Lunchietey

I know a month old but I found no way to have both on my Hikvision EXCEPT when I used one camera specifically as the motion recording camera and left the rest continuously recording. I have 5 cameras near the front of the property but only the door camera records movement only. The reason I set it up this was is the sensor light at night activates the motion recording so anyone who comes near my home or even half way across the yard activates a recording 'incident'. I then use that time to watch the other cameras in playback to see what was happening on the lawn. It is not possible to enter my property without triggering the front door at night and even cars turning around trigger the light(I live at the end of a street). The 2 bullet cams can see the whole front yard anyway so no security is lost this way. I get only a few movements at night due to how quiet my street is so this works perfectly for me. I don't care about daytime triggering though.

Probably mentioning brand and specific models of the DVR and cameras and how you're connecting everything (be specific, is it premade cables, common or seperate power supplies etc) will be helpful in getting assistance. It's like asking a mechanic to diagnose a car issue by giving a small amount of info and not even telling them the make of car.

Try finding a plumbers pipe inspection camera. Some are REALLY pricey but some not so bad and will contain everything in one package. You didn't mention a budget or if you need to do this more than once or regularly so the above suggestion may not help. You can always hire a drain inspection camera which will give great image(they even have little white LEDs to light up what you're looking at AND you can submerge it and see whats happening all the way down. If you're having water quality issues maybe get your water tested and see if it's something you can actually resolve? Or do you mean water delivery issues(poor flow/suction)?

Send the letter to all of the neighbours anyway, and make sure you take heaps of pictures BEFORE you do it so the neighbour cannot deny it was there. Then stick the laser in it. If the cops did nothing when a paedo was filming your kids, then they won't care that the dirty pricks camera isn't working. If he comes to your door after the camera dies, then give him a serve or maybe even a 'physical warning'. If someone tried that with my daughter, I wouldn't be making a sign....

The term you are looking for is 'Intrinsically safe' meaning no vapour can enter the camera. Google 'Intrinsically safe cctv camera' and loads of manufacturers and models come up. The housings you refer to are essentially industry standard fitment and when they say explosion proof, also would mean they are suitable for use in environments where dangerous atmospheres may be present. There are heaps of these where I work. Check with the customer that they do or do not need explosion proof housings as companies may want their cameras to survive an 'incident' to show what happened for legal reasons etc. The housing may also need to be specially constructed depending on what these 'chemicals' actually are. I have one at work which is designed to be exposed to various acid vapours for example(and is also explosion proof and intrinsically safe). The housing is 10 times bigger than the camera!

The audio out is not designed to drive a speaker hence the low volume. It's probably barely a few mW of power so would give very low volume. You wouldn't connect speakers directly to a dvd player would you?(you'd use a home theatre amp!) I would look at some of the small test amplifiers you can buy, you would only need 1w of power to drive your average speaker much louder than you would be able to speak normally(not shouting). There are LOADS of tiny 12v amplifiers on ebay for very little money that would work. The 'Lepai' branded amps are actually pretty good for 12v and sound pretty good even for music. You could even get away with the tiny amplifier boards that work on 12v that are barely a few dollars if it's to drive a small 8 ohm speaker in say, a door intercom or perhaps a ceiling speaker above a door. A car amp is definitely overkill.

Well I have taken the plunge and have the NVR and 3 cams on their way(fingers crossed) I have seen the how to's on loading new versions onto the cams and also unbricking so hopefully one way or another I end up with a reasonable system. I'm not a 'fiddler' so once it's working I won't touch it unless I ABSOLUTELY have to. I don't care about fancy functions, just want reasonable image quality for general home surveillance. Thanks for the reply

So basically the system works fine(this is a CCTV forum, not family court) and the real problem is the 'boyfriend' of your Mother. You need to deal with THEM. If you read your original post, there's no real question that you're asking. Either that or fit hidden cameras and don't tell anyone(yes I'm joking) If you and the rest of the family can't come to an arrangement, you will probably need to remove the cameras or continue what you are doing.

My old system was entirely run on 12V with a power supply charger running it. The vast majority of cams use 12vdc happily and some DVR's have 12v inputs. Effectively the whole system except the monitor ran from the battery with the charger keeping it boosted(this was a special cctv charger/power supply) My new system(on it's way!) will just use a standard UPS(1500va) which should run the whole lot for quite a while if the monitor is off. I rarely get power interruptions anyway and most are of fairly short duration. I do get little ones periodically when storms hit or a car hits a power pole or even when the power company turns the power off for works and the 7ah 12v battery has been able to outlast all but one which was a 2 day outage due to severe storms wiping out the huge feeder lines to the area. There's not a lot you can do about those! My UPS has 24Ah on board so this should be even better Just get yourself a nice sized UPS and don't run anything else off it if possible to ensure max runtime.

