AaronHolio

Does the hik do motion recording while imported into the NVR? I've heard that is a problem- that it will only record full time and not respond to motion recording via the NVR.

Shockwave, I will have to check. Right now I have the 32 channel system all prepped to an install .. In other words everything lying on a floor and I have all cameras record all the time but also flag motion events for flagging.

I did buy one of the HiKvision 3mp cameras and it seems to work fine with the 32 channel Dahua model I got from n e l l y security .com, I think there may only be a couple camera attributes that you can't control from the Dahua interface but I'm not certain yet. For that you can login via the web interface. The picture quality is really clear. You can tell the crisp difference between it and the 1080p (2mp) Dahua cameras.

 

I actually bought a 16 port Trendnet gbit PoE switch http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E3441IG/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 to put everyone on my LAN (which is the NVR's WAN side) so I can directly connect to them via web browser and do more detailed configuration. HiK has more mature software for controlling the camera as well as a pretty decent Software based NVR recording suite. However I prefer a dedicated device managing/recording my cameras vs a PC.

I don't have time yet to write a really good review. But I can say the QC828 does do a decent job at handling 8 1080 cameras at once. It has been upgraded to Web Server 3.0 which is a HUGE improvement over the Web Service 2.0 piece of junk. You have to remember to go into Internet explorer and turn off active filtering for the sites you want to use it with or nothing will work.

 

However I still wasn't happy. 240FPS really means you get about 20-25fps per camera and it still doesn't pack the horse power that they could have spent an extra $15 bucks adding. Luckily I found a Dauha reseller

(ok for some reason I can't post a the URL here????, so the web address spread out) n e l l e y s s e c u r i t y . com

...and ended up going with their 32 camera 8 PoE port Dahua model (Remember Q-see is just repackaged Dahua equipment stripped to be the cheapest. So I ended up paying a bit more from N e l l y and getting the manly version of the device. I put 2 4TB drives in it and it is handling all the live data I can feed it without dropping a frame. It even supports 3 and 5 megapixel cameras very well.. Its limit is 160mbit of total throughput, so think of it this way. a 720p 1.3mp camera runs around 6mbit, a 1080p 2.0mp camera does about 8-9mbit, and 3mp does between 10-12mbit. I've displayed 20 1080p cameras and 1 3mp camera on a 1080p 50" LED TV and it is utterly beautiful. Clear as a bell. So I'm going to sell my QC804 and QC828 and go with the EySurv-ESDV-NVR-32-32-channel-nvr with 8 PoE ports. I bought a 16 port PoE ethernet switch and will leave the on board PoE ports empty because I prefer to have my cameras all on the local LAN so I can hit their web interface and make custom changes that the NVR doesn't really allow you do to. Then you just go into remote devices and find the 1080p cams on the LAN side and adopt that as you wish. I've discovered that allowing all your cameras to get DHCP addresses doesn't always work out for the best, so I set my router to stop offering DHCP addresses above 192.168.0.199 - then hard setting the NVR to .200 and each camera .201 .202 .203 etc so in case your router ever loses a DHCP lease, you'll have them all manually set and easy to adopt in the remote devices section of the NVR.

 

I was so glad that Ryan at n e l l y s security sent me an email after reading one of my posts on youtube complaining as to why Dahua produces high end versions, but Q-See puts out the wimpiest 3 year old models. I finally have the NVR I want and will be installing it for 3 more of my clients in the coming months. While you still can get the Dahua (Q-see) 1080p cameras for a little cheaper from Costco, you can get HikVision 3mp cameras from n e l l y for cheaper, which do work with the Dahua NVR pretty well. Personally I'm looking forward to the 5mp cameras.. The 3mp is a definite improvement over the 2mp 1080p models, but your frame rate will drop to 20fps unless you put them in 1080p mode - which is still a bonus because it does provide a cleaner and more crisp picture.

 

Thew views I'm getting off these units is spectacular. N e l l y s secutiry They are very helpful and they don't wait around like Q-See to release the good stuff. Very responsive and helpful with great advice. So I'm gonna sell my QC804 and QC828.

