Digiscan

Clever girl!

I'm always surprised when companies from China post official product details in English without having a native speaker of the language proofread. If I thought I was "pretty decent" at French, I would nonetheless have a native speaker proofread something I put out in an official release. Anyway, the camera looks nice

This is great to outline the steps so well, somebody is likely to benefit from this. My router has USB 3.0 but after much testing I've found it's worthless (it's a linksys ea6200). The problem is after a time the USB 3.0 trashes the 2.4 ghz. Interference from usb 3.0 is well documented in that spectrum, and my router "shields" it, but apparently not well enough. I use a USB 2.0 external with it as an FTP server now. Seemed to be real hit or miss, but one night I was able to duplicate the problem back and forth as I unplugged it, and now for a week with 2.0 no issues at all. Pretty disappointing, because 2.0 is slow as heck

Yep, you do lose options with external needing SD, and although they exist, if you get a few it goes far toward a PC anyway. I know the NUC line of PCs is good because they are very small and once you get it configured all you need is a network cable and a power supply (you could login remotely to manage), but I'm of half a mind to host everything on a laptop. My network is already on a UPS and a laptop has that built in. An entry level one could be given a 1 TB hard drive and comes with Windows 8. All out of pocket would be $350 and that's enough space for a few cameras. A NAS is probably ideal, though, and you could install Free NAS onto something like those NUC PCs, put a 2 TB hard drive in there and you're good to go for a long while with a good number of cameras.

The hikvisions can do a lot. I have three going and I only require my PC running because I don't have a NAS and it is exposing several windows shares, to which the cameras are recording 24/7. I then have the secondary FTP server onsite, and quite difficult to find to which they are also recording some events (one I have recording 24/7 images, the other just images on motion detection). This is all using the hikvision native firmware. You can certainly have cams send motion images to an FTP site and using FTP software on a PC you could have them deposit to a folder which is also the same as, say, a dropbox folder, then you get real-time syncing online. You'll need to create a powershell script to delete older files before it fills up. I recommend against google drive for this because deleting files from google drive folder locally puts them in the GD "trash" and unless you explicitly delete those (the client app does not do this) you'll hit your space limit. I doubt you want to create your own software that taps the GD API to do this programmatically. Dropbox works better, IMO; when you delete files from your dropbox, they disappear as you probably would want. It's worth noting that this is not a good approach for indoor cams because if somebody cuts your internet line before entering your house now your images are not going up, so if your cameras are taken you're SOL. Contrast with a local FTP site (mine runs on my router because it has a USB port), any lines cut don't affect anything (my router and switch are on a UPS, and the router is on a different floor and through a wall than the UPS and switch, so it is still difficult to find despite being powered by that UPS, so even if my power is cut (a decent number of burglars do this, though most don't because they are stupid) I'm still running.

I have a lot of experience with Dropcam. For a simple setup you want working quickly without any hassle there is just no better solution, period. They are very easy to setup and very reliable. Among the caveats: 1) No realistic way to get it to work outside (there are enclosures you can make, but this becomes a hassle and wifi sucks outside in particular) 2) Image quality inferior to similarly priced IP cameras 3) Monthly cost 4) Uses bandwidth I recently dropped my Dropcam setup and went with some Hikvisions, though. Much steeper learning curve and various issues to deal with, but all of the caveats above are no longer in the picture. As far as this requirement is concerned: I know what you're trying to do, but it's not realistic. Let's say you're taking images (forget off site video) every 3 seconds from your 4 cameras. With a 3 MP cam you can see even at low quality the jpegs up to as high as 500k in size. That's 666k/sec or about 7 mbps, which is way above what the huge majority of residential connections can tolerate. You could go for motion only, and lower this quite a bit, but the math just isn't in your favor. A better idea is to either hide the PC/NVR that is managing the cameras, or have a secondary location somewhere in the house (e.g. small FTP server) to which you're sending images. Hide that, now you'll end up with footage even if somebody steals your main stuff. ------------ boogieman is right not to rely on wifi. I have a hikvision cube and it works great and the wifi is good, but it will never be as great as wired. For a super simple setup, though, if you got cubes and gave them SD cards, you could forget the NVR entirely and just record everything to those (since it's local wifi/wired is irrelevant), then just use the wifi connection to transmit images via FTP to an FTP server somewhere on premises. Even though wifi is sloppy for 24/7 video it should be okay for FTP images. Personally I find more value in exterior cams. If you think about it, indoor only come into play for monitoring pets and burglaries. The latter rarely happen, but people stealing packages, breaking into your car, etc. are far more likely to happen. These cubes can be concealed quite well with a little intelligence, though, and you can more or less remove the need for offsite storage, depending on what you're trying to do. Hide one in the kitchen up high within a fake plant, hide one in a hollowed out hard cover book with just the lens showing through, etc. You don't necessarily need a pinhole camera, and even just having a hidden one that captures the main area in your house would cover you.

