voip-ninja

Within any trade there are always differences of opinion on these sorts of thing. Honestly, when I see a contractor using the cheapest materials, fasteners or whatever on a job it doesn't leave me with a very good feeling. I will typically try to hire someone who does a job as close to the way I would do it as possible.

It could be ethernet, but if the cable was the problem then rebooting the camera at the mid-span doesn't seem like it would have cleared it. Also, during the "outage" the camera could be pinged, I just couldn't HTTP access the camera or the streams. Firmware is current. We'll see if it happens again. It happened when I selected the camera from the Synology Android app, so it could also be an interaction issue between Synology and Axis.

You need a minimum amount of pixels for facial identification, higher end cameras have tools that help you determine if you are getting this pixel count of a given target. I don't have experience with ACTi but I understand they are pretty good. How much lighting do you have in the areas where you want to record people? Vivotek night time performance is pretty poor. Axis cameras in the same locations provide amazing light collection and a useable picture at night with relatively poor illumination. How many people need access to the system? Synology works well for extremely small deployments but it's probably not cut out for the more serious stuff.

I received an interesting PM from a fellow member who wanted to know what I had done to go beyond the "Dahua" level of gear that is very popular with the budget person who needs a small system for their residence or business. After putting the lengthy reply together I thought that perhaps it would be of some use to others... sort of a story of how my initial CCTV system installation of a relatively low budget solution grew into a more substantial system, and, in some ways, turned into a bit of a hobby. So, here it goes;

Yeah it's all a bit mysterious. Hopefully no one comes looking for them.

Hi ......be careful of pre made .....with water tight ends ......they don't exist. Cat 5 has been out well over 30 years .........people new to the industry think cat5 is new........for your application all you need is standard......it will last more than your 10 years I am not new to the industry, I have been working in telecom for over 15 years where we use CAT3 and in the last decade or so CAT5. My understanding is that our technicians that do wire runs use different cable for exterior building applications vs. normal interior wiring where "regular" or plenum rated cable is used.

At the rate things are going I think they might You basically stole those Axis cameras. I don't see any others close to that price! Indeed. They are no longer available at that price, I got a great buy on them for sure.

There is no question that the 3200 is an excellent value camera. $200 for a 1080P PoE camera that has decent image quality when the scene is well lit is hard to argue with. For me, low light performance was at least as important, if not more so, than the performance with great lighting and since a lot of my property is shaded heavily even during the day, WDR and great exposure adjustments (good auto iris performance) was a must. It really comes down to ones expectation in a product. I decided that I would cough up the extra dough to get something that had very good night time performance and had some other image adjustment features such as WDR, auto iris, varifocal lens, etc. Reliability is also a concern for me. After handling the Axis cameras for example I see why they offer such a good warranty. They are built like tanks and clearly designed to operate for years with little to no maintenance.... it's hard to say if the Dahua will hold up as well or will turn out to be "disposable" units that bite the dust after a couple of years (and who knows maybe by then 5MP versions are the same $200 price). Honestly if the P3364-VE had not dropped to the price it had dropped to I likely would have bought another couple of Samsung NVR-5080R cameras, they are also quite good.

That's almost as funny as the .5 million dollar home. My last home before the current one was .25M. " title="Applause" />

Yeah, there's a seller on Amazon who has them for $449. I have no idea how they can sell them at that price, but I bought two. They were both brand new, in the box and fully legitimate specimens. Damn you and your Dahua contacts, I am super jealous!

I think you would be lucky to find a camera with much better than 1000 ms of delay.

Axis P3364-VE 6mm has a 2.5mm wide lens, awesome image quality and is compatible with almost everything. Budget wise, I found a seller on Amazon selling them for $449. Normally they are about $650-$800. That camera is 1280X960, if that's not high enough resolution you can go to the next one up for another $100-$200 per unit. Or, you can get some Dahua cameras, I'm surprised no one in here has chimed in that you can get a 2MP Dahua camera that sees through walls and costs $150.

