voip-ninja

Have you checked Milestone information on supported cameras for x-protect? It's pretty easy to find and it is quite a comprehensive list. If the cameras you are looking at support ONVIF then you can (usually) get them to work with Milestone... but I doubt that you are going to find experts here who can specifically tell you which of those two entry level cameras is "better" with a software that is usually used with more mid to high level cameras.

Hopefully Canon can have a positive influence on Milestone. While I have, on the whole, been satisfied with x-protect there is tons of room for improvement. I'm still battling a bug that Milestone spent over 12 weeks working with me on, and then claimed it would be fixed in the next release, which it wasn't. I would love to see some Canon cameras to compete with Axis and others assuming that Canon can do it right.

Asking the buyer to pay return shipping for a defective product is actually a pretty typical thing (Amazon's policy notwithstanding). I've had to do this with many reputable vendors. What would I do? Well, I wouldn't have purchased directly from a China seller in the first place, I would have dealt with a domestic distributor even if it meant paying a little bit more.

you aren't going to find a switch that can pump over 500 watts out and have it be fanless. It would need a massive heat sink to do that and would take up several rack units. There isn't a market for that product. There are options though that are roughly within your price range. Netgear makes a 24 port gigabit managed switch with 16 ports of PoE for about $450 (available at Amazon). 8 of the 16 PoE ports are capable of POE+ and can deliver up to 30 watts. It has a fan but from the reviews it does not appear to be particularly loud. It's also a fully managed switch which means you can do clever things with your network to segment traffic, as well as see errors/faults when you have a PoE or port speed problem. You can probably even configure it to send you an email alert when there is a problem... like the fan failing.

Wow... that's a lot of questions. I can't answer all of your questions but I can answer some. WHS 2011 will take your drives, and just like any regular flavor of Windows it will register them as C:\ for the OS drive, then next drive is D:\ then E:\ etc. It has the ability to create "shares" for these drives so that you can reference them by the share name rather than the drive letter when you set up user accounts, etc. You don't need to do any of this.... you can simply create a folder in one of the non system drives and point Milestone to that. So, for example on WHS 2011 I created a "NVR recordings" folder on my 2TB E:\ drive and point Milestone to that folder for the recordings and archives of each of my 4 cameras. As far as continuous recording, well, I don't do it. It chews up a ton of disk space for one thing, and it also beats the crap out of non server class hardware because you are writing and re-writing the disks 24 hours a day, even when nothing is going on. Motion detection in modern cameras is pretty good, and if you do camera side motion detection you can also configure the cams to create a recording or series of image files on local SD storage as a backup in case something happens to the NVR. HOWEVER... if you want to do it, Milestone does do it (at least with essentials and up versions)... just click on "recording" and choose "continuous" instead of motion detection... problem solved. As to your question of recovering from a power failure... well, Milestone starts automatically and you can usually configure the PC in the BIOS options to start automatically after a power failure. However... I think it's a bit foolish not to put a NVR PC on a small UPS to keep it up at least during your typical 5-20 minute power events. You can get a decent 1kVA UPS for $120. It will keep a small PC up for at least 25-35 minutes during a power event. If you simply let the PC die when you have a power failure, there's always the chance that the system partition is corrupted, it won't start back up without doing a disk check (or won't start at all)... not to mention equipment damage when something gets a power strike through it during a brownout or surge. A good UPS prevents nearly all of that and is not expensive.

$50 license per camera is very reasonable for good quality software that has support. Then again I get annoyed when I see people asking for high quality day/night exterior dome cameras that cost $35-$50. For a business or a person who does paid installs? $50 camera license is a steal. For a small home/personal use? That's a lot but could be very worth it to some. You can look at this forum how price conscience everyone has become. $400+ IP camera or flashed/purposed Costco IP camera or $125 IP camera from China's ebay. Offering a cheaper/free/"GO" version that is crippled doesn't hurt sales. I'll now recommend xprotect when people ask me about IP cameras. It comes down to how many cameras one has. I have four. $200 or so for Milestone was a no brainer. If a person has a dozen+ cameras, which for most residences would be professionally installed for thousands of dollars, spending $2,000-$3,000 for an NVR or dedicated PC with good software seems like it would be a no brainer also. For billy joe bob who has a few $79 cheap chinese cameras pointed around the house, I'm sure that $200 for software seems insane... because billy joe bob has no reference point for what "real" surveillance gear costs.

