Magic of Philly

I know it's not in view. Great, isn't it!! I say that with my tongue in cheek of course - the reason I say that however is that the camera is doing exactly what the purpose of that camera is! You are absolutely correct - CCTV is not just for crime and is a conversation we have with people on a daily basis. In your suggestion of the guy coming to service the pool heater - again you are correct. If the owner of the property was concerned about ensuring the pool heater was serviced correctly then you wouldn't put the camera in that location to get a good view. Otherwise all you'd see is someone fiddling with the equipment but not have any real idea as to whether the service was done correctly. Here let me be the "arbitrator" between you and the other guy. I say, if face identification is important and at the same time capturing the whole area which includes protecting the window(s) and the pool heater, I would install two cameras, one zoomed to 12mm (assuming thats your optical zoom level) and the other unzoomed to default 2.8mm. If the one unzoomed to 2.8mm that happens to be capturing the broadest range of image cannot give you a clear enough facial image of the person, then the other camera which is zoomed to gate will capture the person's face very clearly as he/she is entering the premises, then the other camera will capture the same person perpetrating the crime, whatever that crime may be. So, you have a team work between two cameras, its a great compromise to having to install a 8MP, 12MP or even 16MP (if such camera exists) and the price associated with such cameras. An idea like this is what I did on my own house. You see, I own a house that have a front yard that is capable of parking two vehicle plus a walking path between the house and the front door by the side walk which is a gate. I have one 2.8mm 1080P HD TVI camera capturing as much as possible of the whole front yard, including the side walk, walking path to the door gate, the pavement where the cars pass by and some view of the other side walk enough to capture a person up to face altitude, then I have another camera installed right next to that one zoomed to 12mm, that camera only captures the front gate door by the sidewalk and because the camera is wide angle (1920x1080) it also extends to most of the gate where my vehicle enters, so this zoomed camera can capture anyone trying to open any of the both of these doors whether its my main gate entrance or the gate to my car's entrance/exit. Anyone who walks by my sidewalk gets clearly identified on the 12mm zoomed lense camera, while the other camera, the 2.8mm can pretty much tell me what happened in any of my areas but will not be enough to identify the person's face walking in the sidewalk, and if you digitally zoom into it, you will get a blurry face, but the other camera will give you a clear image of the person, the person still has to walk on that sector, after that anything else the person do that is not covered by the 12mm camera is covered by the 2.88 camera and that 12mm camera can positively identify the person seen on the 2.8mm camera doing vandalism/stealing, its teamwork between two cameras. A great cheap alternative to having to install one 12MP 2.8mm camera to do the whole entire job and the massive array of disk space associated with that kind of setup. Each of my cameras is setup to record in full hd, at a bitrate of 3 mbps, motion detection, HiKVision TVI DVR is setup to trigger recording the other 2.88mm camera if it is motion triggered in addition to the other 2.88mm camera having its own motion trigger rules an sensitivity (the most sensitive) defined as well, thats so that if there is a very tiny motion event passing on the 2.88mm camera that the motion may not trigger it, if it passes by the 12mm zoomed camera the motion rule for the 12mm camera will trigger itself to begin recording and it will also trigger the other 2.88mm camera to begin recording as well. The DVR is a 16 channel HD TVI 2.0 DVR with two 4TB hard drive for a total of 8 TB of storage (was told by my supply house it takes a max of 4 TB per HDD, and possibly 6TB per HDD, but went with 4TBx2 anyways). So, orange, install both cameras, leave the original 2.88MM 1080P camera and install a varifocal 2.88mm ~ 12mm 1080P camera next to it, and zoom it accordingly till you can see the gate as per your sample, that way you get both, the benefit of identify-ability and broadness.

