latropa

Does anyone know what exactly the "VCA Rule" does? The hikvision manual is mostly worthless for this (and almost everything else) with just a generic description of "Click to enable/disable VCA rule". Thanks Hikvision documentation! I hate seeing the blue lines while viewing cameras in iVMS-4200 but I'm hesitant to disable VCA in case it is actually useful and unchecking it might break some other feature on my cameras.

I've decided the built in recording options on the hikvision cameras I've bought just isn't going to cut it for me. My first search took me to Blue Iris but I've since discovered that is a major resource hog and I don't want that. The next thing I found was Xprotect Go (free but only 5 days of recordings) or Xprotect Essential ($50/camera, reasonable for me since I have only 2 cams)... I want to try it but I've discovered you have to be running 64-bit windows to use it and my server/htpc/media center is only on 32-bit. Is it worth it? It will be a huge time consumer if I take on the task of updating my system to 64-bit with a fresh Win 7 and re-installing all the software I use on it, setting it all up again, recreating the macros for my remote control, re-doing all my SMB shares, forwarding porsts for VNC and RDP and applying old hacks that let me RDP into the machine while someone else is using, etc. So, Xprotect... is it worth the hassle?

Event recording is working great but I can't seem to get Event Snapshots to work. If I check the "Enable Event-Triggered Snapshot" and set an interval of 1 second (which I assume means it will take a snapshot every second) and leave capture number to the default 4 (no idea what that means), absolutely nothing ever gets saved... I've even went and walked in front of the camera moving my hand furiously and no pictures are ever saved. On the other hand, if I check the "Enable Timing Snapshot" and set an interval it seems like it continuously saves a picture every second (or whatever I set it to) regardless of motion. That works but is obviously not what I want to happen. I only want picture snapshots when motion is detected. Anybody know what I'm doing wrong? The documentation for Hikvision cameras is horrible. It basically just tells you what you already know by looking at the web interface without actually going into any details about what is what and how it actually works.

Specifically hikvision cameras. I have the software I need for recording motion and saving all that. No big problems with that. My hangup is getting software to show 4 or more cameras all at once as quickly as possible when the doorbell rings and I'm watching TV on my HTPC. I want to be able to hit a single button and see all my cameras on the TV within less than a few seconds. That's not how it works now though. I have to rely on a macro that takes 75 seconds or more to load. It's almost useless. I could get off the couch or out of bed and get dressed in that time to meat the solicitor in person in that amount time. Help me.

I could get RTSP to work in VLC but it always required me to manually type in my username/password. I had tried a bunch of combinations of adding my user and pass to the URL but could never find the right way to do it, but I finally found one that works tonight. rtsp://username:password@cam.ip.address:554//Streaming/Channels/1 I only have a couple cameras right now so I'll just set two different macros to quickly pull up whichever one I need in VLC.

That might be what I need, whatever it is that has no name, but that post feels like spam so I won't be going through all your links to maybe find a download. Thanks anyway.

That's what I'm using now. It takes forever to load up and start the stream on my HTPC (Q6600). I was hoping there was something out there like the IP Cam Viewer app on android just for Windows. It loads up with all my cameras showing in no more than 2 seconds.

I posted this on another forum and tried to post on the offical IP Cam Viewer forum but was denied registration. Here it is again, any help would be grealty appreciated: [deleted] link to original post is here Oops... I just realized the other forum I posted this to was this one. My bad. Ignore this post. I tried to delete it but couldn't figure out how.

My model number doesn't show in the IP Cam Viewer Android app but I've always (well, mostly) been able to get it to work by using the listed DS-2CD8153F-E for the main stream and DS-2CD2432-I would work for the low-resolution sub stream. All that stopped working after I upgraded my 2032 cameras to the 5.2.0 firmware. It now takes about 40 seconds of sitting on the "loading..." windows before the pictures will pop up. The cameras would load almost instantly before. This happened for both the main stream and the sub stream but I was able to get the sub stream to load quickly again by changing the setting in IP Came Viewer from DS-2CD2432-I to "Hikvision IP Camera (active-x)". Still no luck with the high-res main stream though and I've tried all the different hikvision model numbers in the app. Any idea how to fix this and what the hikvision firmware update might have done to cause it? Thanks.

The official Hikvision Android App still works just fine. I guess I need to wait to see if the author of IP Cam Viewer updates it to support the new firmware for these cameras. I do have USA region Hikvision cameras though.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, that download button on the playback tab is where the timing snapshots end up too. I had looked in there with timing selected in the drop down box and no luck. I just tried it again though with the same details you had set (1000 millisecond interval and 5 as the capture number) and still no luck. The documentation for these cameras really is horrid.

