Does anyone recognize this DVR card or software?

[RichTJ99 0]

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5850613910

 

I am looking into buying that but wanted to know if anyone had any ideas on what card it might actually be?

[rory 0]

dont know, but i think its chinese ...

 

Either way I wouldnt buy a DVR card/system from Ebay, especially since the seller doesnt have a company website.

[Jasper 0]

dont know, but i think its chinese ...

 

Either way I wouldnt buy a DVR card/system from Ebay, especially since the seller doesnt have a company website.

 

I can't believe how many people get burned on eBay. I will only buy something from eBay if I know the item real well and I'm able to speak with the seller and also have some recourse.

 

People think they're getting a deal but they end up spending twice as much money than what they would have if they would have just bought the real product in the first place.

[scottj 0]

It is a chinese generic board. The seller has a 72% gross profit margin on that board, so if you do the math you can see it is very cheap.

 

Scottj

[RVRBOY420007 0]

DEFINATELY JUNK!! GOOD PC CARDS COST GOOD MONEY AND IF IT WAS GOOD AT THAT PRICE HE COULD RUN THE INDUSTRY AND WOULDN'T BE SELLING IT ON E-BAY.

[timmah 0]

Ok, I always see people saying that the cheap cards suck, low quality, blah blah blah.

 

Here is my question, what then is the difference between the "cheap" cards and the expensive ones? At ISC last year I saw many different manufacturers and 99% of the cards used the 878a chip. If that chip is used then the picture quality should be about the same...

 

So then it comes to hardware features that are unique to the card, hardware compression, etc. I can understand that that adds price to the card but many "expensive" cards don't have that built in as well. (like the geo cards)

 

So then, if the hardware is pretty much the same, it's just the software... If the end user isn't looking for web access, PTZ control, object detection, blah blah, then what is the difference?

 

Then you say, reliability, ok so at the price of the "generic" card at 100 and the equivalent "brand name" card at 800, the end user could buy 4 card to spare and still save money!

 

But lastly, PRICE OF HARDWARE DOES NOT = QUALITY. I think the dvr hardware is highly inflated because it's not as main stream a market... look at the prices for a brand new video capture card at mid grade consumer level, its ~200. THAT is for NEW technology, developed within the past yr-6mo or so... most of the dvr cards have been developed years ago and cost of production should have gone down severely. Do you honestly want me to believe that when Tivo's can sell for ~200 and be bundled with lots more tech than a dvr card that the actual manufacturer of these cards cost more than a few dollars?

 

I think the real value comes from the software that comes with the card but that is overpriced as well... These companies will never be able to stop pirates when the factory that OEMs their cards also sell to ANYONE else. They should stop the business model of selling their "superior" hardware for insanely high prices and market their software.

 

Security companies should stop charging their customers 400% markup for overpriced hardware and charge fairly for their expert services. The market has changed since hardware multiplexers and tape rotations. Anyone sys/network admin can set up a dvr installation.

 

This is just MHO, if I am wrong and there is a good explanation for the prices please clue me in. I really would like to know the difference and not just that the price makes it better. In the computer age there are only like 4-5 major hardware factories that build the components for ALL other companies (geo, magic radar, kodi, ati, nvidia, etc), usually hardware quality isn't that much of an issue, it's more of the original hardware design.

[Thomas 0]

Except you fail to take into account the following:

 

Some boards do have extra hardware on the board. Multiplexing chips for instance that aren't software based.

 

R&D for the boards.

Drivers for the boards.

Obeying patent law.

Support for SDKs.

[timmah 0]

That didn't answer much... what boards have the multiplexing chips? How much are those chips themselves? Unlike an MPEG processor, I can't imagine there are very expensive. Does a multiplexing chip justify an 800% difference? Do the geo cards have one? If so then how can they be sold for 1/4 of the price on ebay if the manufacturer uses the same parts?

 

R&D for the boards should have been absorbed years ago when it was released, if this was the case, there would not be new video cards released every 6 months and old ones dropping in value at over 50%. For example, when was the last time geo released a COMPLETELY newly designed card with a different video processor?

 

What patent? These boards are not anything new.

 

Support for SDK should follow Software sales model, not overpriced hardware.

 

Regardless of that, I'm talking about compairing apples to apples, lets say a completely legit board, not cloned from any other design, why would that be inferior? Same hardware... only difference would be the software, then we could choose what software to buy ourselves.

 

What would happen to the PC industry if processors were "locked" to just one OS?

[rory 0]

Its not the same hardware. GeoVision is a software developer, their cards are made by a manufacturer in Korea.

[timmah 0]

HERE is the only patent that Geo has in the US. It has nothing to do with their hardware, only a "method" of capturing and displaying, it's basically a software patent. So maybe they can also sue everyone else that is making dvr software...

 

Either way, NO HARDWARE patent.

 

Here is something else...

http://www.electroketch.com/9201.html?*session*id*key*=*session*id*val*

 

EDIT: moved my comment below rory's post.

Edited January 9, 2006 by Guest

[rory 0]

GeoVision is a software developer, their cards are made by a manufacturer in Korea. Either way, you ARE paying for the software. There's a huge difference between something like go1984 and GeoVision software 7.0, or WebCam Pro and MileStone. .. the more the pay the more you get, you get what you pay for .. the Card Manufacturer though can and will sue but we;re talking about China is its not easy to do.

 

As for regular capture cards, they are useless without decent software .. unless you want to use AmCap/VidCap and some generic software like go1984 .. but those are no good for proper surveillance systems.

 

It takes money to write software that is stable, works on various platforms, drivers, and Codecs arent free, it takes time and time = money. Bugs appear as you have thousands of companies using the software on all kinds of different PC hardware, and they have to be addressed. People go PC based for features, quality, speed, and thats why they have to stay up to date and keep uprading, otherwise if you want cheap, its cheaper to just get a basic standalone ...

