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Lorex - IP HD Camera disconnects randomly for no reason

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I have installed my Lorex NVR (LNR280 - 8 channels with combination of LND2152, LNB2153 + LNB2151) about 6-8 months ago, and it has been working fine 24/7 until recently I found that cameras would randomly disconnected for no reason. It happened to 2 of my cameras in the last 30 days. Both cameras are located indoor with regular room temperature, so it shouldn't be weather or temperature related.

 

In the Log of NVR, it just showed "IP Camera Disconnect", nothing else. Here is what I did trying to understand the root cause:

 

1. When I inspected the disconnected camera physically, the camera was still warm.. that means the ethernet connection was still fine, supplying the power at least. It crashed and hung???

 

2. Then I rebooted the NVR thinking it would fix the issue, but it didn't help, camera still disconnected

 

3. Finally I unplugged the RJ45 cable and re-connected the cable and camera came back to live and worked again.

 

My friend has the exactly same system and similar random disconnecting happened to him too. My NVR version is: V2.2.3 build 130412

 

Anyone have similar issues? help or tips is appreciated.

 

R.B.

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I have that exact problem right now. It seemed fine all summer, but now that it is getting dark again and the cameras are working harder they are randomly disconnecting and days later will reappear. Unless I unplug them myself, which is a PIA since I have to go get a ladder to reach the NVR.

 

Maybe I will try the firmware update, but those are fraught with peril themselves!

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I am not finding this update. Any suggestions? I have done searches for the LNR200 series in general and the LNR280 in particular and they show 0 results for the 280 and just general how0to on the 200 series.

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I am not finding this update. Any suggestions? I have done searches for the LNR200 series in general and the LNR280 in particular and they show 0 results for the 280 and just general how0to on the 200 series.

 

Nevermind, I went to the download tab on that page and found it. I tried to make it too hard.

This is only a daylight savings time update. Don't think it will help this issue.

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I upgraded to the latest firmware V2.2.3 build 131225 too, but it doesn't really fix the issue.

 

PROBLEM ANALYSIS:

 

Do you guys also notice something interesting? If you are recording using "continuous mode" (not using motion), go to the Playback section and check out the last 10 days on any camera. You will see from time to time, there were empty slots. You can also check the log too. In other words, the camera disconnected randomly and then re-connected by itself. The offline is about 10 to 30 seconds. In the event of emergency of a break-in, for example, that will not be recorded. Thanks, Lorex. This can be reproduced if your system has been up and running for more than 1-2 months 24/7 non-stop without power outage. Read my analysis below.

 

If you have set up the "Video Signal Lost" email notification, you will get tons of emails every hours. I received like 30-50 emails every day. Try it yourself.

 

SUSPECTED BUGS:

 

I suspect this temporary disconnection is related to the serious disconnecting that I posted originally. It seems like there is a serious bug on the NVR firmware (perhaps on camera firmware too, not sure??). Basically if you do a cold start, the system let you run for X days and then it memory leaks or some bugs trigger the 10-30 seconds disconnection and eventually the whole camera frozen or NVR port got deadlock or stuck UNTIL you physically un-plug the RJ45 and re-connect, or cold reboot.

 

MY SOLUTION:

 

To solve the problem temporary, you cannot just do a soft reboot remotely. You need to shutdown the whole NVR for a cold reboot (completely power off and then start again), since soft reboot doesn't disconnect the power to the cameras. A cold reboot can give you around 20-30 days without issues, during this period I don't even get a single "Video Signal Lost" email. So, a cold reboot gives me stable 24/7 recording for 20-30 days for my 8 cameras. If you ignore it, I guess after another 5-6 months, your camera will be completely frozen (symptom I originally posted). When I start receiving the notification email, then it's time to do a cold reboot. Sigh....

 

MORE PROBLEM - Database or File system Corrupted

 

Another issue I want to share with everyone - after the firmware upgrade, one of my cameras couldn't do proper playback. The timeline was screwed up, the frame just jumped from one day to another. However, I was able to download the individual videos files. I guess the database or files index were corrupted. The solution was to format the HDD. You have to do it using the mouse connected to the NVR, you cannot do it through the web interface remotely. But after formatted the HDD, everything is back to normal. Arrrgg...

 

 

MADE IN CHINA - Lorex HD made by Hikvision

 

No wonder why Lorex is only in the consumer and small business market, now I know why. Because it sucks so badly, I cannot believe these didn't catch by their QA. This tells you they haven't fully tested their product at all. No wonder why I don't see big corporation or government use Lorex. As many of you know Lorex HD series (both NVR + cameras) are made by a China company called "HikVision" although Lorex customized the firmware, perhaps the programmers messed up Hikvision original code. LOL.... Honestly speaking, I am not sure if that's HikVision or Lorex's problem. But from consumer point of view, Lorex should be responsible.

