Swann DVR8-1260

Dear All

I admit to being a bit of a newbie when it comes to digital CCTV systems, and I have a question/observation which I hope some fellow members can help me out with.

Until recently have been using a 4-camera MPEG-4 system from Swann.

Was happy with the unit, but wanted to upgrade to 8 cameras so bought the DVR8-1260.

Set up the new unit and recorded a week's footage (12 hours over each night). When it came to watch recorded footage then I realised there were some 'problems' with functionality.

1. Although it's an 8-camera system I can only watch the footage from four at a time (although you can watch live feed from all 8 cameras).

2. My old system went up to 6x ffwd, and this allowed me to watch six or seven x 12-hour blocks in about 40 minutes of real time. The new system allows watching at up to 16x ffwd, but watching one hour of recorded footage takes 4 minutes of real time, thus just one nights footage will take 96 mins (2x 48 minutes, as I have to then watch back cameras 5-8 seperately).

So effectively I am requiring 96 mins each day to watch 12 hours of footage. As you can imagine I am not happy with this!

I have spoken several times to Swann Tech support on the phone, and last night tried the live chat on their website as well. I am not really getting anywhere with them (I have an appointment at 9pm tomorrow night for one of their "technical experts" to ring me and go through the operation of the unit, but am not expecting this to achive much progress.)

So far advice has been to reduce quality of recording (pointless as all this will do, as far as I can see, is to reduce file size on HDD), and to record in blocks which don't require me to sit down and watch over an hour at a time (they couldn't grasp that I will still have 12 hours of footage from 8 cameras every night, so this approach won't help!)

So after all that reading you've just done, is what I am asking reasonable, and in any way can this DVR8-1260 satisfy my requirements?

I don't want to go down the motion only record route, as I was told way back that is best to to set to continuous record, as any slight movement (like bushes/trees moving in breeze will make unit come on and off)

Any help and advice would be much appreciated, as I feel I gave spent a lot of money on a unit which is not fit for purpose! (and a step backward from my old 4 camera system)

Thanks

Andrew