jharrell

You obviously didn't even bother to read the paper, the formula comes from real world experimentation: "I came up with a simple framework based on some experimentation and comparing notes with some others who have been tackling the same issue." I will believe the project lead of Adobe TV Productions first hand experience over yours any day of the week. I asked you what you thought of the quality, so are you saying it's unacceptable or not, how about a straight answer? Why did you encode it with such as low CRF to get 6Mbps? You do realize CRF will smooth out bitrate right? The proper way to have tested would have been to use the Kush formula with ABR and see if you can perceive any difference.

So your saying Kush is wrong? Why do you have more credibility than him, he also claims to have done many real world tests to come up with this formula? So is 6Mbps ok or not considering 8Mbps is on the low side? I am confused now too.

His example from from x264 encoded the DSLR video at 6Mbps.

You've made it clear you don't care what anyone else says even IP camera manufacturers themselves. I don't know why I should try and continue to explain further because you probably continue to not care what anyone says. However the generally accepted method for determining a average bitrate is the Kush gage developed by Adobe engineer Kush Amerasinghe and explained here:http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/video/articles/h264_primer/h264_primer.pdf The basic formula is [image width] x [image height] x [framerate] x [motion rank] x 0.07 = [desired bitrate] where motion rank is 1,2 or 4 for low medium and high motion content. Here is the example given: 1280 × 720 @24fps, medium motion (rank 2): 1280 × 720 × 24 × 2 × 0.07 = 3,096,576 bps = ~ 3000 kbps If the motion is high (rank 4), it’s about 6000 kbps. On the other hand, if the same clip is still usable at 5fps, and the motion is low: 1280 × 720 × 5 × 1 × 0.07 = 32,256 bps = ~ 320 kbps So I guess you know more than Adobe video engineers. Constant rate factor is going to adjust the quantization parameter based on the motion or change detected, basically compressing more the more motion is detected because it is harder to perceive compression artifacts within the motion, in effect creating a more constant bit rate. Its no surprise the bit rates are close. BTW hows that 1080p 30fps at 6Mbps, I thought it needed 40Mbps?

That is the nature of VBR and there are many scenes where the entire frame is changing such as panning shots (which fixed security cameras don't do). Dahua cameras support single pass VBR and as far as I can tell from the Ti docs the video processor can spike much higher than 8Mbps when needed in VBR. "reasonably transparent" or "a mess of compression artifacts" is binary and completely subjective I have no idea what your threshold is for something to be one or the other. The only objective comparison you made was against Bluray, that's what I went with. Now go to any H.264 bandwidth calculator and compare 30fps to 15fps see what you get, here's one from Stardot security cameras:http://www.stardot.com/bandwidth-and-storage-calculator. What you said might be true in theory on scenes with a high amount of change such as panning and very low frame rate, but it's simply not true in practice or at frame rates in the double digits. No I am telling you a few hundred dollar security camera will not have the same image quality as equipment costing orders of magnitude more. I would not consider the video quality of broadcast 1080i or my 720p Dahua bullets at 2-4Mbps "a mess of compression", perhaps you do, and based on your comparison methods I would wager on it.

Again all that headroom is for MPEG-2, H.264 Blurays are typically in the low 20's with audio, many in the teens, a few in the 30's. You can't expect low cost security cameras to compete with studio mastered Bluray either, its completely unrealistic. No not really a good comparision, the Canon 5D MkII uses Base profile, which is much worse compression then Main profile which the Dahua cameras use, they make up for this with high bit rate. It's also very unrealistic to compare a few hundred security camera to a few thousand dollar DSLR and expect comparable image quality. Here is the information on the encoder used for Dahua cameras:http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/DM365_Codecs_FAQ Again you are being very unrealistic if you expect a cheap security camera to outperform broadcast television. Honestly I think this is a very good measuring stick, compared to a say a studio mastered Bluray or very expensive DSLR. I think you are going to be disappointed because your expectations are way too high considering the cost of this equipment. 1080p 30fps video in Bluray quality is not going happen from a sub 1k security camera. 30fps is also not necessary, 15 fps easily halves the required bitrate and is completely adequate for the security use.

