Mini SD DVR's

[Hectic 0]

And I thought looking for cameras and quads was annoying. What is it with CCTV and the utter lack of information from sellers or owners?

 

As much as I'd like to rant about it, I'll just get straight to the point. I couple of months ago, I settled on one of these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/NTSC-PAL-Mini-SD-Card-Motion-Detection-Digital-Video-Recorder-video-audio-/121129325401?pt=US_Surveillance_Digital_Video_Recorders_Cards&hash=item1c33ded359

 

The DVR arrived and seemed to be ok, although the sound quality is absolutely terrible and at times it will crash when powered on. Failing to enter recording mode and instead showing both LED's at about 1/10th their brightness. Removing the power does nothing, and the DVR sits there with the dim LEDs until the internal battery dies. Other than those gripes, it does what I want, which is automatic recording when powered on and file saving when power is removed.

 

But those two gripes have me wanting to try another one, although there's absolutely no way I'm going to start ordering different units hoping they wont suffer from the same problems. If the sound quality was ok, I could deal with the occasional crash and battery drain.

 

Does anyone have experience with any of the other comparable units on Ebay? You would think Youtube would be flooded with reviews and samples, but that's not true at all. The only videos are worthless sales pitches, or video samples without captured audio, instead there's usually some annoying song dubbed over the video track or no audio at all.

 

For the record, the sole purpose of the mini DVR is for a backup system that powers on when a motion sensor is triggered. Please, don't suggest that I get a quality DVR, because I have a flat out amazing self configured PC based system including scripts to perform certain tasks with the push of a button. I just need something cheap for the motion triggered system. I assume any DVR with a "reset" button has the crash bug, so I'm mostly interested in the others around the $60-$80 range. But ONLY if they capture quality audio.

 

If anyone has any experience with other comparable units, I would appreciate any info you can provide. A sample video with sound would be awesome.

 

Thanks

[SectorSecurity 0]

In that price range about all you are going to get is cheap stuff rebranded out of china. Chances are the units are going to be hit and miss with quality. This is about what I would expect when dealing with ebay.

 

I don't really deal with low end units, however I would suggest maybe a Q-See or Night-Owl system, you can usually find them pretty cheap.

 

As for the system crashing I wouldn't go as far as to say any unit with a reset has this problem. It is likely due to badly coded software in use on the DVR.

 

Again this is a prime example of you will get what you pay for, and if all you want to pay is about 80$ then you will have to live with these minor defects.

[SectorSecurity 0]

Should have mentioned if you want to due away with the DVR just get an IP cam with edge recording to an SD card.

[jeromephone 6]

You don't always need top of the line stuff but you never need bottem of the line stuff. main things we look for in a supplier are support, return policy, delivery times and price. We don't want to be ripped off but if the supplier is within a few dollars of the lowest unknown merchant we will always buy from the favored supplier. We have found the more business we do with one vendor the pricing sometimes is even better than we can get anywhere else.

[Hectic 0]

Thanks for the replies. After making my post, I decided to attack the sound issue again. After some testing, it turns out the DVR has a mic level input, and the $3 CCTV mic I am using has a line level output, so the quality issue was due to very bad distortion. I built a circuit to lower the input voltage to the DVR and it did the trick. It actually sounds surprisingly good for an 8khz sample rate. Very happy about that.

 

As far as the crash bug, it doesn't ever seem to happen when removing and reinserting the SD card a lot during testing. I think the crash might be related to a bad physical connection between the card and socket. It wouldn't be the first time. I'm going to try a different SD card, and after last night, the slot should be broken in nicely (TWSS). I removed and reinserted the card about 20 times, once after each capture test and the crash didn't occur once. Hell, maybe it was crashing because of the excessive voltage to the audio input. Doubtful, but anything's possible.

 

For now I'm just glad I got the audio situation straightened out and can justify keeping it. I bought this DVR because I liked the appearance and the I/O layout. Plus I cut holes and routed wires specifically with this unit in mind, so using a different one now would ruin all of that.

[Securame 0]

At that price, even I am willing to give it a try... Just got 1pc for testing.

[SectorSecurity 0]

I can buy 10 straight from China and remove the middle man

 

Let me know how these work and I may consider it, I get a lot of request for people wanting simple motion only and install would be a breeze.

[Hectic 0]

These things are a headache, but after some out of box thinking, I have come up with some conclusions and solutions to the problems. In order to get this thing working with a line input and working without crashing, I have to build two circuits. One is a voltage divider and switching circuit for the microphone, which I have already built as I mentioned in another post. The switching part comes into play because I also need the microphone's default line level output. The second circuit is a timer to prevent crashing, which will actually be wired in series with a primary timer, I still need to make the secondary timer, but I'm pretty sure it will solve the crash problem.

 

Although if you were use the thing manually, pretty much only the divider circuit would be needed if using a line-in source. It doesn't have to be as complicated as my setup, which needs to be automated.