Dahua camera in conjunction with Surveillance Station

[mroek 0]

Hi,

 

I am planning to buy a few Dahua bullet cameras (either HFW2100 or HFW3200S). I also own a Synology DS213+, and I am thinking of using this to store the video from the cameras. The best option seems to be the Surveillance Station package, at least if I want to easily browse the recorded events, and to access them remotely. The downside is that this software has quite a few shortcomings, and additional camera licenses are ridiculously expensive.

 

I have a few questions:

 

1) Is it possible to set motion detection in the Dahua camera to save some network bandwidth to the NAS? If motion detection is to be done with Surveillance Station, it will need to continuously stream the video from the camera, but perhaps it is possible to avoid that if the camera itself does the motion detection?

 

2) If yes to question 1), how does that actually work? Is there some kind of push protocol in use?

 

Another option is of course to use motion detection in the cameras, and have them upload event videos to the NAS by FTP, but then it is quite impractical to quickly get an overview of the events, as each file needs to be viewed in a Dahua player software (or converted to AVI by Dahua software). It would also be cumbersome to view recoreded events from remote (on my phone), although live view would be no problem, of course.

 

I am well versed in networking/software/electronics (engineer), but I am quite new to CCTV/Video surveillance, so don't be afraid to throw technical details in my face.

[buellwinkle 0]

For Dahua, use their PSS software, free, supports 1,000 cameras and uses the cameras self recording capabilities, it does not record so very little CPU use, actually don't have to run it except to view the cameras and recordings.

[mroek 0]

The downside is that I would then have to assign a computer to the task. My reason for using the NAS is that it is easier, already installed, and always on anyway.

 

I'm not sure I understood what you mean, surely the PSS software have to be running in order to receive and store the video events from the cameras?

[mroek 0]

Has anyone tried using the Dahua PSS software to just read files (stored by the cameras on motion detect events by FTP) from a NAS?

 

What kind of functionality would that give? Could the PSS software read the directory structure (from the NAS over CIFS/Samba) to provide an easy overview and a timeline, allowing fast searching and playback?

 

I don't have any Dahua cameras (yet), so it doesn't make much sense for me to install the PSS software as I would have no camera data to look at, so I'd appreciate any feedback.

[ajafar 0]

I'm currently using 6x dahua ipc-hfw2100 (q-see qcn7001b) with a Synology DS412+ and setup the cameras as a generic onvif with port 9988 and the default admin admin username and password. Unfortunately, all the motion detection is done on the Synology side and the alarm function does not work so having to resort to motion detection notification during certain hours.

 

Setting the video recording to mjpeg allows the DSCam software to stream smoothly to iphone/ipad, setting it up as h264 the live video runs at about 1 - 3 frames per second on iphone/ipad but runs smoothly on liveview on the surveillance station. Hope that helps.

[mroek 0]

Thanks for that piece of info.

Setting video recording to MJPEG is a significant downside, though, as it will make the recordings a lot bigger.

How much CPU and RAM does the motion detection consume for 6 cameras when everything is running?

[ajafar 0]

Thanks for that piece of info.

Setting video recording to MJPEG is a significant downside, though, as it will make the recordings a lot bigger.

How much CPU and RAM does the motion detection consume for 6 cameras when everything is running?

 

That's the part that surprised me but I had a few issues that I'll explain below.

 

I first setup each camera through it's web interface as 720p CBR 30FPS to see what kind of quality of video I'd get on my office network.

 

I set them all up using an older 3com 2226-PWR Plus 24port PoE Switch and hooked them up to my network first. After I set all the cameras us and changed the admin and 888888 passwords to something else, I put the cameras on the Synology's 2nd NIC, enabled the DHCP server on NIC 2 just to see how they would all take.

 

6 x Cameras at around 4000kb/s each = 24Mbits/Sec. Synology NIC monitor was showing 3.1 Megabytes/Second which is about correct. I setup Motion Detection on the Synology and even enable Live View Motion Analysis and the DS412+ was chugging along at around 25%. Not bad at all!