Blurays were made to support mpeg-2, which many movies are, plus there is the multi-channel surround sound as part of that bit rate. There are many Blurays encoded at under 20Mbps. Look at ATSC 1080i broadcast at 19Mbps MPEG-2 with DD5.1. H.264 is much more advanced then MPEG-2 by most accounts you can achieve similar quality at half of MPEG-2's bitrate. Netflix and iTunes both stream from 4-8Mbps for HD using H.264. I current have my 1.3MP Dahua bullets at 4Mbps at 15 fps but honestly I cannot tell a difference at 2Mbps.

That can be done with under 5 Mbits/s using H.264. Using MJPEG is way over 10Mbits/s for the same.

I have been setting up my Dahua bullets from my Costco NVR kit and on the cam on my driveway was getting really bad ir reflection halo's for some reason, while the others seem to look great. I think a read a post on here where someone said Q-See sharpied out the underside of the sunshade on their version (it's actually black paint). This did prompt me to try a real sharpie on the rest of the white painted face of the camera still exposed to the LED's and the results speak for themselves. Before: After: Perhaps Dahua should invest in some sharpies...

My guess is it downloads in realtime using the same streaming as though you where viewing. Your video is probably encoded at a 2Mbit/sec bitrate which would be exactly 2% of a 100Mbit network link. Most DVR's can download recording faster than realtime to get the file as fast as possible.

What's the bitrate of the video you are downloading?

I'll do a cleaner job on the others, I sharpied this one last night in the dark. Before: After:

The underside of mine are painted black as well, however the black does not cover all surfaces, the half circle on the top half comes from the tip of the sunshade where the black painted ended a mm or two before the edge. The left shine come from the area where the sunshade meets the body that has no black paint. I sharpied everything left white on the front face of the camera not covered by the factory black paint.

The extra stream is really quite good quality and much better on bandwidth if using cellular to view, but not having a pre-record buffer for playback is just silly. However if they allowed us to connect to the main stream as an option when the bandwidth is available would give us the pre-record buffer, and be able to use the retina display to it's fullest. Giving iOS access to the main stream is a software change, so it could be done. Any recent iOS device can easily decode multiple HD H.264 streams so it's not a issue. Still skeptical the pre-record buffer on the extra stream is a hardware limitation since the DVR can record both streams at the same time, so why can't it be recording the pre-buffer at the same time, there is no difference between a pre-record buffer and a normal one other than managing the cleanup of the unused pre-record data in a ring buffer.

The Q-See QC HD app is a rebranded iDMSS HD and is free. I know because I bought iDMSS HD in my desperation to get playback working, it has the same limitations as the Q-See versions. The only nice thing about iDMSS HD is that it is a slightly newer build than QC HD, so they polished up some of the icons and layout and it supports the E-Map feature. I am sure the Q-See version will get these features too in a future update.

I had the same problem with the Q-See branded Dahua. Your DVR may be different, but for mine this was the issue: The iOS client is hard-coded to connect to the "extra" stream not the main one. This applies to playback as well. However the DVR is not setup from the factory to record the extra stream, so when you go to playback in iOS it can't find any recordings it's compatible with. You should be able to enable recording the extra stream under the "Record" menu and set it from Stop to schedule just like the main stream, if your DVR supports this. If not the iOS playback may not work. There is still problem with this though, the pre-record buffer doesn't exist on the extra stream, so if your recording motion you will end up only getting video after the motion trigger on iOS which will be missing much of what occurred if it was fast like someone walking by the camera. The main recording will have it and can be seen using the PC software. Q-See tech support said this is a hardware limitation and there is no fix. It would be really nice if they let you connect to the main stream through iOS to get full res video and avoid all this playback non-sense.

