will experience corruption. Also the only way I can think of to fall back on the local storage in the DVRs would be using Center V2 as suggested by varascope. The DVRs would continue recording to their local storage in the event the network connection is lost. But on the other hand a solid network and buisness-grade NAS should have little to no downtime anyways

On second thought, I think the 'Digital Matrix' feature may be able to take advantage of the full resolution of the display. With matrix you don't choose the resolution, it uses whatever resolution you have the monitor running at. Unfortunately, I don't have any monitor greater than 1920x1200 to test with... You just setup the desired monitor as a secondary 'extended' display in Windows, set your resolution, then you can can fire up GV and set up the matrix layout for that monitor. You don't see the interface on the matrix display(s), just cams

the highest resolution supported by the gv software is 1920x1200 it would display on a 4k screen, but the interface would not fill the screen, just like you suspected. You could use the 'full-screen' option in GV to stretch the image, but as far as I know, that just stretches the 1920x1200 image to fill the screen, it would not be 'native' resolution. I could be wrong on how the fullscreen function works though, maybe it does scale the image vs simply stretching it. Either way, I would think the image quality would be very good.

The GV software supports recording schedule User manual: http://www.usavisionsys.com/forums/download/file.php?id=698

you can have the cam connected to both NVR simultaneously, no problem. I have done it numerous times