 

Anyway, you're preachin to the wrong people, we wish it was all cheaper also ...

[timmah 0]

Rory:

I understand that it's not the same hardware, I was using Geo as an example. I'm looking for a good technical explanation of the quality difference of the so called "generic" cheap cards and the "expensive" what ever brand cards, something with benchmarks, etc, like http://tomshardware.com might do... The issue for me is that everyone says that the "generic" cards are bad because they are cheap, I don't think that's the case.

 

My other issue is that most of the brand name dvr companies sell their card as if it was something special, when most of the time the difference is software... WHY NOT JUST SELL SOFTWARE?

[rory 0]

Most if not almost all DVR companies use Cards made by manufacturing companies. But to make sure it will be stable they write it for a specific card.

 

Honestly Geo has the most stable PC hardware ive used in a long time. The cards are very high quality, i know the actual manufacturer and its a huge difference between their products and some others. Ive used others, the cheap ones, and we have had nothing but problems, sometimes the cards dont even work at all (maybe badly written drivers either way its before we even get to the software side), then there are the software issues. I mean i need it to work 100% of the time, we had a 50% failure rate with the cheap ones.

 

For a home user and Tech, you can get away with almost any card, but to sell it to a client for a security system, you need the most stable system you can get. It takes literally less than 5 minutes to install the Geo Card, Drivers, and Software, and get up and running, i just did it tonight with a GV800 for someone ...

 

There are some cheaper, but not cheap ones, like the iview, that work great also, just the software has much less features, features I need for clients, nothing special, but full screen login, more advanced user admin, download AVIs remotely, etc. The E c l i p s e (rebranded DigiFlower) is one we had nothing but problems with, when it worked it was okay, but the software also has major issues in my opinion. The ebay specials are even cheaper products, and i think those are really where you get into serious problems.

[Thomas 0]

You miss understood my posts. Geovision and Us and other companies buy thier cards from manufacturers. In some cases we have input on the firmware and features. But those companies have thier own costs that increase the pricing.

 

First of all, many of the companies like UDP and Comart do release new boards every few years. And they release firmware updates. They also offer SDK support for the cards. All of those are the costs I've mentioned. And as far as patents go, Phillips holds a number of them in this field.

 

And the reason you don't see alot of software that supports multiple boards is that differant boards give you data in completely differant ways. So now you have to add another layer of abstraction, which is going to add more processor overhead, and more troubleshooting overhead. Add to it that people won't get support from the card makers but expect the software companies to support thier hardware and you are creating a tech support nightmare.

 

So you are left with a choice. Write software for every card and trade developer time for features or write to one card and be able to add features.

 

You assume that all boards are the same. Or at least I'm assuming that from your "PC industry locked to one OS" comment. Unfortunately what your asking for is MS to write Windows to every type of CPU simply because some share the same type of ram.

[timmah 0]

Well, yes, I understand what you mean but it's not quite my point.

 

Perhaps if UDP and Comart do release new boards then their prices are justified. If a company designs the hardware and software as a whole, on their own like Nvidia or ATI then there isn't much to say about the pricing. I mean, it's not like ATI just writes an SDK and driver updates then sells that as an "upgrade". They put lots of money into R&D and design of an actual chip.

 

But how about Geo and others? How long has the v3 board been in use and those are not new designs but just build on the old ones.

 

I'm not saying that the software needs to be written for many different processors, (I don't expect windows to run on a RISC processor) but that we have a choice of who to buy the cards from and for how much. So I can choose to buy my card from Geo and have their "guarantee" that is high quality or buy it from any other manufacturer at 1/4 of the price and deal with them for hardware issues. Then seperately buy the software from Geo, or perhaps even another software dev firm that can create better software.

 

It's like the car aftermarket industry, does it mean that if I put in a K&N filter in my truck that it is not as good as the OEM from the dealership? Does that mean that Dodge should be able to tell me that I can't use a K&N filter?

 

And still, have there been any actual benchmarks on the quality differences of cards? Has anyone actually made a compairson on how much processor, ram, hd space, compression, autio quality, picture quality, analog out quality on each card?

 

This http://www.zoneminder.com software works on any card with a 878a chip, HAL can't be that different if this is possible and it's free.

 

The DVR industry still seems to want to hold on to the old model when all of the hardware was very specialized and had to be engineered for each new model, now with digital systems it's in a different place, it's mostly software development. That means that with the dropping prices of chips, cameras and manufacturing, unless these companies come out with something really different or innovative there will be a huge influx of software that works on any one of these "generic" cards. With the SDK available from the orignal manufacturers of the cards anyone with 100 hours and some visual basic or C# skills can pump out some software. With outsourcing to asia rates can be as low as $10 an hour for quality work. So what's to stop me and anyone else from getting my own software made that is comperable and sell it myself? Look at Frys, they sell security camera systems, Home Depot does too. These cards are easy enough for someone with basic computer skills to install... that means that as soon as someone comes out with a simple plug and play software for the masses and for a cheap price everything else will be useless.

 

I think the way things are going right now, it's only hurting the industry and our clients.

[Thomas 0]

First of all, Geovision does buy from one of the companies mentioned.

 

Choice is a wondeful thing but you keep applying the PC method of production and assume it is the correct one. For most companies this is a mission critical app. So you think about what runs mission critical apps. Big Iron, Custom systems from companies like Sun/IBM/HP/etc. Real mission critical apps are not run on clone boxes.

 

Your scale is wrong for the aftermarket analogy. It's not a filter but an engine. Try putting a Hummer engine in a Honda. Sure it can be done but it is the best way to do it? Nope.

 

Have you looked at outsourced software? It sucks. And what are you going to do when you need support for a bug?