Stereodude

I was referring specifically to the video portion. The max bitrate for the disc is 48Mbps. Still you can't really use good looking low bitrate blu-rays as proof that low bitrate H.264 from a security camera is going to look good or be visually transparent. Blu-Rays can be heavily processed before they're encoded to aid compression. They don't have to be compressed real time and aren't using an encoder that has to run on a low power System on Chip. Feeding the signal directly from a camera's sensor to the compression engine is not the same. I suppose a more apt comparison would be 1920x1080 HD footage from a DSLR like the Canon 5D MkII. It shoots ~38Mbps. I'm not sure I'd use ATSC HD as a measuring stick. Much of it looks pretty poor once the scene starts changing rapidly with artifacts galore. This is true if you have a good quality encoder. The quality of the encoder in the Dahua cameras is unknown. I wouldn't expect it to be anywhere near as good as an encoder like x264. I don't have any "firsthand" viewing experience of either of these, so I can't comment here, but I hope they're better than YouTube's 1080p... Ultimately, I understand that with careful tweaking of compression parameters and pre-processing the video you can visually pleasing results at the sort of bitrates that are used by the Dahua cameras. I've done it myself encoding H.264 video. Being possible doesn't mean it's happening in the Dahua cameras.

I said it really shouldn't make any difference. If the switch is any good, moving 60-80Mbps of data from port A to port B won't reduce the performance of other data through the switch noticeably. I said if he had a gigabit switch in his router (unknown) and had a PoE switch with a gigabit uplink (he doesn't) it would actually be advantageous to connect the PoE switch to the gigabit switch in his router using the gigabit uplink and then connect the NVR to the gigabit switch in the router instead of plugging the NVR directly into a 10/100 port on the PoE switch.

What is the reasoning behind this? Security? You could also use a single managed switch with VLANs and tagged ports. There are lots of ways to accomplish network separation.

Well, I guess this is your opportunity to show off just how much you know and explain how a switch slows down because you're sending a lot of data between two ports. What's your describing is precisely what a switch intends to avoid when compared to a hub. Edit: Further, in some cases it can be very beneficial rather than detrimental when the PoE switch has a gigabit uplink and the second switch is a gigabit switch. The PoE switch aggregates the 10/100 bandwidth of all the PoE ports it has to a gigabit link and that lets you get more bandwidth to your NVR/DVR/PC than if you just plugged it into a 10/100 port on the PoE switch.

That's a bit of an oversimplification don't you think? Don't the cameras use DHCP to get an IP address (meaning they need to see the router) and use NTP to get the time (meaning they need internet access through the router)? Further, if he wants to control or access the cameras or NVR from any computer on his "network" the PoE switch and the router need to be connected. It seems like connecting the PoE switch to the router isn't really optional.

That's one way to do it. You can also do it how Blake suggests.

Neither. You need to plug all the cameras into the PoE switch using the PoE ports. You also need to connect both the PoE switch and the NVR and to your "router" (assuming by router you mean a consumer grade router / wireless access point / switch). You can do this by connecting both the NVR and "router" into the PoE switch using the remaining 8 ports, or you can connect both the NVR and the PoE switch to the switch in the "router". If by "through" you mean going WAN to LAN side I'd agree. If you're simply referring to using the LAN side switch in the router/AP unit it doesn't really matter if the NVR is plugged into the switch in the router or the PoE switch that the cameras are directly plugged into (assuming the PoE switch and router's switch are connected).

Why does your router need a PoE port instead of one of the other 8 non PoE ports?

Well, I guess I'll find out when the cameras I bought arrive.

My point was more that 8192Kbps is on the low side for visually "transparent" 1920x1080p30 or higher. For example, Blu-Ray discs that are 1920x1080p24 using H.264 can use bitrates up to 40Mbps/sec and I'm certain they're made using a much higher quality H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression engine than the SoC in the Dahua cameras. Blu-Ray compression also doesn't have to run real time and is almost certainly done as a 2-pass VBR encode. It would seem minimal compression artifacts / "transparent" video would be the target for a security camera lest they interfere with the ability to get a clean high quality image. The biggest thing the security cameras I'm looking at have going for them is the scene is primarily static (no panning, tilting, or zooming) which aids compression quite a bit. I'm just concerned that the recorded video will have compression artifacts that obscure potentially important details. Is that not a problem with the 2MP and 3MP Dahua cameras?