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salesguy

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Posts posted by salesguy

  10. Posted · Edited by Guest

    I have the following available from a recent order and the testing I posted on this site a few weeks ago. The below are extras, all new in box (the units I tested I actually installed and kept in place) and ready to ship. I wanted to offer these here before I put them all on ebay in case anyone is interested. These are branded k&d but are of course Dahua:

     

    1. mini-bullet, 720p, IR, outdoor, POE, 6mm $145

    http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/ipc-hd2100--22.html

     

    2. mini-dome, 1080p, outdoor, POE, 3.6mm $160

    http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/ipc-hdb3200c--17.html

     

    3. 3MP bullet, IR, POE, outdoor 3.3-12mm, $299

    http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/ipc-hfw3300c--15.html

     

    4. 3MP IR dome - $279

    http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/ipc-hdbw3300--14.html

     

    5. mini-dome 720p, 8mm, $145

    (same as #1)

     

    Shipping would be $10 to $15 depending on what is ordered.

     

    Please email me directly if you are interested - peter.cannell@gmail.com.

     

    cheers.

  11. Posted

    For my outdoor floodlights I started using the honeywell automatic timer that utilizes your longitude & latitude to adjust for sundown and turns the lights on based on that schedule (plus you can offset if you want). Great little timer and more reliable than photosensors in my opinion.

     

    http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-Econoswitch-RPLS740B-Programmable-Switch/dp/B004AP92N2/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_0_0

  12. Posted

    I haven't looked at these yet (can't do it at work), but my 1.3MP Dahua bullet was very pixellated on the default MJPEG settings. When I turned the bit rate to max, it improved a lot, and looked much closer to the H.264, but with lots higher bandwidth (maybe 2x, if I remember correctly).

     

    I actually had it set at max, which was 10 or 15mbit, and it was still pixelated. The 3MP cameras pump out 24mbit max on mjpeg. while that isn't necessarily an issue for my network, the picture quality was not as good.

  13. Posted

    Out of respect for forum sponsors that sell these cameras I'm keeping this thread about the technology, not business.

     

    It's easy enough to get on alibaba and take a chance with who you find. Those who have done that and risked their business & money doing so would not appreciate reviews of individual chinese sellers - sorry.

     

    I will be posting the extra cameras I have in the classifieds or on ebay, in order to recoup what I have in them.

     

    One note - when you buy from China the price of the camera is only one consideration, shipping is either slow or very expensive, payment costs 5 to 8% of order total to get to the seller & in local currency, plus there is a very real and tangible risk of loss to the buyer with no recourse. So keep that in mind when evaluating what a US seller who is a known quantity is asking for a camera.

  14. Posted

    An update here including video samples uploaded to dropbox, hopefully they can be downloaded and viewed. They are quite large, I set BI to 100% quality & recorded as AVI with h.264 encoding. Assuming you have a fast connection I would download the whole file & then watch in VLC to get the best quality.

     

    What I have to show:

     

    1. "livingroom" files are the mini-bullet 1.3MP camera, one with MJPEG and one with H.264. There is a clear difference in quality, especially on the kitchen wall. I'm not sure why this is the case, all settings remained the same, but MJPEG is worse for sure.

     

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/mgbxhhtcpcoi275/livingroom_mjpeg.avi

     

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuk5bqfhc5t1ri5/livingroom_h264.avi

     

    2. 2MP mini-dome 2.8mm outside - this is one of my favorite cameras, the picture is great and the coverage is ideal for the front of our house.

     

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/l1d7epjaax2jcvz/driveway.20121015_160728.avi

     

    3. Vivotek FD8136 as comparison, and I realized how out of focus it must be when looking at this video. Time to climb up there and adjust.

     

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/otb7w9d139k2m38/frontdoor_vivotek_fd8136.avi

     

    Lastly I have included a screen shot of the power draw in mw for these cameras, as you can see they are quite low.

     

    Cheers.

    1226308088_ScreenShot2012-10-15at4_40_41PM.thumb.png.43ce9e499c50384ea873f77f2dc4a6cd.png

  16. Posted

    You can post videos on Vimeo or Youtube.

