buellwinkle

I consider electric use all the time as our top tier rates (anything more than 60w light bulb) is 29 cents per kw hr and going up a bunch in September with SDG&E. With our usage, they are saying $100 more per month, our about a 35% increase. They say 11% increase but that's just a single person in a studio apartment without an air conditioner or an NVR PC. If we had rates down to single digits, wow, I can upgrade my Smart car to a Porsche with the money I would save, LOL.

There's no easy answer other than making the hole about 1" square (bigger if round). Many of the new cameras from even higher end camera companies are coming with pigtails. Heck, the ACTi E44 required an even bigger hole than the Dahua IPC-HFS3300C that has like 7 items on it's pigtail. So it's getting worse, not better. So make the hole bigger first by making it square with a file. I've tried running an outdoor white plastic conduit box, but it doesn't look pretty and all the wires are a tight fit in that as well. The easiest thing is to attach the camera to wall with the pigtail sticking out, run the Cat5 outside and wrap the connector with Coax Seal (available online for a few bucks). Certainly would not look much worse than the old school cameras (last years models) where you ran the wire outside to the camera.

Not trying to be funny but what's wrong with it? What I found is when I mount cameras and run the them with part of the wall included I don't get good results because the wall reflects the IR in a way that causes the rest of the image to have the wrong exposure and it being white doesn't help. You can try moving the viewing area away from the wall and that may help. Also get someone to stand in the picture and see how it looks.

They would work the best unless you had reasons to be more covert.

Don't know if I would call it more solid as I've been running ACTi NVR software for a few years and never had a crash on Windows. But I also run Synology DMS 4.2 which is a Linux operating system distro from Synology, open source, mostly used on their NAS devices but you can run it on many PC, I run it on an HP Proliant Microserver. They then have an app that's already installed called Surveillance Station. Works well with ACTi but only supports up to 2MP (1080P) so it crops my newer 3MP ACTi cameras. What I like is that it's very efficient as it's been developed for Atom processor based Synology hardware so when I run it on a faster processor it barely uses up much CPU. Just because software runs on Linux does not make it more robust or more efficient. I found the opposite, Zoneminder will easily consume more CPU resources than many comparable Windows products. Also, for what it's worth, ACTi NVR's run on Linux and people that have them said that ACTi NVR3 software on Windows has more features and was better. Don't know a I don't have their NVR and it looked pretty good at the trade shows.

Very, very rare that any camera has anything other than 850nm mostly because when you get to the 940nm wavelength, you lose about half the effective working distance. Some nature cameras or hunting equipment uses the covert 940nm wavelength. You can buy IR Illuminators with this and the price is the same, but for the same illuminator, the specs will likely show you it covers about half the distance. If you are asking will it work if you use a 940nm illuminator, then yes, there's no IR filter at that time and the sensors are sensitive to it.

According to the specs on Dahua's website, it says Auto(ICR) which is a mechanical IR Cut Filter, just a different abbreviation which means IR Cut filter Removal. You can usually tell because you'll hear a click when then camera switches and even is some you can see it switch in one of the frames being recorded. Electronic IR is bogus as it has a permanent IR filter for during the day and switches to B&W at night, There isn't a camera made with IR LEDs that has a permanent IR filter, that would defeat the purpose of the IR LEDs. Also, there's no good way of compensating through image processing to correct for colors skewed by not having an IR filter because it's a changing variable.

Dunno what you mean that 4mm is their widest lens option, I have one that came from Hikvision with a 2.8mm lens and have 2 with 12mm lenses on their way. Aks Rory to include a choice to mix Hikvision and Dahua in the same app.

Just open a support ticket with Dahua and they are very good at responding and getting you a firmware update quickly. All kidding aside, I have the same issue on some new cameras and I've tried every possible avenue to get it resolved, emailed their tech guy directly, entered it on their support site, pushed it up through my distributor, and nothing, nada, zilch. Dahua working hard to ignore it's customers. There's no HTTP URL that will get you a stream, it has to be an RTSP stream and that works. You'll have to search around for it or Google this with the quotes - "dahua cgi url api commands" and it will take you to the URL commands manual for Dahua.

That must have been told to you 10 years ago and you just remembered. Most TV, phones, camcorders, surveillance cameras are now 1080P (1920x1080). There's some lower end that are 720P and 3 & 5MP cameras are readily available from most manufacturers. On the high end, you can get 29MP and beyond. Just about all 1080P are 30fps, the higher resolutions like 3 & 5MP tend to be around 15 fps.

WiFi is a lot faster than 3G, but good that it's working for you.

I found this on Newegg's Shell Shocker deal of the day, $229AR for today only (7/1/13). It's an HP Microserver that you can load Synology software on and possibly as a Synology NVR for your cameras. In comparison to a Synology DS1512+, it's supposed to be faster and runs about 1/4th the price. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?nm_mc=AFC-TechBargains&cm_mmc=AFC-TechBargains-_-NA-_-NA-_-NA&Item=N82E16859107921

For me its reflection, so at night I can leave it in day mode by see the IR LEDs reflecting back, yes even with the IR cut filter on. But this may be a rare case as they are in a condo and I have my cameras mounted inside facing out. What's nice about the mini IR bullets from both companies is for me they fit in the window frame, so I can close the blind over them.

Just so you don't get your hopes up, MXControlCenter is not NVR software, its' CMS software, meaning it does not record, not even for Mobotix cameras. It will play back what a Mobotix camera recorded though.

Any video card will be fine as it's all browser based anyway. I used to run 6 cameras, all ACTi megapixel on an Atom processor with plenty of room to spare. Their 32 channel NVR I believe uses an Atom processor. On my old i3-540, 6 cameras is like 2% CPU utilization.

The new ACTi have IR LED on/off and day/night as separate options too. The Hikvision is turned off by putting in day mode as Maxicon says, but that's what most would want to do anyway, at least me where I have reflections issues on my Dahua a night and would prefer it stay in day mode. Not even sure you can unplug the IR leds from Dahua and still have it work.

That's a lot of cameras but even an older PC should handle that to run the server component and you have nothing to lose in trying it. The client component is web based, so as long as you have IE, you can access it the same at home as while traveling. I was accessing it from Italy last month, no problems other that it was slower because of hotel internet limitations. It takes a long time to connect remotely, maybe 2-3 minutes, but once connected it worked well, even fluid video motion on the limited line. You can also access via their free IOS program but I have not tried it as I'm more of an Android guy so I use IP Cam Viewer app. Also, for what it's worth, the first 16 cameras are free, additional licenses are extra and the place you buy from should throw it on that large of a deal. PM me your email address and I can get you the forms for ACTi project pricing which will save you some money.

That should be enough to scare most of us, LOL.

If they are set to DHCP, you find them with a network scan tool like nmap or an app like fing.

Not PoE though but I believe the GV-CA220 is PoE.

I asked my reseller to research it and see if they can get the one you want.

If you get them via ADI, then the price is comparable.

It's a great photo.

That's what I meant, you don't include the SADP camera finder program with each of your cameras like Hikvision does but you probably don't intend people to use it without the NVR, so makes sense. Does the Swann firmware support avoiding the NVR and writing to an NFS mount point? I had to go to version 5 of the firmware on the Hikvision version to get this to work properly. Really cool feature.

Get a Avigilon 8MP, 16MP or 29MP camera, they use full frame Canon lenses I believe.