Kawboy12R

It would be nice to have two options but, if someone wants to save a snapshot, I think it's a good thing to have the uncompressed highest quality pic with the lowest loss available for evidence. Seems to me that something that ONLY output a lossy jpeg image just to make posting pix to the 'net easier would be ever so slightly catering to the Mickey Mouse crowd? Jpegs are good for many things, but each generation always loses quality no matter what the compression is set to. Even a first generation jpeg isn't as good, although I do agree with you that dealing with a quality raw image sometimes has sacrifices like manual jpeg compression for when having the best isn't as important.

I don't sell cctv stuff. I've set up my home and my business with two systems and have turned it into a bit of a hobby though. You might find this thread interesting. It's a "Dad" thread looking for cheap IP cameras with good sound to use for a baby monitor.

How much do you want to spend per camera? Indoor or outdoor? Need a vandal dome or can you use pinatas (bullets)? What kind of lighting is outside? Got lots of bugs in your area?

I'd be more tempted to use it on the "engineer" that decided to put a glowing LED inside a dome designed for night work. Then again, maybe it's supposed to be a day-only camera. Still a dumb design unless something's missing that's supposed to cover the LED most of the time.

.22 Dahua short recommended as a minimum requirement. .308 Axis gives excellent results. .50 Cal Avigilon recommended by the pros but not needed by most. Make sure you buy from a reputable local vendor. Your local streetcorner may have an "expert" but won't know you after the sale.

I haven't played with anything other than the 950G. It soured me for indoor IP cams. I didn't have much of a serious use for one anyway so I never bought another.

My experience says stay faaar away from the DLink 950G, but you probably (hopefully) can't buy them anymore. What an unstable piece of crap that was. That reminds me- it's still in a drawer somewhere. Must throw it out before someone else unwittingly wastes time on it.

Are the criteria IP, wireless, awesome audio, and under $75?

If there were no such thing as Dahua IP cams readily available for $170 ($135 or less if you look around), I'd recommend this- http://www.cctvcamerapros.com/Geovision-DVR-Card-p/gv-900-8.htm I find it hard to justify the cost just to be able to use analog cams though. If someone mostly wants the live view or wishes to record known employees, then any old cheap D1 analog dvr with $75-$250 cams will do. If someone wants to spend $600 on an analog card in addition to a computer to have relatively good saved video quality, why not spend the $600 on 4 IP cams to use with the same computer? Better video quality under many (most?) circumstances than comparably priced analog cams live OR saved, and you have a 4 camera headstart on your system? I'm ignorant of Apple applications besides Geovision's spec sheet. I've never looked into using Dahua stuff on Apples. I'm Android and Microsoft oriented.

Dahua has some quality control problems and major support issues. Best bang for the buck on low-end IP stuff that I've seen though, especially if outdoor nighttime performance is important. Add a few features, better software, and some factory support? Look out. I'd be interested in hearing a good solid recommendation for an 8ch full D1 analog DVR that has saved video almost as good as live for a reasonable enough price that makes it attractive versus low-end IP. If saved video is always considerably worse than live, then what is the argument against cheap IP if most recent computers and a $50 software package will run them quite nicely? I haven't seen anybody absolutely in love with the saved video quality of their analog DVRs in anything even close to a "budget" model.

People don't come to an international forum looking for local sources. They especially don't come here looking for recommendations about local installers if they are DIYers. Price balanced with quality plus the hope of a little help if things don't turn out perfectly. Besides box stores, I know of three local places that deal with CCTV stuff. I've seen partial pricelists and I can buy cams/dvrs cheaper online than THEY pay from their suppliers. One is a parts-only industrial electronics shop and stocks mostly cables, baluns, connectors, and Galaxy cams. One is a computer place that does quality installs with name brand equipment but has very little stock for demos (only cheaper noname stuff kept in stock). The other is an alarm company that'll hang cams and run wires but doesn't demo and is incapable of inspiring confidence that their stuff is even half a notch above a box store special. I can see why people go to the web for references about stuff that'll get shipped to their door and hopefully not leave them completely out in the cold. Too many middlemen in the local market for a customer to hope of getting a reasonable price on hardware that isn't on a Costco/Walmart shelf. The best hope for an installer seems to happen when a homeowner or small business DIYer screws up an install (equipment doesn't work, eventually dies, or can't ID what needs to be IDed) and calls a pro in desperation.