I'm ordering a system this week before the sale goes off on Costco.com. Note this is a one month deal with about 2.5 weeks left. Before taking it to the install site I'm going to fully set it up here at home and make SURE it is really doing 240FPS on all 8 channels @ 1080P. If not, back to Costco it will go. I really wish they had the 16 channel 480FPS 1080p system already. That is really what we need. So what we'll likely do is install this one, wait till late next year when the new 16 channel version comes out, buy it and swap the 8 channel to my house and put the 16 channel at our business site.

Sams Club has a deal posted now with the same NVR for $699.http://www.samsclub.com/sams/qsee-8x4-720p-ip-secrty-dvr-bullt-cam/prod10700191.ip?navAction=

Older slower model with 720p cameras. Not the 8 camera 1080p on the Costco deal.

 

If you run all the cams at 4096 kb/s, which is a reasonable bit rate for 1080p at 10-15 fps, and record full time, here's what you'd get:

 

4096 kb/s = 512 kB/s/camera

8 cameras = 4096 kB/s or 4.1 MB/sec

4.1 MB/sec = 246 MB/min = 14.8 GB/hr = 354 GB/day

Assume 1.8 TB available on a 2 TB drive, you'd get about 5 days with 24 hr recording.

Bumping to 4 TB would roughly double that.

 

With motion detect, it would depend on how often motion was detected and how long the recording continued after detection.

 

If you dropped the frame rate, you could get by with a lower bit rate, and would get more time.

 

Not exactly true. Due to the compression method, recording all cameras non-stop does not mean they have a fixed bit rate. I have 6+ months of 4 720 cameras recorded on my 4 720p camera system because while it may save a frame per second to the HD when little to nothing changes, it only records full bit rate to the HD when there is motion.

 

Basically the difference in this system is, they boosted the broadcom chip that does the mp4 decoding from the cameras, and possibly used a better main ARM processor. In any case, whenever Q-See states 30FPS, you can actually expect about 20fps. My QC804, at best gets 15-20fps with all 4 cameras displaying via HDMI monitor. If Q-See where a more robust company, they would put a little head room in. So instead of this having 240FPS @ 1080p, they could have rounded up to 300FPS and really had a solid product.

 

So what this product release means is that we will likely see a 16 channel 480FPS 16-PoE port system around October-December of 2014. Likely to be around $2000.

 

Tip for you all on Android, buy IP Cam Viewer Pro on Good Play market. It is $4 and far more stable and functional that the crap Q-See makes available. Their PC PSS software is absolute junk. CMS doesn't work for crap. And their web interface only works in Internet Explorer AFTER you turn off ActiveX filtering in your security tab of IE. If you use FireFox, install IE Tab Plugin 4.x and add your site to always open using IE engine and it should work ok. If Q-See was a decent company, these NVR units would work in any browser. They could at a minimum release a add-on for FireFox and Chrome.

 

That being said, this isn't too bad of a deal since they upgraded the HD to 2TB and the cameras to 1080p. Another thing that is VERY important, the camera lens is 65-70 degrees view. The 720p cameras were only 45 deg. Which makes covering an area that is close to your camera very limited.

I flashed to the latest firmware. They provide a single update.bin for all the models (804 808 and 8016). It is all the same hardware, they just make you pay hundreds more for a software encoded switch. Ridiculous. If they'd just put in a faster ARM processor (which are super cheap and fast thanks to them being used in just about every smart phone) and the TI chip which does the decoding of the cameras into the NVR.

 

Honestly, I wish a company would come up with a new cheap NVR box, with an ARM processor running Android for the operating system. A good clean modern interface with lots of future firmware/software upgrades.

 

If Q-See doesn't offer a serious upgrade to their new NVR line I'm going to have to look to another brand.