If you want something better than average, and very discreet look into an Axton IR.

Hey guys, FWIW I wanted to follow up. For one of my exterior cameras I was able to use a bit extension and safely do a cut through from the exterior to an interior location where I could route the cable. For the 2nd one, I opted for an easier (but somewhat less optimal) install location so that I could route the wire directly into my garage and down into my basement where all of my runs terminate to midspan units. So, problem averted. If I had decided to go the exterior route, I for sure would have used exterior graded CAT5 cable. I found a reseller on Amazon who sells 50' cables with water tight ends for $40. I would have then just used silicone tape or "jelly crimps" to bring the cable into the interior of the home where I would have continued with regular CAT5/6 cable. To me, as an amateur, I would always go with the stuff rated for the job vs saving a few bucks and potentially having to re-do work in a few years. I hope to not have to touch these drops for at least 10 years. Thanks again.

I am aware of budget dome cameras, but in all the cameras I have compared, dome cameras with the same capabilities have cost more than their bullet counterparts. A bullet camera would have a sealed design more conducive to low temp operation than a dome. It's admirable that you have dome cameras without heaters operating at -40F but if the cameras did not need heaters then manufacturers would not equip them with heaters. Obviously if you stuff a camera in a sealed exterior enclosure you might not need heaters.

The primary difference between outdoor rated UTP cable and regular UTP is in the cable sheathing. Outdoor rated cable won't break down under UV and water exposure, your regular bargain basement cat5 cable will deteriorate more quickly.

If its for your own home you can do either. I would recommend for your own home to run the external grade cat5 using standarrd cable grips (4-5mm) and avoid staples outdoors even if it is strait into wood. T25 staples are just that little bit too small and there isa risk of nicking the outer sleeve of the cat5 which would make it somewhat vulnerable, but nick it a few times and you've wasted your time. If you use plastic conduit, we use 20 or 25mm round black conduit into a IP65 junction box adjacent to the camera. We use saddles to fix the conduit every 600mm or so into the mortar joints in brick and straight into the wood on wood cladding. We use the conduit for commercial clients and external grade for domestic clients as they prefer the lower profile visual impact of external cat5. Transition your external from internal using either jelly crimps or an IDC junction box remembering to hide it inside the building or in an external IP65 JB. Thanks very much for the info, this is good stuff. Now I just have to figure out where to get some of this stuff! I started my career as a field telecom guy but I was on the engineering side, not the tech services side, so I'm sure some of my old colleagues would have an idea of where to get some of this stuff.

Well they have a lot of limitations, such as fixed lenses, no auto iris, or decent WDR, just to name a few. Dahua does build "better" cameras, but they then get closer in cost to the cameras from the big guys. Dahua I'm sure has products that are very suitable for many home deployments, I just don't think they are well suited to mine.

The picture from the Axis without the external IR is still quite good. It does a really exceptional job of light collecting in my terrible environment. However, there is no question that the IR illuminator takes it to a whole new level. You can actually read license plates and even do basic facial identification of people walking along the sidewalk 40-50 feet away when using the Axton IR. As far as the Samsung's, they do quite a good job with their integrated IR for the relatively small areas they are lighting.

Hello all, My frustration level with Synology is approaching the boiling point. They have left many issues unaddressed for quite some time and the latest thing with them is that they have broken Mac support for live viewing due to them not getting away from Java. So, here's my question... what would be the best budget/residential NVR software (or appliance) that supports the following; 1. Supports cameras like Axis, Samsung, Vivotek. 2. Supports remote viewing over the internet with a browser (embedded web server) 3. Supports iOS devices (iPad, etc) Software cost is less than $400 for a license that supports recording up to six channels of 720P or 1280X1024 video. Recommendations?