     

    Are the cameras set for autoexposure or 1/4 second, wasn't sure about your comments. I don't see any halo or IR light bleed in your shots, good job setting the rubber grommet. Definately, the image from the 3MP bullet looks way better than the image at night from the 3MP dome. Look at the trees and such, they seem soft/blurry on the dome and sharp on the bullet. The some seems to have center sweet spot where it looks sharp and quickly diminishes as it gets closer to the edges of the image.

     

     

    I'll setup a vimeo account and upload some videos for this thread.

     

    Check the file names - they have the exposure detail in the name (hopefully it shows up for you).

  17. Posted

    I take it zoneminder does not support in camera MD? Does it support speed up on MD at the server? I know Milestone supports this, so in theory, you could drop the frame rate down to 1 fps for each camera while monitoring for MD, and then on MD event, speed up to 15 or more FPS for the recording. This drops the CPU requirements significantly as the majority of time, most of cameras are just streaming 1 fps, and when there is motion, maybe 1 or 2 cameras then stream full FPS.

     

    Zoneminder certainly does motion detection - and your suggestion was a great reminder, I meant to try that and forgot. It made a huge difference in load on the system. Thanks for the tip!

     

    It does take a few seconds to get back to full speed, but the savings in CPU cycles is worth it. Now i have it set to 5fps when idle. The only downside is if you want to record say 10 seconds prior to the trigger, you will only have 5fps during that period.

     

    You can also use any trigger you want if it can generate a TCP message, which zoneminder can listen for and then start recording. Very handy if you want to use PIR sensors or integrate into a home security system.

     

    Sorry for veering off topic.

  18. Posted

    I will see what I can do - videos require a place to host them, I could do that from my home server and just link to them in the text here, if that works I'll do it plus add some high res images.

     

    Regarding your request - I don't have any equipment setup that will read license plates. It's to far from any of my cameras for that to be feasible. If that is a core requirement then you should be looking at a higher end class of camera, probably with a zoom lens.

     

    Facial recognition is possible though, at least in the sense that there are enough pixels to ID a person from many of the vantage points i have setup. I'll see what I can do on that.

     

    A note on software and zoneminder:

     

    Last night I had 4 dahua and 1 vivotek cameras running through zoneminder, all at full resolution & frame rate. It absoutely killed my server, it was running at a load average of 11.5/11.5/12.0 all night. I have an i7 quad core machine with 16gb ram and several SSD's and it was not able to handle the frames at that rate. Max load average should be 4 or less, higher than that and stuff stops working well. My network is setup with gigabit throughout, except the POE switch which is a linksys 8-port 15w/port switch with dual gigabit uplink ports. So from what I can tell there is zero network congestion.

     

    The server was seeing roughly 120 3MP images/sec (some were 2MP). From what I have seen of NVR specs, that would require a very high end dedicated server to handle. All of the dahua desktop & vertical series NVR's max out at 120fps at 1080P.

     

    I have used Blue Iris on the same server and it seemed more resource hungry than zoneminder, but it was hard to say. I'd be curious if anyone else is pushing 100+fps through blue iris at 1080P or 3MP.

     

    I'm not sure what the lesson is here, but sticking with 1080p as a max resolution and ensuring you have a solid network, good illumination, possibly additional PIR sensors (more on that later) and a dedicated NVR or high end server is the way to go. You certainly can't blow 90% of your budget on cameras and think you can figure out the rest, it just won't work.

  21. Posted

    The daytime image looks good and in focus. yard.

     

    Thanks - It is tricky to get the focus just right without a handheld screen or more experience. I'd love to have remote focus but that is a whole 'nother class of cameras.

     

    I just took the following shots just after dusk. The 3MP dome & bullet perform about the same, both show much more of the backyard with the shutter opened up to 1/4 exposure, and I fiddled with the "low-noise" and "low-blur" settings vs automatic. The automatic looked the worst to me, but of course there was no motion in these shots which would have been a blur for sure.

     

    I did also notice i get a decent amount of white light from the house next door which has flood lights directed in the general area. Not a ton but 200w of light.

     

    I also took one indoor dark shot with the dome, and the halo effect is gone as far as I can see, which means you simply have to make sure the rubber grommet thing is seated properly and touching the dome.

