ranghar 0 Posted January 7, 2019 Specifically the system is DVR4WM. There was a theft at a location I was asked to visit. Prior to the theft the images are in color and clear. After the theft the images were greyscale and fuzzy. After logging into the system I noticed the system said it was booted in PAL. The cameras are all still NTSC. I was able to confirm this using a hand tester. It seems fairly obvious that the system was tampered with but I was wondering if anyone knew how. I could find no place in the system menu to make the change from PAL to NTSC, and I was curious if it was possibly a jumper on the board. I could find no switch on the board. It seems very hard to find information on such an old product, and I was hoping maybe someone on here would remember this system, and have any idea how this change could have forced. I would greatly appreciate any information. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tomcctv 187 Posted January 7, 2019 Hi. Can you give a little more info.. what country are you in ? can you see on the footage when image went gray and what is the time line from good to bad. Ost systems are automatic on boot up and switch to what ever the camera is ....there are not many cameras on the market that did a region select Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ranghar 0 Posted January 7, 2019 USA. I did see the footage up until the point it went grey. According to the boot log the system rebooted at that time, and that is when it occurred. The monitor was showing a grey/double image after the reboot. It was displaying fine until then. The system is very old and the only thing I can find on it is this. "Selecting Video Format - unit is designed to operate under either NTSC or PAL video formats. Please contact a qualified service person to perform the installation procedure." Prior to the theft it was all working fine. After the theft both the monitor and the video recordings were grey scale. I set my camera tester to PAL and connected it to the system. The cameras were still showing grey scale. I then set the tester to NTSC and connected directly to the camera and it showed up in color. It just seems too much of a coincidence that this happened immediately after the break in/theft. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tomcctv 187 Posted January 7, 2019 Hi. So your tests are right ntsc cameras. how have you removed the footage from the recorder.. is this the old unit with bnc /rca output Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ranghar 0 Posted January 7, 2019 I solved it. Thanks for all the help. I took the board and went over it with a magnifying glass. I found a tiny switch below the Ethernet port at the bottom of the board. Flipped it and I was back in NTSC. Confirms my suspicions that the board was tampered with. This is the model. http://www.specotech.com/index.php/products/video/recorders/dvrs/retired-products/item/736-retired-dvrwm Thanks again for the swift responses! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tomcctv 187 Posted January 7, 2019 20 minutes ago, ranghar said: I solved it. Thanks for all the help. I took the board and went over it with a magnifying glass. I found a tiny switch below the Ethernet port at the bottom of the board. Flipped it and I was back in NTSC. Confirms my suspicions that the board was tampered with. This is the model. http://www.specotech.com/index.php/products/video/recorders/dvrs/retired-products/item/736-retired-dvrwm Thanks again for the swift responses! Hi. . That would not make any difference to the footage. The micro is only to change the video output to the monitor from bnc output module remove hard drive and use speco remote player .... on a pc. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ranghar 0 Posted January 7, 2019 Well, the footage after it was switched to PAL isn't of much importance. I did an export of the data prior to that to a USB device. See, I will give you the complete story. We arrived and the DVR was on PAL mode. I told the manager I would be back tomorrow to pull the HDD for it. Later that evening someone logged in with admin and attempted to purge the system. I can see it clearly in the logs. Unfortunately there is no camera that points to where the system is located. My main issue was trying to figure out how the system was converted to PAL so I had some additional evidence of tampering. The purge failed because he didn't know how to do it correctly, and I have footage of the initial break in. I was just trying to reverse engineer how it was switched to PAL and if it could have happened without human intervention. I know the system didn't log in with Admin on it's own and try to purge the data though. lol. My main objective was to figure out how to switch that system from PAL to NTSC so I could add that to my report. It's obvious the employee wanted to destroy the data of the break in. It just felt incomplete without understanding how the system was changed from NTSC to PAL. Thanks again! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
