Network Video Recorder POE system

DMS General
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I’m mildly familiar with setting up an NVR security system. I have a Dahua lower end 8 channel recorder with about 4 TB and some Dahua 1080 daylight / low light IR vari-focus zoomable ‘bullet’ cameras. The zoom and focus, BTW, is generally for set up and it’s not a PTZ setup.

I have 5 cameras and will need about 5 more so I’m looking at an upgrade, basically a totally new NVR and doubling the camera count.

I’m familiar with Dahua since that is what I have and it seems to be a good brand. The cameras have been amazing for over a year. The system records two ‘streams’ of data. One is compressed a bit and is about 50KBPS per camera and the other is about 4x that data rate. Storage of 5 cameras gives me about a week of video on the 4TB drive. I don’t have motion sensing or other features enabled but that can be done with the recorded data if necessary.

So I’m looking at another Dahua NVR, perhaps a 16 channel with POE built into the NVR. However, there are lots of brands out there.

The newer NVRs will take the 10TB WD purple Sata drives btw.

The NVR is an embedded Linux system that runs the NVR app on the NVR adapted hardware.

Do you have any recommendations on getting the next NVR box? There are many that are ‘no name’ and possibly rebranded boxes. I don’t have to have Dahua. In fact, there may only be a couple of NVR boxes that are branded to be sold under the various names. I will probably go with the Dahua cameras but who knows.

I would also be amenable to hire someone to help me with the system (the programming, that is). I’m pretty sure I could work through it but it’s not my particular area of expertise.

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If you want to consider a PC-based system, I’m pretty happy with Genius Vision NVR. I tested a bunch of open source / low cost programs including Blue Iris, and this was the only one I found that didn’t gobble CPU/RAM as I started adding cameras.

EDIT: Xprotect was also quite good, but the free version is limited to 8 cameras and the real thing costs $$$$

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If you like the NVR solution over a PC solution, then Dahua or HikVision are good choices. LTS, which has an office just around the corner from us carries both and has their on knockoff that is pretty good.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MDPYVCW $500

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Eben and Stan,
Thanks for the good tips. I sort of thought there was a PC solution but never knew where to look.

How does the PC version work in terms of license. Was a bit hard to tell from the website. I don’t want to get into a situation where I buy it then it goes to a subscription license. I don’t mind paying up front for a quality product but I’m sure most companies are trying to rope you into a subscription by some means - offer low cost / free for a while then change the license.

I do see that there is some sort of price per camera per day for some features / licenses. Yikes! $0.10 / camera / day

BTW, the PC version has some amazing options if you go that route.

And Stan, I looked at that LTS website. Looks like they are near DMS :slight_smile:
I don’t really mind a knockoff. Would be nice to use the new 10TB HDD that Dahua is now compatible with but o/w looks like the knock offs will take the 6TB. And I think the Dahua can do 320 MBPS total bandwidth but so far that’s not a limitation, I think.

Thanks again, guys!

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Any of them that will take a 6TB drive will take the 10TB, they are just listing what they have tested with.

Blue Iris is $60/PC for up to 64 cameras per PC. The number of cameras is limited by the CPU and RAM. You can support more cameras if your CPU supports Intel® Quick Sync Video. Our old servers do not support Quick Sync, so we are limited to ~15 cameras per server. (old dual 8 core Xeon E5520 Dell server, 32GB RAM, 18TB storage)

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Yeah, the “enterprise” software usually has a per camera fee that’s higher than the cost of the hardware, sometimes even just for a yearly licence. The ones I linked do have fully free versions for personal/noncommercial use though if you can live with the restrictions (16 cameras / 4 “intelligent monitors” for Genius Vision, 8 cameras for Milestone).

Blue Iris is definitely the best of the “hobbyist” type programs I tested, but I was unsuccessful in getting it to just stream to disk without using CPU/RAM on reencoding, which limited me to about 6 cameras on the server I was using. With GeniusVision I’m currently recording 11 1080p x 15fps streams on a virtual machine with only 2GB of memory.

I was mainly interested in PC solutions though because I had a bunch of nice cameras I got cheap at an auction, as well as a handful of other cheap IP cams I’d collected. If you’re buying new, sticking to one company and an embedded recorder probably makes sense - they often bundle the cost of software into the hardware, so you won’t get your money’s worth using something else.

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Does the free / 16 cam version of Genius Vision have enough ‘features’? Maybe I’m just missing it on the website but I can’t tell what features you get on the free version. Seems like you have to download it to find out.

And another question - Does it have to keep in touch with the internet to keep the free version working? That is, would it be possible for them to shut you down on the free version?

I don’t mind paying for a quality product but I wouldn’t want to be held hostage at some point.

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What features are you looking for? I don’t have a use for motion detection, so I was primarily concerned with efficient recording and easy to use playback which it satisfies for me. There’s also a mobile app but I haven’t tested it extensively.

As far as I know the only restriction on the free version is that only 4 cameras can have the intelligent motion tracking / object detection enable (and 16 max).

I believe that the paid version does need to commuicate with a license server, but the community edition does not.

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Thanks. Yes, live viewing / recording / playback in the case of the need is the main stuff. I’ve played with motion detection a bit. It’s useful when remote viewing since bandwidth is a problem if you must review a ton of stuff. Also, remote as in phone or other computer app is necessary and I suppose the NVR or whatever has a standard protocol for that and doesn’t really care what is requesting the data as long as it’s authenticated.

Heat maps, trip wires, etc, interesting but sort of a novelty.

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i’ve been a long standing fan of exacq vision. Check them out!

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Looks like they have some amazing stuff. Prob too high end but thank you. And looks like after 3 years you have to start negotiating a new software license with them even though you bought their hardware.

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They key with this is to pay for yearly maintenance. It pays for itself in the end.

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Yearly maintenance - do you mean software / firmware upgrades - to NVR? Cameras?

I OK with. Just want good value overall. If it means subscription then that might be it.

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So the way it works now, is you buy the licenses for around 100 to 125 depending on the number. Each year is approx 25 in yearly maintenance. So 5 camers is lets say 500 plus 125 in maintenance for year one, 125 maint year 2 etc etc. Maintenance gets you support and software upgrades. This cost is for the pro licensing. There are other grades like start and enterprise that are more and less money.

exacqVision Professional Video Management System Software | Exacq from Tyco Security Products for the link to the license i am talking about. click the feature matrix for more explanation.

Just for the record, i am not a reseller only a satisfied end user! I have used these cameras and the NVR’s they sell for years. I’ve installed quite a few different systems. I have yet to be let down.

If you decide you like the idea, I do know a reseller who is a good friend. Doubt that would get you any discount but he is reliable. For the record, I dont get any discount :slight_smile:
Thanks

Freddy

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For the life of me, I can NOT get my Hikvision camera added to Genius Vision NVR. Have tried multiple times connecting it with an RSTP connection and via Onvif and no dice. No firewall problems as I can play the stream from my camera from the same machine. I know the exact format of the connect string and still just not working.

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I’ve had some issues with older firmware Hikvision and grey-market Hikvision cameras on non-Hikvision NVR’s. Have you put a recent release of firmware on the camera?

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While we are on the IP / NVR topic, I have a sort of basic question. