yakky

I'd suggest going with a basic Dahua DVR and a few different cameras, I've been happy with CNB 24VF based cameras as well as Qvis Eye 34s. I'd avoid all the Night Owl, Swann, Zmodo crap as the interfaces are terrible, Dahua is just passable. On cameras you will need to spend at least $70 on a camera to get decent quality at night, I would suggest not even considering a camera without a DSP.

I think your best bet might be to find a retailer with good support. There are lots of generous folks around here but a complete system design is a bit much as far as time is required.

Most modern dahuas serve out RTSP.

I've purchased plenty of stuff directly from China at a retail level. However for Security products it doesn't make sense. Most of the stuff is no-name brand or if it is name brand, it is only a few dollars cheaper and the support isn't nearly as good. Shipping takes quite a long time as well. The worst are the no name brand products that advertise "Sony CCD" or "Sony DSP", those are the worst buy there is, if a company won't stamp their name on it, I won't buy it.

If top secret government agencies and top tier financial institutions can get hacked, a lowly turd of a DVR can get hacked. Getting source code is another story, sounds like you might be new to this sort of thing.

Run yes, use for video analysis, no.

Its too hard to generalize like that. I've sampled just about every newer model of CNB Analog cameras and they range from not so hot, to top of the charts. Samsung is certainly able to produce a good quality camera, however they aren't very popular around here.

Glad you got it figured out.

I don't want to rain too much on you parade, but even with telnet access, you might not be able to get what you want. I found my way into my Dahua, not much to look at once there. That said, the Dahuas have an SDK for Windows and Unix and Rory has made some great utilities that made me forget why I wanted to get in anyway.

Si

There are a couple of passwords that floated around for the Nightowl, not of those worked for me. I tried mine with all numeric combos from 0-999999, nothing worked. I also ran john for about a month IIRC, no hits either, it was a POS and I sent it back.

I'm no expert but I do play a corrupt software engineer on a Mexican soap opera.... my thoughts: -Take the tinfoil hat off for a moment and catch your breath... -Its not Dahua as those provide a log of who logs in, but if it was doing covert activity, it surely would clear this out. -Let us know how quickly you "guess" the telnet password, even if its numeric, it'll take a long time. -Its likely the unit it calling home to set its time/ddns/check firmware updates -Someone who builds a unit like this isn't going to do some beginner attempt at snooping only connecting back to the camera mfg's home base. -And last but not least, you can use something like tcpdump or wireshark to figure out exactly how benign its activity is.

Its almost as if you wiped the OS on the unit. I'm out of ideas, time to contact the seller!

So it was working fine until you hit the reboot button, or it only got to the boot logo? Does it have a harddrive in it? If so have you tried unplugging the drive? If it has a CMOS battery, you might try taking it out for a 15 minutes and try again as well.

A happy moment with the family and the dvr? Somehow I think that would be a happy moment for you. Do you see anything on the screen when it tries to boot up?

I agree, that's the biggest drawback to all the current budget D1 DVRs, the live quality is so much better than the recorded. After reading the specs on the video encoder, I'm inclined to believe it is something to do with the implementation. It seems they are using a single 240fps encoder and slicing it up among cameras. I wonder if its able to do true motion detection for compression sake when every frame the encoder sees is completely different.

Yep, in the USA. Glad things worked out for you! Happy Holidays.

I've had good luck with these: http://www.amazon.com/PAIRS-Mini-CCTV-Video-Balun/dp/B00442G9O6 Just slightly more than the fake ones.

hahaha.... same ones I fell for!

They used to be free, and there are now free alternatives or you can use methods like this: http://boomshadow.net/tech/how-to-still-get-a-free-dyndns-account/

I still think the CNB 24VFs are the TDN champs, though the IP cameras are starting to catch up, but they are much more costly.

Just setup a dynamic IP service, most modern routers support this, I like dyndns.

You also want to make sure you have real, quality baluns. I picked some crappy ones up and had all sorts of issues that made me question using CAT5. They turned out to be nothing more than balun style connectors, they didn't actually have any circuitry inside.

Good question. I'd like to hear if anyone has any real working solutions. Lightning is trying to find the shortest/least resistive path to ground, anything that can help that along.... will also cause ground loops!

Post up some nighttime pictures, lets see what good image quality looks like....