Q2U

What probably happened is ignorant members, members much like myself who need to operate on a shoestring budget and who know just enough technology to be dangerous. I work for a small business which is committed to technology but whose budget forces us to operate on a dime. We've got a reasonably sophisticated setup; we run our own mail, web and RDP servers, and we host our own IP phone system. But most of our equipment is a generation or two old (except the phones). When we need a new PC, we pull it out of a dumpster somewhere, or we buy from from Dell DFS direct, not Dell retail. And when we buy an extra Avaya IP phone we purchase it on eBay for $75.00, not from a retailer for $275.00. When something breaks, I fix it. But I also do sales calls, deal with problem customers, handle national accounts and shovel snow. When I decided to try an IP camera it was out of curiosity and it proved intriguing. So I pulled an old Dell Precision 670 dual 3.19 Xeon processor work station out of a closet and hung two Vivotek FD8136's and two Dahua IPC-HDB3200C's off it. I bought a 4TB 7200 rpm USB3 external drive from Costco and a USB3 card with a small 1GB POE switch from Newegg. And I then purchased Blue Iris and half a dozen droid and IOS apps. If I total all this up (and value the Dell 670 @ $200.00) I spent approximately $1,500.00 for this set up. This is a lot of friggin' money for us to spend on something, and while I would like to have purchased a quad core i7 server with 32GB of ram, mirrored raid 15,000 RPM drives and 6 Axis 5MP cameras that just ain't realistic... So I had to settle for mostly Chinese Qrap which seems to be functioning reasonably well so far.

Can anyone tell me what "Intra Frame Period" is used for in my Vivotek for in my FD8136 configuration (Media > Video > Video settings for stream 1)? I running H.264. Thank you.

Here an interesting tidbit: on my Dahua IPC-HDB3200C the "I Frame Interval" is always automatically set to twice the "Frame rate (FPS)" Examples: Frame rate (FPS) = 5 > I Frame Interval = 10 Frame rate (FPS) = 30 > I Frame Interval = 60

Yes. This stuff is bullet proof. But humidity (alone) in an otherwise dry location will rust it terribly and it will look like Qrap, so you're going to have to do a very good job painting it. In addition, don't assume that all threaded joints are waterproof; I would suggest that you use a good joint compound to assure there is no water intrusion.

Nope. I think you may be the first person to sell one.

Teriffic post! Thank you.

You can mount a rope swing on these muthas and they may work for your application...

Thank you; I really appreciate this information.

Thank you! Is there a general rule of thumb, or best practices, for setting the Intra Frame rate? My choices are 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 3 or 4. The default setting is 1. I apologize for being so ignorant. I'm struggling to understand all of this stuff. I'm sure I'll get it but I hope I don't piss a lot of folks off in the process.

I’m having a heckuva hard time a new getting my Vivotek ST7501 server software installation to recognize and insert a new Dahua IPC-HDB3200C 2MP camera. I can log into the camera by way of the camera's web interface and I can edit and/or update and save all of the IPC-HDB3200C's settings. But for the life of me I cannot get the ST7501 server software to see the camera and insert it. Urgh; I spent 4-hours trying and I don't know what else to try. I believe I'm running the latest version of the ST7501 server and LiveClient software (v1.6.4.5) and the Dahua IPC-HDB3200C camera seems to work fine as a stand-alone unit. I know that the ST7501 server software is functioning OK as I have two (2) Vivotek FD8136-F2 IP cameras connected to it and they are running great and our network is configured correctly. The IPC-HDB3200C's BIOS software is 2.103 Build 2012-7-24. Has anyone had any luck or suggestions for getting the HDB3200C to work with Vivotek’s ST7501 software? Can anyone help me. I'm really stuck here. Thank you.

Thanks partner. I figured that too, but I believe I've read that it has been done so I's like to give it another two hours...if I had some ideas about something else to try...but the idea well is dry. Thank you though. I appreciate your time and effort.