 

There is no need to try to contact technical support, those tier-1 support guys don't know anything. Don't waste your time.

Edited by Guest

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You EXACTLY described what is happening to my system! The disconnect emails are 40 a day with only 7 of the cameras running. I haven't done a hard reboot yet, did everything else so I will go do that. I was avoiding it because of having to haul a stepladder out to get to the NVR.

 

I just started a support case 2 days ago and so far have not had any replies, but I expect the standard, "we can't help you by email, call us" and then tell me it is my network, even though the problem is exactly the same on a TV connected directly to the back of the NVR.

 

Another problem, maybe related, is that I cannot view all the cameras on the TV monitor even though I can see them on the computer and wirelessly. If I double click on a "blank" screen where a camera should show it will come on full screen and I can see it, then when I minimize that camera it remains visible and another goes blank.

 

Not a happy camper here lately.

 

Oh, and the firmware update did nothing.

 

Just did the hard reboot. All 8 cameras are working again. Let's see how long!

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Hi spotmom, I know that I am not alone in this world If you get anything from Lorex support, please share with me..... I am really frustrated too.

 

For your monitor issue, I suspect it is the screen resolution issue but I doubt it is related to the disconnecting issue. I have a 720p/1080i HD TV (note: This is older model HD, this is not FULL 1080p HD TV) and when I plugged the HDMI cable, I couldn't see anything. So I needed to use another computer monitor to temporary let me connect and then I was able to change the resolution manually to a lower resolution. By default, Lorex's output is at full HD 1080p.

 

Lorex is NOT smart enough to do auto detect, I guess.

 

After changing the resolution... and I plugged in the HDMI cable again and it worked. I guess this is similar to the DVI/VGA... In your case, try playing with the screen resolution, there is a settings (a dropdown box) you can choose 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x720, 1280x1080, etc... if I remember correctly. If you have another computer monitor or TV, try them too.

 

Before I had Lorex HD PoE system, I have been using Geovision card on a Pentium 4 computer for 10 years. Of course it was low quality analog video since HD or PoE wasn't available at that time. But my system has been rock solid stable 24/7, the only problem I had was 1-2 times hard drive failure during the decade, not related to software/firmware issue. Now I understand why Geovision deserves to be on the enterprise market.

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I just got my reply from Lorex. "Reset it to factory".

 

Really? Is that all they have to offer? So I reset it to factory and have to re-input all my information for DynDns, ports, passwords, camera names, etc, on that Godawful kludgy mouse clicking input they have direct into the nvr? I can barely sign in using that crap.

 

It probably wouldn't work any longer than a hard reboot anyway.

 

As far as the TV goes I have it hooked to two different TV's, both new full 1080p. The little boxes for all the cameras are there in proper size, but it can only show me 4 at a time live. I'll try a screen resolution tweak, but since it does the same thing on 2 different TV's, different brands and sizes I doubt that is the issue.

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That's what I expected from Lorex support. Sigh....

 

This is similar to those many Router companies, once you buy it, they hardly upgrade the firmware. I have similar experience with Netgear, Dlink, Linksys (Cisco). Long time ago I bought 2 x small business grade VPN routers made by Netgear (not cheap at that time) and it just hung or rebooted byitself when it ran for more than a week. I opened a ticket with Netgear, posted it on the forum.... problem identified but they never released another firmware to fix the issue. I had to throw away them into garbage eventually... I was stupid that I didn't return it to the store since I had high hope for such big name company.

 

Think about it, in order to run a business to save money, after a product has been shipped out of their door, many management don't want to spend resources or environment (they can re-use the QA environment for newer products). The goal for all these companies is to make money at the end of the day. Perhaps, they will just fix some minor bugs like day light saving time, just to show that they are doing something.

 

Seriously, look at Lorex web site's FAQ. Anyone with decent technical background will laugh. The problem is that Lorex didn't make the product, Hikvision does. Lorex would just provide basic support and provide stupid answer.

 

Nowadays many professional alarm system installers do surveillance camera installation, it's a huge and growing business for residential. If I were one of those installer professional, I would not recommend Lorex to my clients anymore.

 

Despite the stability frustration, I still like my Lorex cameras/NVR in a way because there was a car theft broken into my car on our driveway several months ago and LNR280 captured every single details in the dark. I went to the local police station and gave CD to the cops and the officer played the video on the spot and said "Wow.. that's really high quality video, now we have a suspect. I hope everyone has such system like you.".

