Littlefoot

I used this guide to find out a few weeks back that it was absolutely a fake, if anybody else is interested it was quite accurate: http://www.dvrkits.com/help-support/identify-fake-dvr-cards I was even under the impression that my DVD was authentic, and this article verified that the counterfeits are VERY convincing sometimes. DON'T buy Geovision from Ebay! I wish the software was good because after restarting the system will work again for several hours leading me to believe the hardware is good, just counterfeit. Thanks for all the input from everyone here, it's been helpful.

Ya, the Firmware did update in the Driver updating process. From the best i can tell the reason it's having so much trouble is because the card is a counterfeit and thus uses different chips than the authentic GV equipment. I'm getting ready to bite the bullet and buy a real GV card, then wipe out the machine again and start from scratch.

I'm going to keep up on these updates as I try different things. It's been so long since this system started screwing up that I decided to wipe out all the Geovision software on the machine (see http://www.worldeyecam.com/store/geovision-fully-clean-up-amp-uninstall-all-geovision-main-system-software-and-drivers.html ) and tried to do a full install of GV Main System 8.2 with the 8.2 driver. After finishing the installation and restarting the PC, I received an error message to the effect of "driver not found, restarting Main System...," even though the device shows up in Device Manager. I decided to completely remove all Geovision software again and install version 8.5 of the driver and GV Main System. This setup would be preferable anyways, and upon restarting after installation I was able to fully open and configure the GV Main System. Everything was working great until I checked several hours later and found that the GV Main System software had shutdown and i was staring at a windows desktop, just as it used to do after giving me an error message to the effect of "you may be the victim of counterfeit hardware..." If i make any more progress I'll post it here, hopefully somebody can get something out of it. My advice is simple: DON'T BUT A CHEAP DVR CARD!!!! There's a reason the deal sounds too good to be true.

Well, sure enough the cameras ended up going nuts again and encoding like in the original photo above. I'm not sure if it's of consequence, but since all the channels are sharing overlapping images of other channels (each camera has 3 or 4 other camera images overlaid on it at a time) could this be an issue with a processor on the board itself? The video will still display normally over the network viewing program but encodes and saves to the DVR hard drive as the jumbled image. I would have assumed bad hardware immediately if not for the fact that after restarting the GV 'Main System' application again the videos encode fine again for several hours. I really thought i had found a good deal on Ebay when i saw a GV-1480 for $400. The package looks just like the genuine GV-xxx cards i used to install, the card had the exact same hardware included and the CD for install was even a genuine 8.2 disc. Had no problems until upgrading to v8.5 and realized the only thing my GV card didn't have was a serial number, and thus no support when i recieved counterfeit messages. It's been a pain since, and i can imagine using the wrong driver doesn't help but the GV 'Main System' shuts down intermittently with the 8.2 driver thus necessitating the v8.5 driver. Any info is helpful as always, I know other people have had or will have this issue and if i can document it maybe they can make sure they buy cards WITH a serial number.

I went ahead and remote desktop'ed in to uncheck monitoring on the newer cams, I'm pretty sure that's what you were saying to do. I'll let you know if that works, it usually taked about 6-10 hours to screw up again regardless of logging in to view remotely or not. Thanks a bunch for the suggestions. Anything's appreciated at this point, even long-shots. I'll keep updating when i have news, probably tomorrow.

Hi, New to the forum but i need some help from people who know what their talking about... I have a home surveillance system with a Geovision GV-1480. I bought the card (foolishly) on ebay and have realized it's not the bargain it appeared to be after updating the included software from v8.2 to v8.5. After getting random shutdowns of the GV Main System and errors about my card possibly being a counterfeit under v8.5 I was able to downgrade to v8.2 again ONLY IF I used the 8.5 driver with the 8.2 software. Everything went great for about 4 months now. Suddenly I'm getting a scrambled image after adding more cameras last week and I have no clue why. I am attaching an image of what this looks like. It appears to be an issue with the encoded (compressed) video under any compression technique available (Mpeg4 or h.264) and even with different screen resolutions. I'm out of ideas and would greatly appreciate any help anybody could give. Thanks in advance!