MaxIcon
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Posts posted by MaxIcon
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OP wanted his new cams to match his old cams.
In general, the cam will work fine with what it ships with (except for the 5.2.8 problems people have reported). It's when you try to update that the problems happen, so it's a good idea to research the version you want first.
I've got 2 Hiks labeled 5.2.8 but running hacked 5.2.5 from an AE vendor, and have had no problems with them.
It's good to have a language you can read for when you change setup on the camera, but once a cam's up and running with good settings, many people don't bother with future changes. Chrome can be set to translate for you, as well.
Hik's fighting the gray market cams by not allowing easy firmware downgrades and such, which makes life more complicated for those who buy the inexpensive Chinese versions.
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Recent Chinese Hiks have been shipping with 5.2.5 or 5.2.8 (which tends to have problems), hacked for English displays. Frequently, the installed version is not the same as what's on the cam's label - you have to check the firmware report. They should come with English enabled.
Trying to install earlier versions has resulted in some bricked cams, and the latest versions are designed to not allow down-rev installations, though the TFTP load still works (with some risk of problems).
I'd recommend trudging through some of the threads before attempting to downgrade.
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Dahua is notorious for their poor end user support. Most support needs to come through your supplier, or from forums like this.
You can leave them a message on their support forum. You might get lucky!
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Hik's BLC control is a weak point in their firmware. Many cams let you draw a box you want to use for BLC, and Hik only lets you select a general image area, which is not well designed. Still, it can help with a gross exposure problem like this one.
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Yes, or connect it to a powerline adapter. This would only help if all the cams are within range of the base station. If some of the cams are too far away from the base station location, it would require a second base station, a directional antenna. or similar.
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It's not clear that the system linked to uses wifi, so access points/wifi extenders wouldn't help. It appears to be a wireless analog system connecting cameras to the base station, which then connects via RJ45 to the local network.
It's my understanding that this type of wireless system uses a different frequency spectrum and protocol than wifi, so you'd need a system specific extender.
Lorex, for instance, sells wireless extenders that work with wireless analog cams, but whether it would work with any wireless analog cam is open to question:
I could be wrong, as I've never used wireless analog gear.
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I'd recommend Hikvision or Dahua. Personally, I'm buying the Hik 2CD2032 mini bullets and 2CD2332 turrets these days. Turrets have fewer IR issues than domes, and are a bit more visually appealing than bullets.
You generally want to get the same brand NVR as the cameras, but I'm not an NVR user, so others will have to chime in on that. PCs give better flexibility, but require more tinkering and maintenance.
Wireless cams are easy to add, but adding very many can cause wifi congestion, and they're not as reliable as wired cams. You still need power, of course. Many people start with wifi, then switch over to wired to avoid problems.
Cat 6 is marginally better for POE cams due to the usually, but not always, heavier gauge, but for your layout, it won't make much difference. How you run the cables depends on access and how much protection you want. Under the eaves, even indoor cables are easy to run and can last for years, but can be cut more easily compared to through the attic or basement and are not as attractive.
With a big house that's not a square, you'll probably want more cams to give full coverage. For general coverage where you're not worried about getting a legally identifiable face, like watching the kids, broad coverage of the yard is pretty straightforward. For security, I like to have close coverage of the doors and windows, as well as the general coverage of the yard; sometimes you can do that with one cam, sometimes it takes several.
My front cams on a small house are 2 Hik 2CD2032 3.6mm bullets in the center of the house covering the yard and street, one Dahua 2100 bullet watching the front door with a 6mm lens I added, and an old Vivotek 1MP bullet watching the driveway.
If it were me, I'd settle on a brand, then order a couple of cams in different lens sizes - maybe one of each style in 2.8mm and 3.6 or 4.0mm, then play with them in temporary setups to see the trade-offs between field of view and resolution, as well as nighttime IR coverage. This will give you a good idea of what to add for the remaining cams.
I use a ladder, a towel, and bungee cords to stage cams in positions I'm interested in before I commit and drill holes.
Some people add extra IR illuminators to help light up bigger stretches of yard at night. These usually require dedicted 12Vdc supplies, but can be run from POE extractors as well if you've got extra POE ports.
The Chinese Hiks are under $100, but warranty support is weak. If you buy from an authorized vendor, costs go up, but support is better. Some people buy from recommended Aliexpress vendors due to the cost savings and buy an extra cam or two in case of problems, providing self-warranty.
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Yeah, an inexpensive 4 port POE switch may be the most cost-effective solution.
There's also a passive 8 port POE injector that gets good reviews here:
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If you run the demo version of Blue Iris, it has a page where it logs the date and time where it loses communications with the camera, as well as other events, and can write it to a log file as well. This may not show you the root cause, but will give you the uptime.
The demo is free for 15 days, and can be reset easily after that, but puts a watermark on the video. Should be good for monitoring your camera reboots.
Another thing to do would be to have the windows scheduler run a script every so often (5 minutes or whatever) that pings your cameras, router, PC, whatever, and sends the output to a log file. This would give you more info about whether the network is dropping out, vs just the cameras.
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IP Cam Viewer claims to support ONVIF. I use the Pro version on iOS, but not with ONVIF. I like it a lot as a basic viewer.
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When I power up a Hik cam, it goes through a pretty predictable sequence at the switch and camera.
First the IR LEDs flash briefly on the cam. After that, the network port blinks a few times, pauses, blinks, pauses, for about 1 minute, then starts blinking steadily like when it's connected normally.
If it doesn't do this, it might be dead.
