Kawboy12R

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833181163

I don't know about those particular cameras but the times I've seen coloured snow or interference at night when cams are in B&W mode were caused by cable shielding or balun issues, which is basically interference from an outside source getting in. Eliminating the noise source or improving shielding in cables or possibly power supply should do it. Those particular cams might just be susceptible as well. Try one of the cams in a different position at the store or at home and see if they do the same thing at night as well as swapping another different well-known (to you) cam in.

Lots of info to read here- search.php?keywords=alibaba+dahua&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search If you're in the USA though, Dahua has supposedly tightened up on Chinese suppliers selling to Americans.

I'd expect black and white snow without outside interference. Does flipping off the halides get rid of the coloured snow? What about flipping off other lights or things that wouldn't be running and causing snow in the daytime?

I'll second Tomscave in a way- when I see blue utp I automatically think data. Grey is what I tend to pick if wiring is going to be exposed to view.

Most likely, and possibly made worse by lower grade cables installed with the first 4 cameras.

It's a good card from a good company but I have no idea what your situation is. Just don't buy one off of EBay. The vast majority of EBay Geovision cards are unreliable fakes. Before sinking serious money into a computer and analog Geovision card, personally I'd look into something like a Lorex or Swann hi definition network camera and NVR bundle from Costco. It's a bit more money than just replacing your dead DVR, but then you've got new hidef cameras to go with the new NVR, rather than putting significant time and money locking yourself into your old analog QSee cameras. The biggest issue might be replacing the wiring, depending on how difficult it is to re-run Cat 5 in place of your coax.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/ Looks like the folks on here who didn't like "green" drives weren't wrong. Seagate in particular fared poorly. The quick lesson? The Hitachi Deskstar has come a long way since the "Deathstar" days. Also, it is hard to go wrong with the Western Digital 3TB Red (WD30EFRX).

On an interesting note- be kind to your drives. http://lildude.co.uk/effect-of-noise-on-disk-performance

I'm out. Not familiar with any of them. I find that the big test of cheap systems is stored video quality of pictures with subtle shades of the same colour. Unfortunately, this makes night pictures with subtle shades of grey wash out any detail that the camera might've picked up. Maybe ask the vendors to send you some night shots captured with no white light and see if you're happy. Still, it'd be hard to tell without comparing them with YOUR DVR saving data from YOUR cameras in YOUR mounting spots with YOUR light levels.

Dvarapala, it's just speculation on my part, but I'd probably guess either a bug in the Linux file system kernel, possibly something non-standard in the firmware of the red drive that gets accessed rarely, or a reaction to heat (insufficient ventilation perhaps?) over an extended period of time. Might be a Zoneminder issue as well, but it looks like you've isolated it to something hitting the hardware pretty directly. Whatever the cause, swapping drives fixed it so that's excellent detective work.

If anything serious happened I'd want GOOD video. No compromises, unless I was going away for, say, a month and nobody would be watching the house until you got back. At least that way you MIGHT have something rather than nothing if they broke in or vandalized the place more than a week and a half before you returned. I'd much rather add storage than suffer through any amount of CIF. If your DVR will handle a larger HD then upgrade it and do D1 and WD1 all the time if possible. If you can't add to the DVR and you're suffering through low frame rates to get even a week and a half of back footage without fulltime D1 recording then I'd try and get a DVR capable of more storage, or add a computer with LOTS of storage running Blue Iris to monitor and record the DVR from over the LAN for the extra storage time. But, if there was no increase in budget allowed, I'd pick less than a week of storage at D1 and WD1, or maybe tweak the motion detection so that I wasn't recording useless footage.

The admin has the site set to not allow newbies to post live links. You have to make a certain number of posts (20?) before you're considered a low risk to be a spammer. Those that hang out and contribute with knowledge or questions are considered trustworthy.

Hard to say but it is worth a try. You might set a notification on ebay in case something comes up on there, or use a Craigslist search daemon (searches every city at once) to help find used ones.

Swap good cam with bad cam? If bad picture doesn't follow the camera then swap power supplies. Probably 4 cams run from one power supply via splitter? It is more likely that one power supply fails than 4 cables at once.

Swann and Lorex are rebranded Hiks. Dahua is a separate company.

I'd guess because the mount looks like a single axis "swivel". Most folks consider a 2-axis design limiting, with 3-axis being almost the norm these days. The infra "red" almost looks like infra "violet" for some reason though.