 

The Video Recording Settings and Live View settings would only allow me to make them the same so they were all at 1280x720, h264, Quality 5 (best), and 30FPS. Everything looked great, I had it on continuous record and it even had the green lines whenever anything was captured because of motion detection. The problem I started having was what I called the rubberband effect, if I was monitoring all 6 cameras in live view, everything looked like it was running about 7/10 of normal speed that eventually, I noticed a delay of around 10 seconds yet when I double clicked that one camera to bring it up, it would start to catchup in fast motion till it became live with no delay. I tried IE10, Firefox, Chrome, Windows 7 and 8 and they all exhibited the same behaviour after a while. CPU usage on the Synology stayed at 30%. I had to drop everything down to 15 FPS at quality 3 to get it to run normal, but the nice surprise was changing the settings in the Synology Video Recording Settings actually changed the settings on the camera itself after I logged into the web interface of the camera to make the change on the source as well! I guess that's part of the ONVIF standard possibly.

 

Hopefully my experience helps those who are wondering if it works, it works with some weird live view issues when set at full 30fps at quality 5.

[mroek 0]

Again, thank you very much for the detailed information!

I will probably do some testing with just one camera first, because I think the prices of additional camera licenses for the Synology is ridiculous, at least when the product is very much less than perfect.

 

Your Synology is also a lot more powerful than mine (DS213+), so I might have to go for a dedicated solution, like an NVR or a computer with surveillance software on it.

 

The ideal solution would be if the cameras could do motion detection internally, and only stream video to the Synology when motion was detected (or if live view was requested from the web interface of the Synology). In that scenario, both network bandwidth and CPU load would be preserved under normal circumstances. Pre-event recording would have to be buffered in the cameras themself though, and I guess these cheap cams don't have enough memory for that.

[MaxIcon 0]

Setting video recording to MJPEG is a significant downside, though, as it will make the recordings a lot bigger.

How much CPU and RAM does the motion detection consume for 6 cameras when everything is running?

 

Someone else should probably verify this, but when I tested my HFW3300C on mjpeg, it looked like a bad acid trip. Very ugly colors and artifacts, not a pretty picture. This was both on Blue Iris and on the IE webpage viewer.

[buellwinkle 0]

Thanks for that tip, I love it in that mode, sort of Andy Warhol look. Now if I can only get Mick Jagger to look into my camera

 

[ajafar 0]

So I found an interesting PDF on Q-see's website that documents some URL's, specifically RTSP.

 

http://www.q-see.com/files/HowToFiles/QC-RTSP_setup.pdf

 

I'm trying to setup the surveillance station to use both the main and substream on the Q-See cameras since having 6 IP 720P cameras running in Live View is horrendously slow when viewing remotely (4mbits/sec per camera = 24mbits/sec total upstream bandwidth).

 

The RTSP connection url is

 

rtsp://LOGIN@IP:PORT/cam/realmonitor?channel=CHANNEL&subtype=ENCODING

 

Setting the Channel to 1 and subtype to 1 gives me the secondary stream which I have set at 704x480 @ 30FPS which is yielding an average of 500kbits/s. That would give me a total of 3mbits/sec upload which is below the bandwidth limitation of most clients business class internet connection (usually at 20mbits down, 4mbits up).

 

Does anyone know how to create the custom camera config files in the Surveillance Station to add the camera with both the main and substream?

[dexterash 0]

what's the use for both streams?

[ajafar 0]

what's the use for both streams?

 

The main stream is the high quality 720P H264 stream that is used to record any motion detection or continuous by the Surveillance Station. The sub stream is used in the Live View screen and makes it possible to view the cameras remotely without it dropping frames (The Surveillance Station can theoretically allow you to view 49 Cameras simultaneously but I highly doubt it could, I have it showing 6 at a time and will probably drop it to 4)

[Mrcarcrazy 0]

So I found an interesting PDF on Q-see's website that documents some URL's, specifically RTSP.