Speak to you Mother maybe? And yes, why have full security for when they are ALREADY INSIDE YOUR HOME. Better to have visible security outside so they don't actually come in the house in the first place. Cameras aren't usually installed in 'private' areas either. Maybe just the lounge and front entry for example.

Hi, First off, I am an IP NOOOOB! I am just about to buy some Hikvision cams and NVR for the house and just have a basic question in regards to camera software updates being different between cameras. I am looking at buying a total of 4 X DS-2CD3332-I Domes for under-eaves locations (software version 5.2.0) and 3 bullets DS-2CD2232-I (software version 5.2.5) for the exposed locations at the front of the property and over the workshop entry. If all of these are to be connected to a Hikvision NVR DS-7604/08NI-E1/4P(-E2/8P)/A. Is there an issue using cams with different software versions or is this a non issue? All will just be running 1080p except the front door cam at max resolution and may reduce a few to 720P for bandwidth/storage space reduction if needed or maybe just restricted frame rate? Hopefully it will all be ok as I would like to get these on their way to meet certain construction schedules and arrival of items I'd like to protect. Thanks!

Get a good water dispersing contact cleaner spray. Pull the connections apart, spray, wipe clean and dry and try again. A good way to seal is to use self amalgamating tape that 'melts' together after you tape it to form essentially a waterproof wrap.

Thankyou very much for the reply! It's a fairly large investment to do it all at once and there will now likely be 7 cameras in total meaning a $1500Au+ system which is not a number to sneeze at for me! I have 5 cameras at the moment, 3 of which just watch boring stuff(side gate, rear of house/laundry door and the patio area) all of which are protected by two black and 4 legged animals with teeth so I'm not fussed so much about that area but I will need to buy at least 2 cams to cover the important stuff straight up(main driveway and front yard cam and door cam) If I don't buy at least 2 cams straight away, I will lose a significant portion of my coverage! I do agree however that for simplicity, I should just save my coins and buy identical cams all around(probably 4 domes, 3 bullets total) I've ordered several cat5e cables in various colours which I will run in the mean time so that once I get the gear, I can do a pretty quick changeover(assuming I can quickly learn how to set up an IP system as I am an absolute noob!) One of the cables is 50m(150ft) which will go to a camera over my new workshop doors which will be built in 3-4 weeks. Have never run a signal cable that far before! Have also already acquired a 1500VA APC UPS to protect it all and stop dropouts during power dips and I will re-use the 2TB drive from my old DVR for now. Hopefully might be able to sell the old system and cover one of the cams or something? Anyway thanks for the advice!

Unless your cam has a cat 5/6 cable socket on it and you're using basically blue computer networking cable then it is NOT 720p. It is like VHS quality from 10 years ago. A BC connector is just a more robust RCA at the end of the day (for simplicity) A 1080p cam will have more than 4 times the effective resolution than you have now as well as actually being a clear and non noisy image. It will be FAR better than what you have now(like VHS to BluRay image difference-literally) I have a feeling you will in actual fact be throwing a lot of money away on resolution you don't need. I would be surprised if you got a decent 8mp camera ALONE for less than $1000-$1500 EACH, Plus an NVR that can handle it $2000+ and then you'll need probably 10TB for a couple of years of storage per camera. At the end of the day it's up to you, install an appropriately lensed $150 camera and get everything you need or spend $5000 dollars for high end technology that will be 1/4 the price in a year. You might even find that just adding a cheap 700tvl 12mm lensed camera to the system you already have may get you the license plate reading you require. I will point out that you actually never divulged how far away these cars are and what the actual place look like(is it a public street, looking down a long property to a gate, passing cars at high speed, car parking suspiciously in the dark etc etc) Depending on the situation(poor light etc) a mega $$$ camera may not be adequate anyway. Good luck

What RCA cable? You said you had a 720p system. You can't have an rca cable and 720p... Maybe 700TVL and a DVR? Short answer is there is no 'P' on any TVL type RCA camera. They are MUCH blurrier than an actual 720P camera on an NVR. When you say you can't notice a better quality camera, that is because your DVR is using standard video and you can only get so much as well as using compression on top of this. A 1000TVL camera with an rca plug is NOT 1080p either... You will probably find all the detail you will need on a 3MP camera or even just 1080p. Also data storage has reached a point where it can't get all that much 'denser' unless new technologies are discovered. Noticed how single hard drives haven't gotten dramatically bigger lately? They can only make transitors/circuits etc on chips so small before they simply can't go smaller(they are basically at that limit now)