I'd get him to tell you the proper settings to get a clean image in low light. If his settings don't work then after three cable changes I'd send it back. From the specs it looks like it should be a pretty good cam without much light.

Good question. Some quick Googling didn't turn up a good answer for me. I'm not sure if most of the 940nm sensitivity is in the lens or in the camera sensor, but I suspect it's in the sensor. There's an IR filter that is removed in order for the sensor to see IR at night (IR needs to be blocked during the day because of the huge amounts the sun puts out). When the filter is removed at night then everything is going through the lens to the sensor. I'd like to find out for sure myself because I like using 940nm with my setup and might run into the problem in the future. Are you sure that your cam sees IR at all? If it doesn't have IR LEDs built into it then it's not a given. It might be blind to ALL IR. If you need a quick check and a quick fix, a power splitter and cheap IR camera with 850nm LEDs (the red glowing ones) might be available for you to pick up on Monday before "crimbo". They're a lot more available locally here than dedicated illuminators or lenses. You wouldn't have to hook up the cheapo as a camera, just feed it power and use the IR for your other (I assume better) camera. If not, then you at least have a camera that can see at night even though it sticks out like a sore thumb. Santa might notice the red LEDs and get scared off though. He guards himself quite carefully around here. Better be careful if you're setting it up near a tree or chimney.

What's your budget per camera? You want to stay with analog or go hi-def? Outdoor I assume? Dome or bullet? At what distance do you want to ID someone? Need a wide field of view for each camera?

I know of one theft case locally where the thieves were known and got IDed well on the video but the judge let them off because the time was off by an hour or so. It might even have been a daylight savings time error. Wrong timestamp = no conviction sometimes.

What happens when you switch cables or camera locations? Seems like a low light noise issue though. Edit- I know you said same spot, but I'm just making sure that the cable got tested with a known good one. Also, sometimes crappy cams are so crappy at night they don't show noise, they just blur.

No, but they're fairly common in cheapish cameras. Indoor cctv box cameras tend to be CS mount. Some el cheapo cams you can't replace the lens at all.

I'm looking at NVR vs PC vs hybrid NVR vs hybrid PC at the moment. It is beginning to look like it might be cheaper to forget hybrid and my existing analog cams and get the flexibility of a PC IP system. If it isn't actually cheaper, depending on what cams a fellow wants to mix and match with, then it's not much more expensive for a big increase in image quality where the cheap IP cams replace analog ones. Well, as long as you have decent light and/or don't require outboard-only infrared for the cameras. For a small homeowner installation we can mix and match cams and brands and not worry so much about whether the software supports the in-camera motion detection of everything out there. Just throw CPU cycles at the video streams from the software end and don't worry about it. Put a few good IP cams in the areas that need it most and put some cheap ones where pixel count and image quality isn't as important. The problem is that I'd greatly prefer having an NVR by my front door but I can't find one reasonably priced that'll run the cams I want with motion detection. It's looking like either a PC in my front closet or a wireless mouse and VGA balun system so I can locate the PC elsewhere and still view my cams on a monitor at a convenient central location. That's probably a better solution security-wise because there's always the possibility that someone will break into the house. A hidden security system is better than one by the front door that they can easily steal as well. Around my home most of the problem is with prowlers looking for open cars/sheds/etc though.

And then plan for a week of cloudy weather and see how the numbers pan out in the winter with poor battery performance and maybe some snow covering the panel. Oversize your panel and add additional batteries depending on how important it is for the camera to keep functioning in poor weather.

