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^Gecko^

New user here, and some of my thoughts and experience

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I started in southern California with burglar alarms and cctv systems back in 2007, with GE Caddx and traditional DVRs like everfocus and Vitek and Digimerge. Everfocus was a disaster; their 4 channel DVRs only had a 10baseT network card, and their interface was junk. I loved working with the Vitek units In fact whenever I had trouble, it was great to be able to just take the problem unit over the hill to Valencia for a swap. The GE Caddx/NetworX burg panels, while not really related to CCTV, are one of the best systems I've worked with; the system will accept keypad input as fast as you can press the buttons (as opposed to Napco, which is slow as molasses.)

 

After several years of hiatus, a move to Texas, and a deployment to Afghanistan, I got back into security work, and the first thing I did was replace about 60 Integral DVRs with Exacqvision systems (one per school in the district) and fell in love with how reliable and easy to use they are. I have yet to see a system that's as user friendly. Then we installed some 600 Panasonic WV502S cameras, along with 60 Samsung SNV-5080's.

 

Over the course of two years, of the 600 Panasonics, we had to RMA around 10 of them. Of the 60 Samsungs, we had to RMA 10 of them.

 

Now I'm working for a company that deals in Video Insight and Samsung cameras. I was pretty distressed after starting finding that Samsung was the main product we sell. Each different model of IP Samsung camera requires a different version of the "STWwebviewer" ActiveX control, which doesn't reliably install unless you're running IE9. If you're running IE11, you have to enable compatibility mode and pretty much disable any kind of ActiveX security. In Chrome you'll need to enable the NP-API flag which will stop working in September after Chrome v45. Not to mention the Engrish in the software.

 

Video Insight is not too terrible. It's super CPU heavy, especially if you want to display tons of cameras. I was able to run over 70 IP cameras on an Exacq server across three monitors. I'm lucky to get 50 on three monitors using their outdated 'video wall' software on an i7 computer. I've never been able to run their VI Monitor software for more than ten minutes without it crashing (Java). For as long as they've been pushing their software out, it still seems like a beta product.

 

Arecont cameras are complete junk. Stay as far away from them as you possibly can!

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If this is any help at all, I believe once you've pretty much disabled all of the security on IE to install the plugin. I think you can re-enable it all again and the plugin still works, it's just the initial install.

 

Just an aspect that may help your current situation. Hopefully someone else can answer your questions.

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If this is any help at all, I believe once you've pretty much disabled all of the security on IE to install the plugin. I think you can re-enable it all again and the plugin still works, it's just the initial install.

 

Just an aspect that may help your current situation. Hopefully someone else can answer your questions.

 

I haven't tried that. The biggest problem comes when you have more than one series of the Samsung cameras, as each model will want to use a different version of the webviewer and will try to uninstall the other one.

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If this is any help at all, I believe once you've pretty much disabled all of the security on IE to install the plugin. I think you can re-enable it all again and the plugin still works, it's just the initial install.

 

Just an aspect that may help your current situation. Hopefully someone else can answer your questions.

 

I haven't tried that. The biggest problem comes when you have more than one series of the Samsung cameras, as each model will want to use a different version of the webviewer and will try to uninstall the other one.

 

That could be a reason why you are there. No money if anybody can do it. Is that correct?

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The trick to Samsungs STWebviewer, you have to add the camera to trusted sites and enable downloading of signed and unsigned activeX controls. You also have to add the site to compatibility view. Get the latest version of the thing you can, install it, then use firefox to access the cameras. It doesn't seem to care which model camera you're using as long as your version of STWebviewer is newer than the one the camera expects to use.

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