I got my 4 channel kit at Costco for $599 over a year ago.. and I contacted their sales dept and they have very low chance of selling the qc808 or qc8016 at Costco anytime soon. Which is disappointing because I prefer to buy from costco and all the hardware of the 804 - 808 - 8016 has been confirmed to be the exact same performance, it is nothing more than a software switch that they charge a whole lot more for.. The total FPS is the same on all units.. And they say 30FPS, but often you get about 15FPS even on the main display.. It is really too bad they didn't put a better/faster set of chips in the unit.. Much more is discussed on these threads

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32554

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=33075

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=33196

Looks like the QC804 is available again at Costco (back in stock), but according to Q-See, they have no plans to sell the 8016 there. Too bad. It seems Costco had the best prices and I have 2 sites that I was waiting on the 8016 for. Q-See's store wants $3000 for an 8016 with 12 cameras, and a few other sites are selling it for $1700 with 8 702p cameras. https://www.google.com/search?q=QC8016

I do see a small trend that the QCN8001D 1080p cameras are slowly coming down in price.

I found it on their FAQ section under Support.

Oh there it is. http://qsee.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1877 Looks like they made it a single update.bin (14.4MB) for all 3 models. Doesn't look like it does too much unless you are running cameras other than their branded models.

This Firmware has the following fixes and functions:

- 1. Improves ONVIF IP Camera support

If your still following this post - I see Q-See has a firmware update for the QC804/8/16. Not sure what fixes are included.

I don't see it on their site. Are they only giving it out upon request? I'd sure like it if someone attempted to use the 8016 firmware on the 804 since from what everyone can tell, it is all the same hardware. viewtopic.php?f=19&t=33196&p=217187#p217187

Thx for the input. From a CPU perspective, it seems the specs are the same. There is a high probability they are also using a hardware decoder card for displaying video, but i haven't had a chance to check yet.

I think someone mentioned it was a broadcom h.264 decoder chip. The debate may be if it is any different in the 804 808 or 8016. Since Q-See states the same total unit frame rate for all models, it is pretty likely the same chip.

 

On another note, I see Costco is out of stock on the 804.. So perhaps we'll see the 8016 in time. Even tho Q-See said it would be at Costco first of the year.

Aaron, Rory hasn't posted here in a long time. I'm not sure why he left but you can most likely get in touch with him on his own site if you want. I don't know if he got hit with the ban hammer or left on his own. PM me if you want.

Oh boy, I came into this thread searching for troubles with the Active X control and never even looked at the post date! Thank you. I PM'ed you.

QT is only for cameras (as in input devices), not for NVRs (as in decoding/playback devices).

QT uses RTSP which is rather buggy.... You might have a beta firmware, too

Latest firmwares solves the RTSP bug..,

I have the latest firmware on the QC448 DVR and what shipped with my QC804 NVR (Q-See said there was no new update yet).

I am not accessing the cameras directly, only via web browser direct to the DVR and NVR. So in Firefox and Chrome, it wants to use Quicktime, which results in no video streaming.

 

I tried several tips and tricks on the web to try to direct chrome and firefox to VLC. But couldn't get any results. Including changing control panel -> programs -> default programs -> set associations .rtp and .rtsp (and several other streaming types) to point from quicktime to VLC.

 

Works in IE of course, but as I reported before since IE10.x, the webrec.cab is causing the browser to crash now and then. Worked fine before. I sure hope webrec.cab plugin is getting a complete upgrade for all the models at some point. It sure has its problems (and would be nice if it was signed too).

Well we have tested the unsigned version on latest IE and Windows 8 too... Works, but needs to pay attention.

HTML5 requires special compression, encoding in a format that is not natively supported by the hardware

Strange. I turned off the ActiveX blocking, turned security down all the way, added as a safe site, and only 1 out of 6 machines accepted the change permanently. But now I don't have to worry, I have it installed permanently for now.

 

Re the HTML5 - True I should have thought of that. I tend to get a little ahead of trends. I realize that would be pretty difficult for an OEM to already be fully supporting something so new.