Keep 'em running for posterity, good fellow! That way the aliens that built the Mayan pyramids can watch their handiwork first-hand when they come back to reclaim Pangaea after the destruction and remolding of our continents. Bonus points for megapixel cams on battery backup running SD cards for emergency storage when the network goes down.

Try choosing DISABLE, save, run it a bit, and then choose ENABLE again and saving the config. Sometimes computerized devices get scrambled a bit and won't truly resave settings that they think haven't changed. REALLY changing and saving them to something different and going back and freshly selecting what you really want might do the trick. That's not DVR specific, just what I've seen occasionally on other electronic devices. It is also possible that their overwrite menu selection is vague or mislabeled and that you really want DISABLE write protect instead of ENABLE overwrite if you know what I mean, so try running it on DISABLE until it's full as well.

Yep. A quality crisp picture in a camera that will handle difficult situations like the one with sunlight in the background through the windows costs money whether the cam is analog or IP. IP is a lot easier to get a crisp recorded image and the detail captured is much higher even if you get a crisp saved picture from an analog cam. The feature you're looking for is Wide Dynamic Range (WDR), or ExDR, or something similar. Some cheaper cams will claim WDR but, like most things, you generally get what you pay for. You might be able to crisp up your images on the cheaper cameras just by putting in better lenses though. They're probably m12 (12mm metric thread) board lenses of some kind. A 3.6mm lens is a pretty common wideangle (not fisheye) lens. You can get good quality lenses from a reputable source for 8-20 bucks/lens that might perk up those cheap cameras if they take screw-in lenses. Some super-cheap cams either won't come apart or won't take a different lens, but it's worth a shot. m12lenses.com has a good selection of m12 and CS mount lenses. The "megapixel" m12 lenses are higher quality than the Joe Schmoe regular m12 lenses because you need better lenses in the high-definition IP cameras. You can see the fuzziness and imperfections that aren't visible through analog resolution. Might be worth the money buying an "expensive" $15-$20 lens to see how good your cameras can get (if they take replaceable lenses at all, that is).

If you're happy with the live quality of the video and the recorded quality sucks then it is the DVR. If the recorded quality is exactly the same as the live quality then you have a great DVR with poor cameras. As ak357 said, you're better off with megapixel cameras if recorded quality is of utmost importance. From what I've seen, superb analog DVRs cost more than cheaper IP cameras that will easily record exactly what they display. The only person I've seen claim that he had an awesome analog DVR that played back video EXACTLY the same as the live view paid somewhere around $3500 for the DVR alone. You can get three or more excellent high end IP cameras plus a computer to record them on for the price of that DVR alone and the image will be MUCH better.

Anything interesting written on the PCB inside or did you look there, too?

I'm not a cctv expert by any means, and I'm not sure why copying the file from thumbdrive to disk would change the file and somehow break it so that only one channel is now visible when there used to be more, but I do know that the good folks at YouTube are experts at converting just about any video filetype imaginable. Upload it there with all of the privacy settings turned on so it isn't publicly viewable and see what happens. If it works there are a ton of programs to dload YouTube videos to your HD. I've suggested this before to people that had cctv files compressed with unknown proprietary codecs and had it turn out well for them. It MIGHT work out for multiplexed files as well, because if I understand your problem correctly then the video isn't merely a single-screen recording of a multiplexed video stream, it's actually a digital file with 4 streams encoded with only one stream now visible with the software you have available, right? Either the file got slightly damaged somehow or something else changed to make it not work fully. If YouTube won't crack it, there are tons of people on here with lots of knowledge but some of them might speak up a bit more clearly if money were involved. You might want to add a cash incentive to see if someone on here is knowledgeable enough tell you or might be able to dive into the file and possibly extract the other streams separately if it's not possible to figure out what software did the multiplexing just from looking at a screenshot. Even looking at a copy of a digital file with a hex editor can uncover interesting ASCII text strings that might give clues to the original file type or company that produced it. I used to fiddle with that stuff quite a bit although I don't know much about raw video file formats.