 

http://www.q-see.com/files/HowToFiles/QC-RTSP_setup.pdf

 

 

Wow...QSee straight out stole that from http://www.bahamassecurity.com/articles/dahua-rtsp-stream.asp

 

notice the pics on QSee's page are Pics from Bahamas. They didn't even try to alter it to make it look less stolen.

[dexterash 0]

what's the use for both streams?

 

The main stream is the high quality 720P H264 stream that is used to record any motion detection or continuous by the Surveillance Station. The sub stream is used in the Live View screen and makes it possible to view the cameras remotely without it dropping frames (The Surveillance Station can theoretically allow you to view 49 Cameras simultaneously but I highly doubt it could, I have it showing 6 at a time and will probably drop it to 4)

For my own info, isn't it able to display the main stream(not the extra)?

[ajafar 0]

what's the use for both streams?

 

The main stream is the high quality 720P H264 stream that is used to record any motion detection or continuous by the Surveillance Station. The sub stream is used in the Live View screen and makes it possible to view the cameras remotely without it dropping frames (The Surveillance Station can theoretically allow you to view 49 Cameras simultaneously but I highly doubt it could, I have it showing 6 at a time and will probably drop it to 4)

For my own info, isn't it able to display the main stream(not the extra)?

 

I'll try to clarify the technical hurdle I'm facing.

 

The Synology Surveillance Station has a list of approved IP cameras and unfortunately, Dahua/Q-See is not on that list. I had to add the cameras using the generic onvif settings.

 

It works perfectly to look at all the camera streams when on site sitting on the 100mbit network through the surveillance station and when monitoring how much bandwidth is coming into the computer that is connected to the surveillance station, it's registering somewhere around 24mbits/second (6 cameras x 4mbits/s = 24mbits/s). At the same time, the diskstation is also writing that amount of data to it's storage array. So far so good.

 

When trying to view the surveillance station remotely (offsite), the clients upload speed is only 4mbits/sec so trying to view 6 streams is nearly impossible.

 

The synology allows you to pick the two different video streams when setting up the IP cameras, ONLY if the camera is part of their pre-programmed list of cameras. You can pick the record stream and the live view stream, either both the same or pick the second lower quality stream for the live view, and the high quality hd stream for the recorder.

 

Since the Dahua/Q-see camera is not part of their approved list, and I picked onvif, it only allows both the live view and record stream to be the same, which in this case would both be the high quality stream.

 

If I can get the live view to show the lower quality stream (it's around 500kbits/sec), then I can setup live view to show 4 cameras simultaneously without saturating the upload on my clients internet connection when viewing from offsite.

 

There are very smart folks who have figured out how to create their own camera profiles within the Synology Surveillance station to do just that. This is why I posted the RTSP settings, I might just have to figure this one out myself and if I do, I'll post my results.

[dexterash 0]

If I can get the live view to show the lower quality stream (it's around 500kbits/sec), then I can setup live view to show 4 cameras simultaneously without saturating the upload on my clients internet connection when viewing from offsite.

 

What happens at peak? Frame drops?

[embeleco 0]

ajafar,

 

Were you able to make the dahua camera work properly with Surveillance Station? I already have surveillance station and I'm looking to add some outdoor cams. Were you able to do motion detection with surveillance station properly using SS and also using the cam itself? Live view? DCAM App on iphone/ipad?

 

Let me know your results.

 

Thanks in advanced.

Jose

[buellwinkle 0]

Just get cameras that are officially supported by Surveillance Station. Why go out of your way to buy something that may not work?

[MaxIcon 0]

Another possible option is to set up each camera twice - once with the full stream, once with the low-bit-rate stream. Assuming you can choose which cameras to view remotely, this would let you stream the substream remotely while recording the main stream locally.

 

If you can do this, it may require another license, depending on the limitations of Surveillance Station.