     

    Hopefully some of these shots help folks here make decisions between models & manufacturers, and I will follow up with the mini-dome info and then (eventually) with what I decided to go with and where.

     

    A few folks have asked me who I got these from and what I paid - I haven't responded because I don't want this to be about what deal you can get. You can get on alibaba and find out pricing easily, so for now I'm not going to talk about the deal in this context.

     

    cheers.

    manual_3MP_dome.thumb.jpg.5f60655d7454496f87681a2063efb4e1.jpg

    low_motion_blur_3MP_dome.thumb.jpg.466847d2319bf833327564ab82ebce99.jpg

    manual_1_4_shutter_3MP_dome.thumb.jpg.e7a9671d3124af3b7dc8f0a672c83e56.jpg

  22. Posted

    Updated back yard shot - 3MP dome with the seal pressed up against the dome to hopefully minimize the halo effect.

     

    Right not it's not dark, but I set it up so I thought I'd post what it looks like now. Will update later with a night shot. It will be truly night, there is barely any light back there.

     

    When I originally got into IP cameras, I thought it would be awesome to see all the wildlife and stuff going on at night, see who was walking or driving back there on that road. now I know it will take a $10k camera AND a $10k illuminator do light up the entire area with that level of detail. I'll settle for seeing what is on my patio.

     

    I do have no doubt the 3MP dome would work wonders inside, say to cover our livingroom/kitchen at night, but no way the wife would want this big sucker (it's really not that big) so noticeable. I might get away with a mini dome or mini-bullet at best in our main living areas.

     

    Question - what do folks think about the 3MP format being 2040x1536? I think the image size looks odd since all my monitors and such are widescreen. I wonder if there is a benefit to staying with resolutions that are in that format.

    3MP_dome_outside.thumb.jpg.701830bdaa085121b8c5db903e0f6ce5.jpg

  23. Posted

    FAT Unable to open input rtsp://admin:admin@10.0.0.71:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0&tcp due to: Success zm_ffmpeg_camera.cpp 95

     

    Source Type: ffmpeg

    Source path: rtsp://admin:admin@10.0.0.71:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0&tcp

    Source Colours 24bit colour

    Capture Width (pixels) 1280

    Capture Height (pixels) 960

    Preserve Aspect Ratio ()

    Orientation normal

     

    any ideas?

     

     

    That looks like a public IP - are you 100% sure zoneminder can get throught any firewalls or routers to get to the camera?

     

    If it is - get that password changed!

     

    Have you been able to open any other camera types using FFMPEG? Is FFMPEG checked under options - images - checked and correct path?

     

    I installed zoneminder 1.25.0 on ubuntu which included FFMPEG, I was never able to get it to compile on ubuntu no matter what I tried, so I went the easy route.

     

    Double check that FFMPEG stuff and report back.

  24. Posted

    It looks like the bullet is better to go with for now since the dome is causing softness for many.

    I hope Dahua engineers can get the issue fix.

     

    In the settings, you can set up a Multicast stream, but what software would you use to view the stream?

    And what settings would you set it up with, rtsp?

     

    These questions are probably outside the scope of a particular camera review - the most basic way to view the web interface of the camera itself, you can see the live stream, take snapshots & record video.

  25. Posted

    Good point on that rubber grommet - I will open up that dome and double check, it might not be in proper position. I'm still waiting to hear back from dahua engineering, they are on holiday in China until the 8th. I'm not ready to write off the 3MP dome just yet, the form factor is appealing and daytime pictures are great.

     

    Today I hope to get to the 2 models of mini-domes I have on hand (1.3mp and 2mp).

     

    Zoneminder setting exactly below.

     

    Source: FFMPEG (which doesn't have the settings you ask for - that is for remote)

     

    rtsp://admin:admin@192.168.1.150:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0?tcp

     

    1920x1080

     

    I haven't been successful getting "remote" type to work with many cameras, at least not these dahua.

     

    Remote Protocol:

    Remote Method:

    Remote Host Name:

    Remote Host Port:

    Remote Host Path:

    Remote image Colours: 24 bit colour (default)

    Capture Width (pixels): 1920 (default)

    Caputer Height (Pixels): 1080 ((default)

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