 

Any thoughts on getting other browsers to not try using the Quicktime plugin? I did some research to try to get VLC and other mp4 players to grab the MIME type, but never figured it out. For some odd reason, for the 3 systems I have running that I try to connect to with Chrome/FF - Quicktime rarely works. Kind of gets stuck in a [logo] dot dot dot dot trying to load screen and doesn't come up. I'd love it if I could get a different player to embed and take care of it.

Been busy but for starters here is a screen shot of an extra stripped down LIVE only version I threw together last night for a client with a slow connection ...snip...

Cool Rory, can we get a copy once you have it ready? I think I could use this for a couple of my clients. Navigating PSS is too difficult for them. I'd love something I could run (perhaps with command line arguments?) or simple presets that would allow them to pull it right up with no login and extra stuff.

Have you tried:

1a. Put the address of the DVR in the "trusted sites" list of IE

or

1b. Change settings for "Download Unsigned ActiveX" and "Initialize and script ActiveX controls not marked as safe for scripting" to "prompt"?

2. Run IE with admin rights...

Yup. Tried them all. Hit and miss. Worked on one machine, not on 5 others. Got tired of the trouble and just researched how to install it dedicated so there is no future annoyance. IE 10.0.2 is so protective. I wish Q-See (Dahua) made a signed version of the driver, or better yet, had a HTML5 interface or full plugin for Firefox/Chrome.

Hello everyone, after banging my head against the wall with lots of PC's with IE10 and it not letting it use the webrec.cab install.. or more so that it rejects it because it has no certificate... which by the way Q-See, you need to fix this and provide firmware updates to all your DVR units! --- I downloaded the webrec.cab myself, extracted it, wrote an install read me, and put it out on my web server for you..

 

http://slfarms.us/misc/WebrecForqsee.zip

 

From the read me I put in the zip file:

 

" Go into the webrec folder, right click on webrec.inf --> then select install

- From this point on Internet Explorer should play from the q-see DVR. "

 

After you do this, it will pull up just fine in IE on your machine. I can't believe what a pain this was before I figured out who to just download the cab, extract it, then install manually. Come on Q-See. Fix this. Since Microsloth went overboard with their security this is unusable to so many people. Hope this helps everyone out.

You might try user root, psw vizxv at the shell prompt. That got me into the WAN port on my QC804. It is probably the same going in through the LAN ports. I nosed around inside soon after I got it last fall. Found that most of the NVR behaviors are inside a single executable, making it hard to do any reverse engineering there. But the linux environment is there and might let you query the hardware configuration, especially identifying the processor, memory size, etc.

I'll PayPal anyone $20 bucks who can either absolutely report the exact model and speed of the ARM main processor, as well as the Broadcom h.264 decoder chip AND if it has any differences between the 804 808 and 8016. A bonus $20 if you prove to me that you can hack the 804 up to 8016 firmware and have it actually work. I'd love to put our conspiracy theory to an end, whether right or wrong.

 

Note, no fudging/hacking the results to make $20.

Q-SEE only sell they dont make anything they just re-badge

Hi. the only way to exspand from 4 to 8 is a new NVR and the other problem thats about to happen dahua now have 3 and 5mp cameras and guess what they will not work on ........ well they do but take the 4 way nvr to run one 3mp you would have to remove the other 3

Yes, I understand. I've stated it before that it is rebranded stuff. But when I refer to the unit it wouldn't make much sense to always state Q-See (rebranded Dahua) every time.

 

Interesting info on the 3mp and 5mp cameras. Thanks for sharing. It's a good thing that ARM processors are so cheap and increasing in performance so rapidly (4 core chips now, with plenty of 8 core chips on the way). Those billions of people buying cell phones help lower for the price for dedicated devices like NVR's. I'd sure love to have a 16 5mp camera setup with 30fps on each channel someday and likely in 2016-2018 time frame we'll start to see both camera and NVR starting to use the HEVC H.265 standard. 30%-45% the data size as H.264 and capability to handle resolutions up to 8,192×4,320 (35.3mp).

Thanks - that was a really useful post!

