kiwicam

I have just recently bought a Dahua hfw2100 ip camera, not installed yet but still in testing phase. Like my foscam I have found the inbuilt motion detection unusable thanks to heaps of false alarms so I want to try it out with vitamin D software which I found to work really well with the foscam. Problem is I can't connect to it via Vitamin D, it is fine through internet browser but Vitamin D seems to need something other than just the ip address for this camera, perhaps all I need is the port address but don't know how to find out what that is. I know there is free software that comes with this camera but I want to try it out on Vitamin D since I am already familiar with that and already know what should work from my experience with the foscam, also my old laptop is not powerful enough for the free Dahua software.

Your suggestion of using vlc player put me on the right track to figuring out the extra low resolution(below 320x240) problem, I changed Vitamin D to the substream(set to around 320x240) which solved the problem, thanks.

Yes I am using the free version and did forget about the resolution limitations although that does not explain why I get a resolution well below 320x240. Thanks for the vlc player tip, using that I do get the full resolution but there are quality problems with the picture, looks like compression problems, this quality issue is not there when viewing through the camera's own software on a web browser. I hope this quality issue is not present in Vitamin D if I could get the full resolution or the 320 x 240 at least. If I can test that this camera works as well with vitamin D as my foscam I will buy the full version.

I have just recently bought a Dahua hfw2100 ip camera, not installed yet but still in testing phase. I had hoped the motion detection software onboard the camera was good but unfortunately it produces a ton of false alarms so is of no use. My next port of call was to use vitamin D pc based software as it works very well with my foscam camera and was easy to figure out how to use without even referring to a manual. Unfortunately I am not having much luck getting it to accept the Dahua so I need to turn to the included free software that came with the camera, called Pro Surveillance System(PSS) but this software is anything but easy to work out how to use. I have the camera video stream been displayed in PSS but that is as far as I can get, I can get any further with it. The first thing I want to test with PSS is the motion detection, at this stage I can't even find out if PSS does it's own motion detection or just takes the results from the camera's motion detection, if the later then I need to move onto some other software. Now the bit that really has me bashing my head against the wall is that I cannot find any manual for this software, either on the cd or online, I find this very difficult to believe that there is no operating instructions anywhere for this software, but try as I might I cannot find them, I must be missing something here, surely, please help?

Thanks for the alternative software solution suggestions, have had a little look at them, will look into them more if need be. It is a real shame that Vitamin D does not work easily with Dahua like it does with foscam because the software is very easy to use and does everything I want and does it really well, false alerts almost never happen during day using the camera to monitor outside, can't say what the results will be at nighttime yet given a proper camera installation, I would guess some false alerts due to nightlife been attracted to the ir led's.

Yeah it looks like that is so.

Thanks, evnldr, that's good to have the manual even if it has turned out to do not much more than just show you what you will see when you use the program rather than actually anything on how to use the program. The video was good but was from the standpoint of using a nvr which is not what I am doing, I'm just using a pc with the camera.

Woops, sorry, subtype=1 was a mistype, I was meant to type subtype=0 The video stream I get is very low resolution, well below 320x240 even. And in Dahua's own configuration the main and sub streams are much higher resolution.

And of course the obvious question is does the cd normally contain the manual?

rtsp, a port of 554, and a stream path of cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1 this works in connecting the camera but the resolution is very, very low.

I should say I have already searched high and low on the internet for the information I need but can find very little and what there is does not work although apparently it is possible.