 

Wondering the newer LNR 300 series has same issue. I have a friend just bought the LNR 380 (NVR is diff but all cameras are same as mine)... maybe he has to wait for several months and then I will ask him.

 

After thinking about it, maybe there is a reason of why there isn't a lot of people complain about it on Lorex official review page or forums like this. If the person lives in an area where there is having occasional power outage, the system would shutdown and restart for cold reboot which resets everything automatically from time to time For me, my Lorex is on uninterrupted power supply. Hmmm......

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This is still a relatively new market. I think things will get better as more people realize home surveillance cameras are within reach and not hard to install. For now we are stuck with not a whole lot of competition so the companies don't need to be on top of the game.

 

We basically have Lorex/Swann (Hikvision) and QSee (Dahua) - I think that's right- in the more inexpensive home market, plus a bunch of relatively obscure companies like Hoo-Too selling a few stand alone cameras. The "real" camera systems are still just too expensive for the average homeowner.

 

The Lorex 1080p cameras do have great day pictures, but on mine the night stuff isn't as good, everyone looks like a ghost floating around. Maybe someone can help me with settings, but I have tried a lot with little improvement.

 

And of course the biggie is, will the camera be running when it really counts?

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I also experienced this issue past weekend as 4 of my 6 cameras disconnected withing 24 hours for no reason. Let me tell you it's not a great feeling being away and remotely logging in only to find 2 cameras online. Only after disconnecting/reconnecting the rj45 cable did the cameras come back.

I figure if Lorex decides to stop supporting the product with firmware they should at least give us the blessing to run the Hikvision releases.

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My finding is pretty accurate (see my previous analysis on this thread), I COLD rebooted my NVR on Sept 12, 2014 and today Oct 7, 2014 I started to receive at least 20+ emails notification about signal lost on random cameras, but as expected cameras came back online by themselves (this is the 10-15 sec. "black out" period I stated earlier). I have 8 cameras and stable recording lasted roughly about one month (to be exact 25 days), perhaps it may not nothing to do with number of cameras. Anyways, at this point, today all cameras are still working when I logged in remotely and none got totally disconnected yet, but the email notification is a warning message suggesting me I have to do another cold reboot, then it will give me another 25 days of guaranteed 24/7 100% trouble free recording (no email notification + no black out period). Sigh....

 

bparanoid: Are you using Lorex NVR 200 or 300 series? In my experience, disconnecting/reconnecting the RJ45 will bring the individual camera online, but it will still continue to happen on all the cameras, please keep monitoring on your system and post the result here for sharing. If this is true (at least my experience but we need more evidence), by isolation we can conclude that there is a bug in their NVR's firmware instead of the camera's firmware.

 

Indeed, if there were a bug on cameras instead of NVR, there is an easy fix for 300 series. Buy a PoE switch and hook up to some home automated systems (X10, Zigbee, Z-wave, Insteon or even DIY using Raspberry pi) and you can power off/power on to cold reboot the switch remotely. You can automate this and trigger the cycle by Lorex notification email. Unfortunately I still think the bug is on NVR side and I am on 200 series. Well technically you can remote power cycle the whole NVR but I am not sure if it will get the file system corrupted without proper shutdown.

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the 52v rail on my power supply failed, prior to power supply failing completely I was losing cameras randomly. replaced power supply and everything is good again...

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If you bought your system from costco just take it back..

you can always put you nvr on a time to reboot once a week...

The problem is certainly not hikvision, I have hikvision and dahua cams running 24/7 with no issues.

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I did the cold reboot on Sept 17th or within a few days of that and all worked good until October 13th. I started getting camera disconnects again.

 

So it seems to be a pattern here? I cold booted again this morning and we'll see if I get the same performance. If so, this is a Lorex NVR bug/firmware/hardware issue that they need to resolve!

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If you bought your system from costco just take it back..

you can always put you nvr on a time to reboot once a week...

The problem is certainly not hikvision, I have hikvision and dahua cams running 24/7 with no issues.

 

Pretty hard to take it back after this long (I finally burned all the boxes, too) and what do they have to offer as a replacement? They don't sell these any more. Right now all they have is some pretty substandard stuff. It would be nice if I could get just the NVR replaced. I doubt Lorex would do that.

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@spotmom: Yes, the pattern is totally correct, every 22 days and I will start receiving TONS of notification saying the camera disconnected. Now, I don't touch it and see how long can it last until it TOTALLY FROZEN (RJ45 unplug or cold reboot needed - according to my initial experience, it should be around 6-7 months)... will let you know.