I'm interested in this for the very rare instance where a burglary takes place and the DVR along with the internal hard drive is taken. It's a very rare occurrence for this to happen, and I've made what I call break away hard drives that are concealed....but with those we're limited by SATA. Here's a thread of I think the first time I did this: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23401&start=15 It is indeed not likely to happen (in truth most people live their lives without a burglary), but if you've gone as far as installing cameras I think it's prudent to consider such an eventuality. My cams record to a primary PC but also are in parallel sending FTP images to a USB drive that is supported by my router. My router is exceedingly difficult to locate and you'd have to track wires up inside a wall to figure out where it is, so I expect a thief even smart enough to walk off with my PC is probably not smart enough to go tracking down such things, else he'd probably have a real job, frankly.

Just wanted to say this is awesome.

I'd be surprised if the camera works on this powerline EXCEPT for that. Are you sure the cameras are running the same firmware? I assume you're trying the exact same mail settings in all three cases.

I addressed this issue on my hikvisions by having them write to windows share drives on a PC that's on 24/7, but also drop files via FTP to a USB flash drive using the storage on my router via a USB extension that leads to a location hard to get to/find. The problem with those cameras is they stupidly deposit all files to the same directory, and thousands of files in one folder become very problematic, so I wrote a small windows utility on that primary PC that shuffles files around to different folders. If the PC shuts down, though, it doesn't much matter; the files are still being written to the flash drive in any case--just not in the subfolders I like.

They have Max! Over the past several months I've purchased several Hiklvision DS-2CD2032-I and DS-2CD2132-I IP cameras from AliExpress for $87.00 each. They arrive within 1 to 2 weeks and low and behold...they work very well. " title="Applause" /> Well in his defense he wrote that in April of 2012. It's truly insane how cheap some of those cameras from ali are, though. I spent $140 a couple of weeks ago for some 3 MP Hikvision turrets sourced stateside and I absolutely feel I got good product for that, but sub $100 is crazy. I wanted "now", though, and wanted to get it from the US, but I can certainly see buying a couple more at that rate from elsewhere.

edit: delete

FWIW when I did mine recently to 5.2.0 I had my eye on the "updated completed" and instantly shut down the TFTP. I then also could not ping the camera at 192.0.0.64, even after a few min. only after rebooting the camera once more would it ping at 192.0.0.64 to another PC with the 192.0.0.128 IP address manually selected and both physically plugged into the same switch. It also couldn't hurt to download a free IP address scanner (or fing if you have an iphone) and see if it popped up there.

I just scanned this thread. I got my first IP cam after much resistance somewhere over two years ago. I, like many, thought I'd be cleverer than most and make a system with a USB camera and save myself a bunch of money on an IP camera. But, I had not found (and have not ever seen) somebody using multiple USB cameras reliably in this manner. pkoi in this thread I am sure also never had multiple cameras running reliably. Of course their image quality for moving images is poor and they are worthless at night. I actually do have a use for one as an indoor security cam running directly at my PC, but I'm just not confident I can have one run continually and reliably, which is what I expect and get out of my IP cams. As long as my network is up, so are they. USB has a horrendous range as well and extending it is tricky (decreasing power as you get further, meaning your device can't take as much power).

Cat7 won't make it run any better than 5e or even 5 Do you have any sample images? I'm really impressed with what my $140 hikvisions can pull off at night. It sure sucks compared to the day, absolutely, but it's more than just a blurry mess. A great way to make any camera work better at night is to just throw more light at it. I have my garage lights running all night at--I calculated it--a very small cost, but they throw a lot more light onto my driveway. Heck, the light alone is likely to keep naughties away, but it helps the camera quite a bit.

I think a truer thing never said. I have three hikvisions now running, one to SD and the other two to SMB/CIFS shares on a windows machine. This isn't quite what the OP is asking for, but it's a similar concept; the only hardware/software outside of the scope of the cameras is storage, in my case windows shares, but others do it directly to NAS devices. It took a lot of messing around because the firmware on these cameras was not competently written in certain areas. The SD card works a treat, I will say. Setting it up took no effort and it's the quickest access of all the others; playback is super-snappy from the camera itself. Playback from my other two cams with the network storage is pretty good but not quite as responsive. I partly went without a PC-based NVR because I didn't want to pay for it, have it using up my CPU cycles (i sometimes game on this box), and felt I could simplify by not using it, though that last point is probably not true in reality given how much time I fiddled with shaky firmware.

Well it looks like they won't make end of September. Hikvision has a lot of failings when it comes to software. I love the cameras' image quality but their firmware is hilariously riddled with bugs. I'm not surprised at all they wouldn't have had this app ready in time for IOS8. That said, I just tested this on 8.0.2 and the device was able to live view and do remote playback on a particular camera I tried.