Your DVR only takes Hikvision and ONVIF protocols, it can not record from an RTSP stream. If the audio on the RTSP stream is good enough for you, you could buy an NVR that does support RTSP and have it recording 24/7. But I would first try out the quality using a client like VLC before buying anything else. I got in contact with my converter's vendor/manufacturer and got a reply from them, they said that their converters do encode MP3/AAC to ONVIF, and that all what I have to do is choose '"disable" on the "G711a ver RTSP" on the ONVIF section, then the primary codec, MP3 or AAC whichever one I chose takes over for everything, including ONVIF, so I did that test, I chose AAC at 128 kbps, disabled 711, and connected that stream to my KT&C EZHD TVI DVR as an ONVIF IP camera and was able to see the stream, I opened up the IVMS-4500 smartphone app and was able to see a recording and its audio sounded in high quality, so I called it a success, but all what not 100% success, it appears that OMNI CMS for Windows which I had downloaded from ktncusa.com website's support page doesn't support the playing of audio for any videos that wasn't recorded using G711 ulaw/alaw, I did the experiment, here was the experiment I did: When playing back the same video from the same time frame for IP camera 1 on my smart phone I was able to hear the audio for that recording, when I attempted to playback the video for the same time frame for this same IP camera but this time using OMNI CMS for Windows I was only able to get video to show up, but no audio, I enabled audio (its always disabled by default), and no matter what I did, audio would no work. If I went to my converter's configuration page and I enabled G711 encoding for the ONVIF stream, then I am able to hear the low quality audio from OMNI CMS, but not if it was encoded using MP3 or AAC. Experiment phase #2: I tried another software, called IVMS-4200 CMS for Windows, so I went ahead and downloaded that, added my DVR. Since KT&C is pretty much a rebrand for HiKVision, I didn't have any trouble adding my DVR onto IVMS-4500 and then I tried to replay the video from IP camera #1 from the same time frame, then I enabled the audio and this time I had high quality stereo audio playing back along with the video. Conclusion: HiKVision's IVMS-4200 CMS for Windows supports other audio formats such as AAC and MP3 (keep in mind the experiment I ran only included AAC at 128 kbps, didn't try MP3, but I think its safe to assume MP3 would work too). It appears that KT&C's OMNI CMS for Windows can only playback recordings of Videos with Audio as long as the audio's codec used was G711, it will completely ignore the MP3 or AAC audio streams and just playback the video silently giving the impression or the illusion that the audio wasn't being recorded. This really sucks, I dont know why KT&C removed MP3/AAC support for H.264 Videos encoded with them? I mean, HiKVision apparently made their IVMS-4200 CMS Windows software compatible with AAC (dont know about MP3 as I haven't re-ran the experiment with MP3 encoded videos yet). So, HiKVision, being the parent company and the actual "innovator" here, is the one who creates these softwares and then makes them available to different re-branders such as KT&C, DVRDVS, among others and theoretically the software made available by these re-branders should support everything IVMS-4200 supports, right? If I can replay an "IP Camera" footage that was encoded with AAC in Stereo at 128 kbps just fine and successfully, I should also be able to play it using OMNI CMS, but that's not the case, KT&C changing the Graphical User Interface when they re-branded their software was not all what they did even though on the surface that's exactly what it appears since both software on the surface have the same feature base, (live, Playback, System, etc) with different variations such as HiKVision opting to use all numbers on their calendars (such as 6.2017) while KT&C's OMNI CMS using complete words (such as June 2017), I find it that OMNI CMS's GUI presentation is less confusing and more to the point than HiKVision's IVMS-4200 and I would really have loved to continue to use OMNI CMS primarily because that's the one I have been using for the past two years an so, but it looks like now I would have to get used to IVMS-4200 because its the only one where the AAC encoded audio of the 1080 IP Camera video works when you play it back from that software. It looks like KT&C deleted/disabled MP3/AAC support on their OMNI CMS in their process of creating their GUI design and customization, I wonder why KT&C removed MP3/AAC support off their customized software? Why? Is it that it was of no use for them? It is that they didn't plan to sell IP cameras with microphones that encoded in AAC/MP3? Or was it to keep costs down and not pay the menial license fee to use MP3 and AAC? I wouldn't have minded paying $5 extra for my DVR if it meant that ONMI CMS was going to be able to playback IP camera video streams encoded in AAC... Do you know of anyway that I can make ONMI CMS not ignore the AAC stream of the recorded video? If If it isn't presently possible I would use IVMS-4200 for the moment, but I would rather use OMNI CMS if I can make the AAC encoded audio work on it. Thanks.

