Someone at our company recently hired some folks to change out our old PC based DVR with a dedicated one. They brought in a Hikvision, which I have a problem with , it won't work unless you install a plugin straight from China - which is a security concern, not to mention the other security concerns with the system and it's known vulnerabilities. I tried installing the software on my Windows 8 laptop anyways and to say the least it was a crash fest. Our company is full of Mac users, especially the executive people who are going to want access to view the DVR over the LAN.
The people who brought in the security folks put me in touch with someone at the security company who did some shopping, found a Honeywell DVR that advertised no software required - Honeywell lied, when they brought it in it was the same Hikvision they had already brought us rebranded.
Does anyone make a dedicated DVR that will work with a web-browser using nothing but web standards? HTML-5, h.264, Flash, JAVA, and even weird codecs that are semi-commonly used but less than h.264 are acceptable, but weird plugins that have no excuse to exist are a network security concern and are also a concern for long-term support, and are a real problem in a mixed Windows XP-8, Linux and OS X environment.
Also, does anyone know if i can just replace the crappy Hikvision distro with Zone Minder? I don't actually want to try it with the company equipment, but it would be something I would like to do on my own with a cheap Hikvision off of Amazon or eBay or something.