Personally I've found that the Milestone iPhone and Android apps work very very well... best of any mobile apps I have tried. Not only can I view the cams, change views, zoom in, etc, but I also have relatively painless access to recordings, even over a cellular network. The web browser, when using the Milestone web server is kind of marginal... it works, but has a lot of bugs and performance issues. I've actually got a case up at Milestone for 2 weeks now because of browser freezing when changing camera views with the web client. Customers should be pretty easy to inform that server software is designed for the biggest server/OS base and that is Windows. If they really insist they MUST run the server on a Mac then the easiest option is to use VMWare or Parallels to run Windows 7 or Server 2008 as a virtual machine and run it that way... although they might need a powerful Mac to virtualize surveillance packages. I have an all Mac household but have a cheap C2D server in the basement running Windows Home Server 2011 for Milestone. It was cheap and works well. On the client side, I think that surveillance companies are going to get increasing pressure to support native OS X client viewer apps for Macs because more and more new PC sales are Macs... not to mention that the more affluent customers who might be buying surveillance software for use in a residential or small business setting are often using Macs nowadays.

I am using the motion detection to record 2 Axis P3364VE and 2 Samsung SNVR5080R, both using the built in camera motion detection and they are both working fine. What cameras are you using... and what do your motion recording options in Milestone look like?

$50 license per camera is very reasonable for good quality software that has support. Then again I get annoyed when I see people asking for high quality day/night exterior dome cameras that cost $35-$50.

I think you might have an unrealistic view of what an IP camera is going to accomplish based on your description. How far away are these cars? Can you post a picture of the "view" from roughly where you'd like to place the camera? If the goal is to make facial identification and report people doing the vandalism to police then you will need pretty good resolution at the distance away the perpetrator is from the camera. If the activity occurs at night with only a couple of street lights then you will need a camera with very good low light performance. I don't know about spray-painting the camera being a good idea. Seeing that a camera is there is sometime a deterrent to petty criminals and it's usually better to deter a crime than try to catch someone in the act with footage that may or may not be useful to local police. Also, what's your budget? You should look through the forum because there are a couple of other threads with people who similarly set up cameras to catch local vandals and petty criminals and in some cases the systems are quite expensive and elaborate, involving multiple cameras so that once motion is detected a 2nd camera can zoom in on the perpetrator.... external sensors to activate the cams instead of just relying on basic motion detection, etc. A $300 dome camera will record something but it may be of no use to the cops.

I don't even know why anyone bothered replying, he never followed up. Typical newbie drive-by!

What's the default resolution and frame-rate? 1TB is paltry for recording 3 5MP cams for 7 days especially if it's recording something like 30 fps. Are you recording motion or continuously?

That sounds a lot like Vivotek's excuse for technical support. I had a camera where I installed it but the screws on the body were not tapped out fully. I complained to them of both that problem as well as really bad IR performance because at the angle I had the camera there was a ton of IR bleed. They insisted that the only way they could do anything for me was to box the camera up, send it back to them, and then 4-6 weeks later, IF they agreed it was defective they would send me another one. Unfortunately that appears to be the norm as I think Samsung, Axis, etc, do the same thing.

If you turn on dedicated stream for a camera then that will be the stream that is always used for live viewing in any of the mobile or client viewers. It's a handy way to reduce network bandwidth for devices that need access to the camera feed but don't need the full resolution of the camera (especially 3MP and 5MP cams). There is no way to "toggle" between the 2nd feed and the other feed from the mobile client that I've noticed.

You have to buy through an authorized distributor, and there are several here. You can't order them from wholesalers as you can with most other brands.

I will try moving the PoE injector to the camera location. I already have a continuity tester. This is the first I've heard of duplex for ethernet. Where are the settings for that? If you have an un-managed switch then you can't change it, but that does not mean that there isn't a duplex mis-match.... which could be caused by cabling or an incompatibility between the switch and camera. You might be able to force the speed on the camera side to half duplex if that's what's coming up on the ethernet switch. Google "ethernet duplex mis-match" to get an idea of what I'm referring to.