KT&C forgot nothing there, since the DVR is not doing any encoding. All the video and audio encoding is done on the HDMI to IP converter, which then sends is as 0s and 1s over your network, and your DVR just receives the stream and stores it on the hard disk without doing any work on that data. Check your converter to see if you have any options to improve your audio, but if there aren't any, you probably will not be able to do much more. The HDMI to IP converter I have also outputs video streams over RTSP, do you know of a way to make my DVR accept the video stream as as IP camera over RTSP instead as "ONVIF". You are right in the aspect that my HDMI to IP converter IS encoding the audio as G711a PCM for ONVIF while it encodes to either MP3 or AAC to any other streams such as RTSP, Flash Video (flv), TS, etc, so I am paying special attention to RTSP and maybe I can add the IP camera as "IPCAM" instead as "ONVIF" on my DVR and then maybe I can get the DVR to accept the stream as RTSP? By the way, here is the configuration menu that I get with my HDMI to IP converter: This would be the main page: One of the features of this converter is that I can customize all URL's to match that of any URL that any special hardware might require for the stream to work, so I am thinking of emulating an KT&C IP camera's URL path so that I can "Trick" the DVR that it is an KT&C IP camera thus connecting as "IPCAM" Under "RTSP URL" field I have tried the following /h264/ch1/sub/av_stream based on what I have read on another forum, to simulate a "HiKVision IP Camera", but it didn't work, wasn't able to get it connect under "IPCAM" setting. by the way, my DVR only have two IP cameras add settings, its either IPCAM or ONVIF and I take it the "IPCAM" setting is if I want to add a "KT&C IP CAMERA" http://192.168.1.89/OutputP1MainE.html IF I can make the DVR accept the stream using the RTSP URL from my converter, then my problem would be solved as the DVR would be pretty much saving my full HD video with stereo AAC encoding on the hard drive.

The very best recovery software that I have used is called "Active File Recovery", dont get the "Active Partitions Recovery" and the later one only recovers partitions not files. You can either purchase "Active File Recovery" or torrent it, its your choice, but it works really well. Based on the images you have posted, it seems you have a DAHUA based DVR based on the menus you showed. "EDVR"? that sounds to me like a Dahua based DVR. These DVR's seems to be recording in a FAT32 partition table and the video files are regular .avi's or sometimes if not you rename them to .avi the file extension and then it will playback with any media player on your computer and in your computer you MIGHT have to install K-Lite Codec Pack if you get a codec error/cant play while attempting to play back these videos. So, once you install Active FILE Recovery, and having attached the DVR's SATA hard drive to a SATA to USB adapter you will select that hard drive on Active File Recovery, select to search all supported file systems (NTFS, FAT, FAT32, ExFat, EXT, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, HFS, HFS+, and so on and so on) basically select all file systems to look for data and then perform a "Super Scan" which in other words, is a sector by sector surface scan. WARNING!!! Immediately stop recording, turn off the DVR, you are overwritting data on the hard drive, including potentially data that you might want to recover, so lets say your hard drive is too little and gets filled up within a week or two and you have waited a week or two before turning off the DVR, well its too late, your data you wish to recover has been overwritten, but if you have a very big hard drive with optimal settings in your DVR (reasonable FPS like 6 FPS under a Reasonable bitrate like 2 mbps for full hd or 1 mbps for D1/960) then on a large hard drive it would take up to 30 to 60 to 90+ days for it to get filled, in that case the likelyhood of you having overwritten your critical data you are trying to recover within a week or two week time span is low - you are pretty much purchased a lottery ticket where your odds of winning is about 90%, a 90% change of getting back the data intact). All in all, good luck with your data recovery endeavor. WARNING #2: This will keep your DVR not recording while you have its hard drive taken out and performing the surface scans with the data recovery software. Unless you purchase a new hard drive and if the existing hard drive already have like a year or two in operation it could be almost upon time for you to buy a new hard drive anyways as a potential hard drive failure could be around the corner as you are reaching the hard drive manufacturer's Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) average calculations (the average the manufacturer SPECULATES the hard drive might fails after writing amount of TB's of Data on it and/or number of hours of powered on operations)