More research has let me narrow down exactly what is happening on my cameras, and it is unequivocally a fault in the firmware, v 5.1.2 Whether I have a camera running with event detection or continuous save (tried two different cams), I will only ever see an FTP image or a snapshot image at the sub stream resolution and only if I have those enabled and actually view the substream. At that point the camera will take a few substream-res images, put them where it should, and summarily crash/reboot. On v 5.1.6 the timing snapshots ARE working properly. I have not tested the FTP yet properly in 5.1.6.

Thank you guys a ton! I was able to connect via smb and I'm currently formatting the drive(it kept saying uninitialized). I can't wait to see the quality of the recordings, this camera is pretty impressive! SMB/CIFS is rock solid for me for a week now, regardless of disconnecting drives, camera reboots, etc. but this has been with a USB drive of 250 gb and a partition of 200 GB taken from a larger drive, against which absolutely no other processes were trying to do anything. I think you do want to keep the given drives dedicated to just one drive per camera.

This would be a despicable security hole. However, I'm not finding this (EDIT: I did find this below for the ONVIF URL). I've just tested two cameras on 5.1.2 and one on 5.1.6. Tested from both a device on my LAN and one out on the internet. My findings: 5.1.2 cameras In both Chrome and IE http:///Streaming/channels/1/picture results in a challenge for user/password. When the proper user/password is put in the camera immediately crashes. In both Chrome and IE http://user:pass@/Streaming/channels/1/picture results in a challenge for user/pass in IE, but no challenge in Chrome (passthrough works fine). Nonetheless, both causes both cameras to immediately crash 5.1.6 In both Chrome and IE http:///Streaming/channels/1/picture Results in challenge for user/pass and successful main stream image In IE http://user:pass@/Streaming/channels/1/picture Pass through does not work for user:pass; still asked in a dialog for the user & pass. After supplying, image is returned. In Chrome this same URL works properly to return the image immediately. I was unable to retrieve a substream image; regardless of the "channel", I always get a main stream image: http://user:pass@/Streaming/channels/1/picture = http://user:pass@/Streaming/channels/201/picture = http://user:pass@/Streaming/channels/56/picture etc. Can anybody else confirm unequivocally that there is in fact a security hole in 5.1.6 that allows image retrieval from a camera without properly authenticating with user/password? EDIT: This http:///onvif/snapshot does nothing on 5.1.2; no challenge for user/pass, but cameras don't crash. It DOES return an image on 5.1.6 without a request for authentication, which is utterly egregious and totally unacceptable. I assume that not port forwarding to the camera's port 80 would prohibit this glaring security hole; is there a way to use the ONVIF approach over port 8000 or 554...? Not via a browser, but through another tool that executes the same code on the camera?

Great link. Hikvision does say the FOV is less side on 3 MP. The 2 MP setting gives an appreciably wider field of view, but it's also shorter. For what it's worth I went back and forth with my camera and comparing cropped, zoomed-in sections of a picture the clarity when set to 3 MP is noticeably better than the clarity when set to 2 MP.

Your syntax is off. First, I've only tested on a windows system exposing an NFS via haneWIN. I've found that large drives don't work; they initialize but fail shortly thereafter. Large for me was 600 GB. 200 gb works great. Anyway your server address should be set as 192.168.0.50 for example and the path is then /WHATEVERPATH Contrast with the SMB/CIFS option you'd put in the IP but your path would be \WHATEVERPATH

You ever get this to work? I've created a thread on another forum for my three hikvisions. Come hell or high water they are just refusing to save snapshots OR upload images to ftp except in very rare circumstances. I have spent hours trying tons of different combinations of configuration. Video is saving perfectly to my SMB/CIFS shares but strangely images seem only to save basically if the camera has just recovered from a crash, and only at 640X480. Even on a camera that has only local SD storage, again video perfect but only very rare images saved in that very low resolution and not when they're supposed to. Regular "timing" doesn't work in any case. My problem affects both 5.1.2 and 5.1.6 firmware. Most people at this point would throw up their hands and use NVR software that does all this properly, but by golly I want to win this fight.

I mounted my two turrets today. Got some practice with adding RJ45 connectors first, since they need to be cut to use the hardware properly. My guess is that since the supplied hardware only allows waterproofing of the network cable, and the reset button and optional power supply cables are still exposed that they are fine if they get wet--at least I would hope that (maybe if you were actually using a power supply you'd want to protect it). In my case my turrets are under soffits and will never have direct rain on them anyway, just ambient moisture. I took no measures protecting the other two components of the pigtail personally. Not sure if it's right, but based on some pics I found of mounted hikvisions I am sure I'm not the first.

There seems little information about ezviz. I understand this is basically a security wrapper to access hikvision cameras as opposed to a VPN. Do OEM, non-Hikvision branded cameras work with this? I ask because I see on the website for setup it wants a camera serial number or something and I am wondering if a non-Hikvision brand will work. I am guessing no (?). Does it work with any 5.2.0 hikvision camera, or just a couple of their indoor ones?