For turning off the IR, you should be able to unplug the IR board with no issues. I tried this with my HFW3300C, and it worked as normal, since it doesn't use the IR board sensor for anything except turning the IR on and off. If you power up the camera and cover/uncover the sensor, the LEDs switch on and off immediately, so the software apparently has nothing to do with switching (in this version, at least).

 

Other cams, like the Vivotek IP8332, use the IR board sensor to switch between day and night mode as well (which is why it's much faster than the Dahua), but the Dahuas use the video signal to decide when to switch modes.

You are welcome. I took the time to post what I knew because when I first got the system I was very confused on many features. As for disconnecting the IR board, I tried this when I took apart the unit (shown here viewtopic.php?f=19&t=33075 ). If I remember right, when I disconnected it the entire camera didn't function at all. It seems that it has a trigger tied into the 4 pin connector that disables the whole thing. No biggie. As I said before, putting a piece of black tape, or using a dry erase black marker to cover the sensor will just turn the LEDs on all the time.

 

Edit update: I think I remember better now. When I unplugged the IR board, the camera did work, but got stuck in black and white mode. Which at that time of experimenting, I hadn't yet logged directly into the camera where you can force it to stay in color mode all the time. So, yes - there is a chance that you could unplug the IR board and still have functionality. But, my cameras are all mounted now, so I'm not going to take one down to experiment. I'm willing to bet it would work now that I've thought about it.

Ok, you got a good point, that hardware is cheap. But you usually pay for hardware or software? If you only pay for hardware, phones and others should be damn cheap

- I understand the business model. Entice with standard hardware that is limited by software. Microsoft taught us that a long long time ago. But as for smart phones, Google pretty much gives away Android compared to Microsoft and Apple (which doesn't put it on anything other than their own hardware) - companies like Q-See and Dahua are just plane lucky that Google didn't spend 0.000001% of its resources writing an Android/Chrome chunk of code that enabled any basic hardware to operate as a NVR.. Or we'd have $300 i5 or ARM based laptops able to handle 20 1080P cameras without breaking a sweat. And there would be an army of Google Play developers writing awesome software for it.

 

My Galaxy Note 2 has a quad core ARM chip, 2GB ram, 96GB flash memory, records 1080p video with ease, and cost me about $325 total. I'm willing to bet it has more processing power than the QC804. Of course, that was the cost with a 2 year data plan subscription. So I'm paying for the hardware in installments if you want to look at it that way. I'm ok with Q-See releasing what is likely the same hardware and enabling features via software. I'm not ok with the price difference being so extreme. And I guess why I'm the most bitter person on this forum about it is, it was one of their sales people who told me that if I got the 804 all I had to do was "buy a PoE switch" to add more cameras. So I planned my purchase based on that. And now I've got $300 worth of cameras sitting around that my NVR cannot see while I wait for the price on the QC8016 to come down in price so I can actually expand things.

With that in mind, I wouldn't doubt if it isn't just a software lock. When Costco was first selling the QC804, some people got upgraded to the QC808 for free. The only practical reason for Q-See to do that is if their cost was insignificant.

That is our current conspiracy theory. But you know we conspiracy theory people, we sometimes wish for the conspiracy to be true. Maybe some brave soul will get an 804, obtain the 8016 firmware, and try to flash it. That person won't be me. I can't afford to buy a new unit.

I guess the "proof in the pudding" as they say, in regards to if AvertX will stick around and become a major player in the IP cam / NVR world is if we see firmware updates and decent response times to fixing bugs (even when they aren't reported). I hope they stick around and keep releasing interoperable product lines and the prices drop on Costco's site. I may give them some consideration in a year or so if they show to be a solid company and keep releasing software upgrades to not just the NVR, but also the PC/Android/iPhone apps.

 

Question for you Sloride: Does the web interface require a plugin? If so, do they have plugins for IE/Firefox/Chrome etc? Would be really cool if they adopted HTML5 so it was universal.

 

Tip to AvertX, assign an official representative to monitor forums such as this to answer questions. You'll likely get more sales showing a public response to these discussions.