I just heard back from Q-See tech support on the extra/mobile stream pre-record buffer issue. They are saying it's a hardware issue and there will be no fix. So be warned playback through a mobile device will have no pre-record buffer making review of motion footage much less useful. Not sure why they don't support connecting to the main stream on iOS anyway, my iPad 4 can easily handle 4Mbit/sec H.264 decode, this would solve the playback issue as well on top of actually displaying the full 1.3MP video on my retina display.

I bought two of QC-804 with 4 camera Costco systems, they came in as QC-808 8 channel systems. For the money they are hard to beat, the whole system being about as much as a single decent IP cam yet have very decent day/night quality, but there are some issues. First out the 8 total cameras from the two packages, one of the cameras has a video issue, it seems to cycle color or gain constantly causing continuous motion record and compression artifacts, so it's going back, but the other 7 cameras are fine. The docs and setting are pretty cryptic so I missed that you need to enable recording of the "extra" stream if you want to do playback from a mobile device, it came defaulted to off, and my iPhone and iPad could view live video, but when trying to review records would simply say "no record" even though the PSS software would view recordings fine. Q-See tech support had no clue, which is no surprise, I simply stumbled on this buried setting. Lastly the pre-record buffer seems to not be functional on the extra stream, so while you can view recorded video based on motion detection and get a few seconds a prior video on the main stream in PSS, the same video's viewed in iOS only show after the motion is triggered which many times seems to completely miss the item that triggered the event such as a person walking quickly by, this makes playback nearly useless on a mobile device and why DVR's have pre-record buffers to begin with. Overall I am happy simply because of the cost, I am hopeful some firmware upgrades will resolve the issue described above, but it's never going to be polished like a more expensive system.

Has anyone been able to get recorded video to playback through the iOS app? I have been able to review recorded video through the Windows app but when using the iOS app it always says "no recordings". Live video works great however through iOS. For those asking about outdoor motion detectors I use DSC LC-151's: http://www.dsc.com/index.php?n=products&o=view&id=1346 I have the motions hooked up to my HAI Omni security/automation system which in turn control's outdoor lights through UPB relay switches. The HAI Omni can be programmed to do anything I want(Alarms,beeps, logs, output triggers) and the QC NVR has alarm inputs and outputs, so I will probably end up hooking those up to input and outputs on my Omni to the cameras can act like motions or my Omni can trigger recording from the standard motions or other events like garage door openings, or schedule recording based on Omni arm status.

My other system at home is also an 8 Channel. I know when I ordered it showed in stock and the expected delivery was the end of last week. Took a few days to actually ship and the expected delivery changed to today. Wonder if they ran out of 4 channels and had to fulfill the orders with 8 instead? I am very pleased, was planning on upgrading to an 8 channel at some point to put a few more cameras around, now no need. The whole package was extremely easy to setup with the camera auto detection on the NVR's poe ports. The iOS apps seem to work well too. Fan is a little loud if you plan to put it say in your living room, which I am not.

Yes the PO shows 689086, I ordered online on 10/28 and it arrived today. I have a second one waiting at home ordered the same day but separately, will be interesting to see if it's 8 channel as well.

No extra cameras here at the office, I am getting a second kit for home and have some Y-cams there there but I doubt it will connect to them. Pretty sure it's 8-channel though, the front has QC808 stamped on it and the device config software shows 8 channels throughout the setup.

Wow. How did you manage that? Did you have to ask for it? Nope complete surprise when I opened the box, ordered the kit last week assuming 4 channel.

I just got one of these kits in from Costco and it looks like it's 8 channel now:

Y-cams all have mics and WiFi. I have two Y-cam knights in my kids room watching each crib and my wife has her iPhone on all night in the dock watching them using a baby monitor app that plots audio over time on graph below the video stream besides hearing it. The Y-cam knight are relatively cheap at $250 but only VGA rez and no IR cut filter so reddish picture during the day. They have a outdoor megapixel bullet with IR cut in the $500 range with a mic too. Pretty sure there are Android apps that support the audio on y-cams as well. http://www.y-cam.com