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Just did the hard reboot. All 8 cameras are working again. Let's see how long!

 

OK Here's how long....That was Sept 16th I did the hard reboot. Did another on Oct 13th. I had to do a cold boot yesterday, Nov 16th, after I started getting disconnect emails again. That makes about 1 month that it goes before losing connections. There is definitely a problem here.

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I have been fighting this camera disconnect problem on LNR380 for months. You guys sound lucky who get 20+ days before a disconnect. The cold reboot has been about 50% successful for me. Sometimes, a cold boot results in a different camera being offline than the one that caused me to cold boot. It sometimes takes 2-4 successive cold boots before all cameras are online again. I've seen cameras drop off again in as little as a few minutes after a fresh cold boot. Unplugging the cameras doesn't seem to ever help.

 

However, after reading through this thread, it made me do some thinking and so I started playing around with my camera settings a bit. At the time, I had two cameras offline. After making a couple of changes BOOM all cameras were active again WITHOUT rebooting. " title="Applause" /> I changed some settings back and had one camera go back offline. Changed settings again and they were all online again. Now we're getting somewhere.

 

After playing around, I have narrowed it down to two settings that seem to be at issue, Bitrate Type and Max Bitrate. I'm still working out which of these are specifically at fault (I suspect its the Bitrate Type), but since adjusting these and getting my camera feeds back automatically, I think the source of the issue may lie here.

 

Bitrate Type - I have always had this set to Variable. When I changed this to Constant, my feeds returned. This could have just forced a sync and my problem may return over time, or it may have been the fix. I suspect that possibly the NVR has trouble adapting to the variable bit rate as it changes on the camera. In fixing it constant, then the NVR and cameras should always be in sync. I feel this may be the root of the problem, but only time will tell.

 

Max Bitrate - I lowered my values here, though I feel it is less likely these were the problem. I had had all my settings set to 8192kbps, but lowered my Substream to 512kbps, Main Continuous to 2048kbps, and Main Motion to 6144kbps.

 

So now I wait and see if anything goes offline or not.

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Because motion detection can't be counted on to always work and there are so many false motion positives with dust, moths , spiders and the like, I set motion to a lower bitrate and just use it if I need to find an incident. I keep the constant record to the highest quality I can squeak out of the system. That way anything I find in motion record I have a high quality copy of in the continuous record file and if I know something happened (maybe footprints, or something out of place) but can't find it in motion I know I have it in good quality in continuous record, I just have to manually find it.

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I have been fighting this camera disconnect problem on LNR380 for months.

Max Bitrate - I lowered my values here, though I feel it is less likely these were the problem. I had had all my settings set to 8192kbps, but lowered my Substream to 512kbps, Main Continuous to 2048kbps, and Main Motion to 6144kbps.

 

So now I wait and see if anything goes offline or not.

 

Make sure that you keep within the limits of the NVR, as it has a total max bitrate throughput for all the cameras combined.

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Just an update to let people following this thread know that the LNR200 does keep losing cameras basically once a month. Every 22-28 days (I suppose it depends on how much is going on in that time?) I start losing cameras, going on and off line.

 

A hard reboot (power switch off for 10-20 seconds, then back on) cures the problem for another month. No support from Lorex of course. Very poor device support once you have purchased it. No software updates , firmware or bug fixes.

 

They could certainly use better viewer software for the computer too! What junk.

 

At least the wiring is in place. Someday I will replace it with something better. Until then, I just have to be here to reboot it once a month. Sigh.

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That's what I have been doing in the past 1.5 years since I started this thread - rebooting every 22+ days (once I got tons of email notifications) does resolve the issues for another 22+ days. Lorex is so garbage.

 

I read you guys tried to play with the "Bitrate Type" and "Max Bitrate", did it help?? I am still too scared to install the Hivision firmware like some other suggested.

 

Eventually when my whole system is broken, I will get the real PoE cameras that can connect to my LAN, since many advanced NAS (like Qnap) supports camera surveillance and there are 3000 IP cameras (different brands) you can mix and match, there is no need to stick with proprietary standards. Yes, it maybe more expensive but I guess we paid for what we got for Lorex. LOL... Since I have wired all my Cat5e cable behind the wall, the upgrade is not too bad in the future.

 

R.B.

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Hi. You may have the hikvision unit from Costco. In which case I would say you have one of the hikvision Bitcoin malware units.

 

In 2014 -2015 hikvision would not admit to the problem but they have now ... So either talk with Costco support or your other option is to contact

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=37202

 

He knows how to get Bitcoin malware off

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