(I'll email their support and tell them of this forum)

Kyle: Perhaps I was remembering the screen that allows you to turn off DHCP for the WAN network. My mistake. So yeah, no option to bridge the NVR's LAN into your LAN other than putting the camera on your local network behind a PoE switch. Although to give them credit, at least it can see cameras over its WAN port.

The 4, 8, and 16 Station QC NVRs all have the same 4 POE ports. I have the QC808. A seperate POE switch is needed for more than 4 cams on the 8 and 16 channel stations.

Yup. And for the price, they could at least let the user still show up to 16 cameras on the QC804 even if the frame rate is slow. Q-See told me there was a different chipset to handle the extra streams on the higher models. In this case it would possibly be the Broadcom h.264 decoder chip I was told they use. Which likely has a cost difference of $10-$15 to them but they want $200-$400 more for the more advanced models. Kind of disappointing.

 

By the way - something I forgot to note before. If you put your cameras on your local 192.168.x.x LAN, either log in to them and give them a manual hard set IP address, or go into your router and set them to have a reserved DHCP preset IP. Otherwise your NVR will lose them every time they reboot because when you configure them under the "Remote Devices" menu of the NVR, it attaches to the IP address at the time and won't find them again by itself. Since my router didn't seem to like to reserve an IP for them reliably, I just set each one with a permanent IP address outside the IP pool range of my router. Now it is totally fixed and reliable.

 

you wrote: "I'm still surprised there isn't even a forwarded port for each camera's interface (ie: port 192.168.0.3:8502 goes to camera 10.1.1.20:85, 192.168.0.3:8503 goes to camera 10.1.1.30:85, etc)." Excellent idea -- Well, maybe someday Q-See (or their OEM Dahua) will read these forums and adopt our ideas and feature requests. I'm pretty sure Q-See can do very little to improve their products without paying for it with Dahua. That extra layer of middle man just means we get fixes and feature improvements far less than needed.

 

Wow, look at this bad boy! http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/nvr60006000d6000dr-3.html

Input 128ch@D1/64ch@720P/32ch@1080P

Transmission 128ch@D1/64ch@720P/32ch@1080P

Recording 128ch@D1/64ch@720P/32ch@1080P

 

If you happen to figure out how to lift the 4 camera limit, definitely update. It's possible the only hardware change is the POE switch (I assume the QC808 have 8 POE ports and so fourth).

If bricking the unit wasn't a concern, I'd attempt to run the firmware update for the QC8016. But Q-See wrote me back that I can't have the firmware images, because they don't have any new ones to release.

Hmm, found your thread because I have a similar issue with the QC804. One of my cameras is picking up a neighbors light so it won't switch to night-vision. I believe you can set a manual time for the camera to switch the IR-filter off and turn on the IR lights .. but you can't seem to access those camera settings from the NVR software.The NVR does have it's own DHCP and it does put the cameras on a 10.1.1. IP# set. It's incredibly silly that you can't manually set that to match your network. Besides going to an external POE switch, did you find (or does anyone know) a way to manually set the internet network IP?

Glad finding the thread helped. When I was first figuring out my system these forums helped me quite a bit. So onto your questions...

 

Yes it is a little annoying that Q-See puts it on a subnet that you cannot access very easily.. Or more so, that they NVR doesn't allow you to configure ALL the settings you can configure via the direct camera web interface. It took me a month to realize that the camera was setting its own time to a different time zone (than the NVR) and every night at 2am rebooting and re-syncing its time to 1 hour ahead of the NVR. Among many other things, you cannot make several changes to the cameras without directly hitting their web interface.

 

The good news is (as I think you've realized) if you buy your own PoE switch, you can put all the cameras on your local network (i.e. giving them all 192.168.x.x addresses) and the NVR will find them over its WAN port. Unfortunately while you can add a hundred cameras on your local LAN, the 804 will only let you add 4 of them -- or 8 for the QC808 -- or 16 for the QC8016, while the debate remains if the hardware is really much different between the units other than several hundred dollars in price. So you can take that route, I think I got a pretty good Zyxel PoE switch for around $110. Now, if you don't want to do that, you can connect up your cameras to your local LAN, use configtool.exe to find them on your network (assuming your router gave them a DHCP address), then right click and open them in Internut Exploder (no advanced controls are available in any other browser) -- install the activex cab file (select "Allow for all sites" or you'll be clicking that often) and then you can fine tune all the things the NVR doesn't allow you to set. There are lots of features you need to comb thru to get things just like you want. Something wise to do is change the camera's default login admin pw: admin to admin pw: so if someone taps into your network they can't jump right onto your camera.