I appreciate that, thanks. The way that Milestone did it was their mobile server (which is free assuming you have their licensed software) provides a stripped down basic (and fairly poor resolution) "web feed" that will pretty much work on anything. The mobile server also provides client access to Droid and iOS devices with dedicated apps and can do things like allow for review of recorded footage. I had a few minutes yesterday and tried to turn up ExacQVision, and it was a mess. It did not have a module for Samsung and trying to add the Samsung cameras as ONVIF failed. They did email me asking if I needed help getting the demo working so I might inquire on that.

So I have to run windows on virtualization software? That's kind of a non-starter for me, I want a native app/web-viewer for my Mac. Honestly the lack of a working Mac viewer is one of the reasons that I have looked away from Synology.... their Mac viewer has been very hit or miss due to their reliance on Java, and currently they simply don't work on the Mac at all due to their reliance on Java-32. Again most business run windows even when they are using a Mac. Also with Parallels you get to add the Avigilon icon to your desk and it will launch just like any other Mac program. So no extra steps to launch Avigilon on a Mac or PC. I work for a very large company and Macs are everywhere. In more and more of the other businesses that I work with they are deploying more Macbooks than Windows laptop. You are right, there is a workaround if someone has a Mac and a software company decides not to support it, they can run virtualization software ($49) plus a copy of Windows ($99-$299) in order to run apps that don't have Mac support. If Avigilon is as good as you guys say then I have to question why they don't offer a stripped down basic web browser based monitoring tool like Blue Iris, Milestone and others.

The iPhone/iPad viewer is called "ACC mobile".. I've not looked at the reviews to be honest but have used it when we were out of town over the AT&T 3G network and it worked fine.. I just find that the interface to select video footage for captured content is not the greatest .. It works just fine but you really need the time/date line like you get with the full client where captured video is showing and you can zoom in/out on the time/date bar to select individual events.. Right now the mobile version allows you to select a 15 minute window and it will check with the server to see if there's anything that happened for that timeslot -- unfortunately it doesn't have a way to list when events occurred -- you're left trying to find them on your own.. Using the full client on a PC it's 10000% better and works awesome IMHO! Okay, thanks for this. Sounds like the Synology mobile app for android/ios and the Milestone app both might actually be a bit better in this area.

So I have to run windows on virtualization software? That's kind of a non-starter for me, I want a native app/web-viewer for my Mac. Honestly the lack of a working Mac viewer is one of the reasons that I have looked away from Synology.... their Mac viewer has been very hit or miss due to their reliance on Java, and currently they simply don't work on the Mac at all due to their reliance on Java-32.

I'm sure you're onto something with Dahua being a better value but other products exist for a reason. For one thing, bullet cameras are ALWAYS cheaper than domes. This is a fact. However I need dome cameras because the community association where I live does not look fondly on things like bullet cameras pointed all over the place... the wife also does not like it to look like we live in a fortified compound. Also, I need cameras that have very good performance in low temps. I have observed that most budget/cheap cameras indicate they only work down to 32 F. Do they go lower? Maybe... maybe not, but if the manufacturer does not give a lower value then it's a crapshoot. All of the cameras I have chosen are capable of 0F or lower temperatures which is necessary when you live at 6200 feet altitude near the Rocky mountains. You're also missing something when I point out the $600 cost of my Synology NAS. It is a full network storage device that serves content to all of the devices in my house. I would have purchased it regardless of my needs for NVR use, it just happened to have that capability. The advantage of using it as an NVR is that I don't need another server/box in the home sucking juice. If you want to contend that I went overkill with my solution then please provide some full motion video from a Dahua camera with integrated IR in complete darkness. The few videos that I have seen are not particularly impressive. What mobile applications are available for Dahua solutions that offer the ability not only to monitor live feeds but also play back recording clips from specific time intervals? As I said originally, I don't have any experience with Dahua.... so if someone wants to send me a Dahua system I would be happy to try it out and see if it beats the system I already have. Obviously everyone is also entitled to their own opinion about cost/value in a security system. Obviously Dahua stuff is extremely popular here, and probably for a reason, but saying that the Dahua 2MP is going to perform better than a 1MP Axis camera leaves me extremely skeptical... in fact, I don't believe it.