The way that they do it is a dumb way to keep you always being able to see it. First of all, it's kind of a stupid algorithm that changes it from black to white (or vice versa) when the background doesn't warrant it. It's also distracting when you are watching a live feed or a video and looking for the motion and keep noticing the changing colors of the time stamp. And it's just ugly when it isn't uniform. Why don't they just outline it with a 1 or 2 pixel border of a different color? That way it could be seen on any color background and there would be no need for these weird hybrid, some numbers are all black and some numbers are all white thing. Even better would be if they outlined it and made it semi-transparent.

every 1 or 2 minutes because of thinks like this: They seem to be attracted to the little red lights. (Hikvision cameras, with the sensitivity as low as it will go which is 20%). Is the only solution to turn of the IR lights and keep something like a porch light on that's a ways away all night instead?

I'll probably just end up living with it because I've already went to all the work I want to running wires through the walls and getting in the attic and I doubt my cameras support PIR (Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I).

I guess another thing that can't be easily fixed is picking up trees (or shadows of trees) that are moving on a slightly windy day? It makes finding relevant motion events fairly worthless when your playback timeline looks like this: And it's all just shadows of leaves blowing in the window.

I've noticed that when I start the iHIK app on my phone and look at the feed on my cams they seem to be choppy and only show like one from every 2 or 3 seconds (despite being on the same network with a 172mbps wireless connection). When I was first testing this indoors, it seemed like they were almost real time with almost no delay. The other problem is now after I've started the iHIK app, it disables my screen lock even after I click the power button to shut the screen off or it times out after a minute.... unless I close all the cameras by clicking the x button on the windows icon (http://i.imgur.com/B7QSr1S.png) in iHIK and then swipe away iHIK from the recently used programs in Android. If I don't remember to do all that, then I'm not required to enter my lock pattern to get back into my phone... not good. I've been playing with my cameras for about a week now and I could have sworn this never happened before I finally mounted them outside (which coincidentally happens to coincide with when VZW updated my phone to Android 4.4.2). Galaxy S4, if that matters.

Your s4 phone can connect at a max rate of 72.2 Mbps, which can give a real life data speed of about half that. How many cameras are you viewing at the same time, and what are their data rate set to? Which stream were you viewing, clear/balanced/fluent? And what are those data rate? My phone can connect much faster than that on my 5ghz wifi. The closer I am to the router the faster it is... but generally it's at around 170 when I'm upstairs where I mostly use my phone. I have two cameras running. They are both set at 1920x1080 with 30FPS and 4096 Max Bitrate. The substream is only 352x240 at 30fps with bitrate at 512. The app defaults to fluent (which I think uses the substream settings because it looks very low resolution) but it even skips every 2 or 3 seconds on the substream, just like when I select clear. That reminds me of another fluke of the app, when you first open it, it has the cameras set to fluent but as soon as you've switched it to clear you cannot switch back to fluent or any other of those options. I just get a message about device not supported. The only way to get back to fluent is to close the app and open it again.

Well, I just hope they fix it in the next firmware because it's really ugly when it looks like this:

I doubt it's the best and it's definitely not the most current software, but I use Avidemux when I want to capture a single frame or even edit a short clip of almost any video format. Don't know if it would help in your case. Avidemux can read most formats but not all.

I have trigger channel selected, which works for saving video recordings and timing snapshots to my NAS, but the even-triggered snapshots still don't work. I haven't set up e-mail or FTP yet so I don't know if those work. My firmware is 5.1.0

It's alright but it just seems subpar. One example that really stands out is when i hit the FFWD button it doesn't actually seem to fast fowrad, it just a constant real time stream despite that option. It also sometimes seems to start recording of motion about 30 seconds before it happens instead of the 5 seconds it is set at.... or, even worse, it doesn't capture the motion until 5 or 10 seconds after it had already started to happen. And, no, I haven't tried the hikvision NVR software... with how crappy the documentation is for their web interface, I don't think I'll ever try it.

I contacted Milestone and apparently I could use the 2.1 version of Essentials as it still supports 32-bit. The problem with that is, according to this chart, it's no longer receiving service updates and it looks like it expires/terminates in 2016. Do they really have such a short life cycle on their software and does it really expire, requiring you to upgrade to a newer version and buy all new licenses for your cameras every few years? If that's the case, I'm not sure I want to use it even if it's the greatest program ever.

I thought I had everything set up on mine as far as storage and events go, but it turns out you have to check the "Trigger Channel" box on the Events tab. It took me awhile to figure that out. There's no documentation about that in Hikvision user manual I found online for my cameras.

I have another machine that is my main desktop but only has bout 320 gb of storage that runs a 64-bit Windows. I'm sure I could get a hang of how it worked if I installed it on that machine, but I wan't to know how well it would work if I installed it on my server as a service (so it loaded up whenever the machine started) and then just logged into from my various windows accounts that have different access restrictions. I want to know how versatile it is in the real world before I commit to doing a fresh install of windows 64-bit on the machine.

It looks like I'm having a similar problem with the files I can download once I've setup my SMB/NAS storage. They all say ch01_ even though I numbered one of the cameras 1 and the other 2. These lists are from two different cameras: Is there not a way to change the numbers on the file names hikvision creates?