If it worked fine with a short direct cable then there's nothing wrong with the camera or the NVR. You should probably check the PoE injector, cable pairs (get a continuity tester) and the ethernet switch port. If you are getting a lot of dropouts one possibility is that the camera and port on your network switch are negotiating at the wrong duplex.

I don't know why we are even entertaining him with responses about PTZ when his budget of "a few hundred dollars" isn't even close to being enough. That budget will even limit the choice of 2MP fixed dome cameras to pretty low end models.

Very good review. I've made some comments. One thing I wanted to ask you is, I signed up for 2 years of SUP, do you know what it would take to extend that out another year or two?

So, in an effort to move away from my buggy Synology setup I have been giving Milestone XProtect Express a shot. I installed the software with the 30 day trial license, onto a spare Windows Home Server I had around (basically Windows Server 2003). It is working really well other than a very frustrating problem so I'm wondering if anyone here has any ideas. At install time, Milestone gives the option of specifying an internal and external IP address. I went ahead and did that. I also downloaded and installed Milestone Mobile server components. Milestone Mobile is working - kind of. On my home router I forwarded ports 8080 (the one I used for Milestone's primary install as port 80 was in use on the machine), 8081 (mobile http) and 8081 (secure http) to the box running Milestone. The Windows Firewall is disabled. On the local network, everything works fine.... I can get all clients and services working when pointed to the local IP of the box. On the internet, pointing to my home router via DynDNS, I can get the Milestone Mobile App working on my iOS device.... however, I am unable to get the Milestone client app or web client working... and they use the same port as the iOS app! Here's the real wrinkle. When I access the system from the internet (www.mynetworkip.com:8081) What I see come back in my browser is "waiting for 192.168.0.10:8081".... so what seems to be happening is that Milestone is telling the remote client to connect to it's NAT IP instead of the external IP. Anyone have any ideas on this?

I've noticed some performance issues with the Milestone Mobile server, such as memory leaks which result in the process ballooning to around 200MB or more with just a few cams in use. I've also observed slow loading/refreshing when changing mobile views with Firefox. I've also observed a bug with Safari that Milestone technical support have confirmed but won't be fixing as they say they don't officially support Safari. I did glean a few things on the support call with them. 1. They are aware of a couple of the bugs I pointed out to them, saying the memory leak would be fixed in a patch version available as soon as later this week. 2. They are aware of some of the other problems I mentioned and vaguely said a version near the end of the year or very early next year would resolve them. 3. The rep hinted that a Mac client viewer application is coming sometime in 2014 but didn't want to commit that they would get it out on time or that it was a for sure thing in the pipeline. Overall tech support is not bad, but they are not especially tech savvy. With the Safari bug I observed they kept insisting it was a firewall problem when clearly it is a caching problem that is on the server itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet PoE+ provides up to 25 watts of power and is needed sometimes for cameras with heaters or PTZ (although it's worth noting that Axis has outdoor cams with both heaters and IR that work on regular PoE). Normal PoE injectors do not put out this amount of power but PoE+ injectors are available Zyxel makes some that aren't super expensive. For some cameras, if you have a heater they require auxiliary 48V supply for the heater... you want to avoid those, pain in the ass.

I'm a bit skeptical that the reliability numbers pan out between brands like that. For that to be true the quality of components and assembly would have to be the same between $100 and $1000 cameras and I don't think that's the case. The longer the factory warranty the more confidence the manufacturer has in the long term reliability of the unit. Generally speaking your higher tier brands with long established track records should prove more reliable than the very cheap cameras that are out there.

I think the results are pretty in line with what most of us expected.

I observed that also. You will notice if you make your browser window rectangular (taller than it is wide) you will actually get the cam feeds to spill off the side of the browser. I mentioned this to them today. Also with Safari I have been having some problems where I get a "black screen" instead of the Milestone login screen.... killing and re-starting the browser clears it. Not sure what is going on with that, if it is Safari specific or affecting other browsers and OSs. A nice new trick with the iOS application is you can now mark a server as "favorite" and set it to auto login to that server... which is nice!