Never done it myself but that's how I'd start if I were to try it without the cam wired into a wireless network first.

Don't expect an EBay no-name cheapo DVR to be any good. Find something with a name on it at least. CNB still makes a decent DVR with built-in CD burner. I've got one. It does have its flaws, lossy video compression and unintuitive (to me anyway) footage review among them, but those are fairly common flaws in "cheap" DVRs. Depending on how your mum's DVR implements jpeg2000, it may have totally lossless compression and essentially same-as-live stored video quality. Jpeg2000 is good stuff, it just never really caught on. If you can't tell the difference between live and recorded video on that DVR then you're going to have to spend pretty big dollars replacing it with an equivalent h.264 unit. Or just throw in something cheap like the one you linked to and suffer the low quality no support blues.

Good idea on adding the ends and using a tester. Solid stranded utp wire can be brittle and break inside, especially if it was manhandled a bit beforehand. Might also have gotten pinched, chewed, or whatever in some unseen spot.

I'm familiar with some of KT&C's analog stuff and had no complaints with what I've seen and used. I have no experience with their network cams though.

USB ports on DVRs are generally just for storage devices or mice. If a usb to lan adapter worked I'd be very surprised. Haven't got a clue on repairability (might even be more damage inside), but that is a discontinued model to add to the decision. Might be best to conclude that it was near end-of-life anyway and replace it if a local shop can't fix it just by soldering in a replacement jack, even if it is just a keystone jack mickey-moused to the board somehow.

Must've missed something from the previous page. Either way obviously it still should show registered. Restart will hopefully fix it if it wasn't a typo. I liked Milestone after I got used to it but got along better with the motion detection in BI. My server has lots of cpu cycles to burn so that's what I've been running lately.

As an addition though, I know nobody wants to spend more than necessary, but I started with analog for my home as an emergency gotta-have-it-now system because that's what was available locally on short notice, spent more time and money looking for "good" analog cameras to bump up the shortfalls of the cheapo analogs that came with the package system, and then just threw up my hands and went with network cameras. I kept the analog system running alongside my hi-def network cameras until I moved though, just to fill in the areas until I got more high def stuff. Analog can get the job done, but for the most part you can get much better pictures with high definition network cams like the Swann/Lorex/Hikvision or QSee/Dahua at a comparable price to the $250/each and under analog cameras like the Samsung SCOs I linked to. Not sure what's easily available to you across the pond though. AVer and Geovision might be as readily available as Dahua or Hikvision rebranded stuff. Just as a heads-up, I do cctv as an interest for home and work, not as an installer for others. You can search on here for the brands of network cams I mentioned above and spend a few weeks reading on the subject.

It's not just the system, it's the expectations for the system, although that night shot isn't bad at all for what you paid. 8m is too far for a wide angle lens with analog resolution to be able to make a passable mug shot even straight on, and if you add that kind of angle and horizontal distance and you're looking at a 12-20m distance from the camera shot to get any decent angle at all at their faces. Waaay too far, especially when you factor in the quality loss when the analog picture gets converted to digital for storage using a cheap DVR. 3m (preferably 1 or 2m) is a much better distance for ID with wideangle analog cameras, and preferably with as shallow an angle as possible right into their faces. Your current camera and mounting position are good for telling you WHAT is happening, but not WHO is doing it. If you want to improve the system's mugshot-generating capabilities then you'll have to add more cameras, preferably ones with longer lenses. All you need is one clear closeup face shot of who is on the property to give to the police alongside the overview shots that your present cameras are giving to tell what they did and exactly who did it. If you're all fenced in, then maybe a Samsung SCO-2080R mounted just above head height on the house pointed at the gate and another pointed out your driveway to get faces and maybe plates (that subject is a whole other topic) of everybody that comes to your home. My rule of thumb is one fairly wide angle camera (3-4mm ballpark for the lens) per door, plus a longer lensed camera (at least 6mm, maybe 12mm lens) for each driveway mounted just above head height looking straight out the driveway if at all possible. Add cameras after that to cover windows, play areas, rear gates, etc that aren't covered adequately by the door/driveway cams, plus what you need or want for indoor cams. One per main public area is nice to view when away to see if your TV is still there, check on the nanny, pets, sick family members, flood height in the basement, or whatever.