Recording 8 Camera's without an NVR

[Ozone 0]

How do I do this? There are going to be 8 IPC-HFW3200S‏'s. I have no idea how to connect this to my comuter.

 

Since they are POE I will need this, ZyXEL ES1100-16P Unmanaged 10/100Mbps 16-port PoE Switch

 

What else? Another NIC card? What frame rate/resolution will I get by running it off of my computer?

 

The computer has an i7 processor with 12GB ram.

[Kawboy12R 0]

Another nic wouldn't hurt if that computer runs a lot of other network traffic but you'd be better off running a dedicated computer for your surveillance system. Basically you'd just need the PoE switch, software, and lots of HD space.

[Ozone 0]

I use it as my main computer but its on almost 24/7 anyways. I use it for internet use anyways. So I would install another NIC in my computer. How do I go about hooking the 8 camera's up to a the single NIC card? Or should I consider buying 2NIC's?

 

Here's how I picture it.

[Kawboy12R 0]

If the computer isn't just a dedicated NVR with no net access, the pic should probably be cams to switch, switch to router, then computer to router and cablemodem to WAN port on router. I wouldn't bother with another NIC at first. If it ain't broke don't fix it. If you have troubles under heavy use then consider it. Stress the network by recording all cams continuous with lots of motion (bandwidth varies with motion), surf the net, do some large file copies over your network, stream some hidef to a smart tv, or whatever. If everything's stable then don't worry about it but keep it in mind if you run into problems or slowdowns.

[Ozone 0]

Thanks so much for the help. This is really helping me and making a ton more sense. Since the camera's get hooked up to my router, they can be viewed locally off of almost any device ie an ipad.

 

I couldn't find where the output off of the switch goes. I see all the inputs on the switch but don't see an output that would send all the combined data to my router.

 

Also what do you think the quality of the video's will be? 30FPS 720p? 30fps 1080p? What advantage does an NVR have over directly connecting it to my home network?

 

Sorry for all the questions you're really helping me

[Kawboy12R 0]

The switch ports are IN and OUT, if you know what I mean, so if you want 8 cameras running over PoE you'll need a switch with 9 or more ports, but only the 8 camera ports need to be PoE. You're covered with that ZyXel. Just plug the 8 cameras into the 8 PoE ports and the router into one of the others and you're good to go.

 

The video quality of the cams will be whatever you set them to be (probably the max they're capable of). Personally I wouldn't run them at 30fps just for storage reasons. 15fps cctv video looks smooth to me, and even 7fps isn't toooo bad. You'll get 4 times the storage time at 7fps from your hard drives than you would at 30fps, or looking at it another way you'll need to buy 4 times the storage space for very little practical benefit. The cops won't care what your framerate is as long as you get one clear face shot of the jerk that keyed your car (or did whatever). Hard to calculate how much you'll need exactly for, say, a month of backups because of motion detection, video compression, etc. It'll vary, possibly by a LOT if your cameras are outdoors. Completely cloudy or sunny days with no wind and little motion won't take up much storage. Windy or foggy nights with lots of bugs will eat up a lot of storage. Continuous recording will make the calculations easier, but to give you an idea of the variability even on continuous recording, when I run Axis' storage calculation tool for my Axis P3364VE, depending on the motion in the scene and the light level, the bitrate can vary by at least 9 times. Motionless scenes with lots of light compress VERY well. Scenes with lots of motion (grainy video in the dark and/or lots of trees, people, or shadows) take up a lot more space. You can make it more predictable by specifying a constant bitrate rather than variable bit rate (it should be in the camera settings somewhere) but then you lose some of the storage and bandwidth benefits of the h.264 compression. With a very high constant bitrate set, picture quality will be a bit better at the very start of high motion events after a motionless period than if the cam has to ramp up the variable bitrate. Shouldn't be a big deal unless either your cam is very bad at it or you're trying to catch plates on speeding cars or something.

 

NVRs are low maintenance (no regular windows updates, etc), reliable, cheaper to run (use less power), small, and tuned and dedicated to the job.

[buellwinkle 0]

You can try and have the cameras do the recording and use the free Dahua PSS software. BlueIris is popular software that people use with Dahua. Lastly, NVR+ from Linovision works well with Dahua cameras.