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Note that newer firmware doesn't use vizxv any more, per this post:
viewtopic.php?p=253713#p253713
i've been in the forums as a passive member for quite a while and now i liketo contribute some little information to this forum.
I noticed that with the v2.4x baseline firmware releases the well known
telnet access root/vizxv is gone
For me as a linux guy i wasn't happy with it at all so i took some
time to reverse enginieer the firmware of my HFW4200s camera.
I manage to analyse the telnet authorization
part in the firmware. The /etc/passwd is still the same so
the old password should work as always but the engineers
at dahua changed the authorization so this file is never read
for login. First i was able to patch the busybox binary to
accept any passwords but a couple of hours later i was
able to enter a valid password.
In fact the secret login/password consists of a valid
user with administrator privileges to the web interface
(e.g. admin) and a password with a 'secret' prefix.
Long story short as in my case with login 'admin' and password 'admin'
my telnet login is like this:
login: admin
password: 7ujMko0admin
So the prefix '7ujMko0' is the important part here.
Finally i'm able to telnet login to my cameras again
Can any of you double check on that?
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If the camera's in English or multi-language and you didn't check the firmware version it was actually running, there's a good chance the camera was running hacked 5.2.5 firmware, though there have been cases of hacked 5.2.8 firmware causing a lot of problems. The 5.2.8 sticker was likely referring to the original Chinese firmware, which usually gets replaced with an English or multi-language version.
If you bought from an official distributor, this may not apply, but they should be able to help you un-brick the cam.
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I'm not familiar with the software you're using, so I don't know if that's lot of cams for it, or if a better video card would help. The base PC looks powerful enough. I'm mostly familiar with Blue Iris, which uses more CPU as frame rates and total MP get higher. Most of this is due to decoding the video to view it, which increases the load as more cameras are viewed.
If the software is 32 bit, more memory won't help, but if it's 64 bit, that could make a difference. Possibly someone with more experience with your software can chime in on what affects performance.
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Most NVR software doesn't care a lot about video card performance, and mostly use 2D, so the on-board video of the i7-4790 should be sufficient. Most high power video cards focus on 3D performance, which just increases your power load without increasing performance.
There are exceptions; apparently Exacq and others can use the video card processing to improve performance, but I don't have any experience with that.
The next biggest update would be a videocam friendly hard disk, like the WD Purple or the equivalent Seagate. Depending on what you've got now, this may or may not make a difference.
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The last few Dahua cams I bought were set to auto-reboot daily at 2 am by default. I always turn that off, and never have problems.
If the camera times aren't synced precisely to the NVR time, they could be rebooting 15-20 minutes early compared to the NVR clock.
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Makes sense; the CPU is probably one of the more expensive pieces. It sounds like it struggles with all the features enabled, but most of us would run it at lower frame rates.
At 14Mbps, that's 6.3GB/hour, 150GB/day for full time recording. Fortunately, drive are getting bigger and cheaper!
It's hard to tell if the fuzziness around the person's outline is from compression or if the lens just doesn't have the resolution for that many MP. It looks like a lens resolution artifact to me, but it's not present on other objects.
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Here's Hik's recommended bit rate settings for various resolutions and FPS:
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The 4k looks pretty durn good. No over-compressed fuzziness, which is surprising; they must have some decent CPU power to handle the 4k stream and maintain that much detail. The main problem is the chromatic aberration, but the detail in the grass and figure are quite good.
What's the bit rate for the 4K stream?
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Always hard to be sure about these. It's not clear who maintains this site, but a number of people have used the firmware from it, and so far no complaints posted. That doesn't mean it's safe, though.
This is probably the single biggest downside to Dahua cams from non-approved vendors - lack of reliable firmware support.
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Time to get down with the sickness.
One of my favorite parts in the Dawn of the Dead remake was when they started in with the Richard Cheese cover of this tune!
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It covers as many cams as your CPU can support, which depends on frame rate and resolution, as well as whether BI processes the video (takes more CPU) or writes it direct to disk (less CPU). It also supports a huge number of camera models, but many people stick with Hiks for simplicity of support these days.
There's a community support forum over at cam-it.org that has lots of info on BI, and you can download the free demo for testing. I consider it the best value in a PC-based system, though it does use more CPU than, say, Milestone Xprotect Go.
I run 9 cams on my i5-3570k system, 14MP (5x2MP and 4x1MP) total, 10 fps, without using direct to disk, and it handles them fine. I could add several more if I changed to direct to disk, and upgrading to an i7-4770 would probably let me double my camera load. The demo doesn't support direct to disk, but has all other features enabled.
Here's a good example of a solid PC with an i7-4770 processor, 8GB RAM, a 2TB HD, and Win 8.1 for just over $500. Install BI on this and connect it to your POE switch, and you're ready to record.
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BI is pretty resource intensive, can use a lot of CPU power, and doesn't play well with older CPUs. What CPU are you running? To reduce CPU usage, the best knobs are to reduce frame rate and/or resolution until you're below 80%.
There's a screen that shows the camera status and bit rate (in bytes, not bits); I'm not in front of it right now and don't have V4 installed, but it'll be one of the icons across the top row.
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It should help with spiders, but I haven't mounted mine outside yet. For instance, if a web is directly across the lens, the offset IR shouldn't illuminate it the way the concentric ring LEDs do.
The single high power IR LED gets better reviews for coverage than the multiple low-power LEDs that most cams have.
Changing Current Time Gives Parameter Error - Hikvision NVR
in IP/Megapixel Cameras and Software Solutions
Posted
Shot in the dark here, but have you tried a different browser? Some of these things can be browser sensitive.