 

NOTE If you put your cameras on your main LAN, they will all try to set ports 85 37777 37778 via UPnP just like your NVR does. And guess what this causes? A whole lotta confusion to your router -- You'll need to go into your camera's network config and turn off the UPnP settings. None have to be on for the NVR to find them on the local LAN. And if you don't, your NVR won't be able to grab the ports itself.. So if you try to connect remotely, you'll be a bit confused that you'll get one camera at a time and it crashes.. I like to let my NVR handle all my viewing on the internet. So let your NVR have those ports, of it you really want, set the cameras to live on other ports.. although you'll have to take note of the info.. because you'll have a total of 15 camera related ports exposed to the internet world

 

After you are done, plug it back into your NVR's subnet and it will keep the settings and you should be good to go. As for setting the camera to NEVER turn on the LED lights. As far as I've discovered, not possible. You can set the camera into black and white or color mode, as well as set times for it to change into each mode (or auto which is default), but no matter what, the LED lights turn on when they want to turn on. I actually took an odd route with 2 of my cameras, I used a dry erase black marker and blacked out all the glass (except the camera lens center of course) - and that caused the LED lights to always be on and be barely visible. Since I run all my cameras now in color mode 24/7 the IR light doesn't really matter. For the one part of my back yard that isn't bright enough, I have a motion sensing light so anytime something (including squirrels) is back there, it lights right up and the motion record feature turns on and it is all good.

 

Q-See could have very easily (software wise), simply turned the on board PoE ports into a network bridge switch -- in other words, have it bridge into your LAN over its WAN port.. come to think of it, maybe it does do this. I never turned off its DHCP server. Perhaps I should have tried that. I was so angry that after I tried to plug a 5th camera into its 10.1.1.x network it freaked the whole thing out. I didn't even know it would detect cameras over its WAN port onto your local LAN until someone gave me the tip (although I did try but must have done something wrong the first time).

 

You can do other things from the camera's manual configuration, like give it a unique device name (instead of the serial # as a name) - for example "FrontDoor" and various other things that make it much easier to deal with when it is on your LAN.

 

If you don't have a PoE switch you can plug the camera into a 12v power supply and plug it into your non-PoE router. You could try plugging your computer into the PoE switch on the NVR, maybe get a DHCP address, and then use configtool.exe to find it.. although not sure that would work or not. If you do more than 4 cameras, just do yourself the favor and buy a good 16 port PoE switch for your entire network. Then you can see everything from the NVR and your computers.

 

It is a shame that Q-See's NVR has such promise, yet such annoying shortfalls that it turns off a huge amount of customers. Heck, their PSS software feels so clunky and non user friendly that their Android software even feels more modern... and even it kind of stinks half the time. Their software always gives very generic error messages, has little to no mouse over tool tips, and their manuals barely cover anything. Their web interface only works with IE unless you want to do anything more advanced that look at the cameras, and to top it off the Active-X .cab control now crashes IE version 10 across several of their DVR (and this NVR model) A bit more processing power and some firmware updates and it would be close to a small enterprise class system. But they are hung up on such silly little issues.

 

I only see them fixing some bugs in future firmware releases if we are lucky, and unlikely adding any new features (such as support for other browsers, more camera control without logging into the camera, etc). They seem to do the minimum on a platform, then release a new platform and ignore the previous models. As grumpy as I sound, I still like my system and will stick with it. Once they release the 8016 at a price that doesn't have an absolutely ridiculous price mark up, I've got several other sites to buy units for.

 

Hope this helps.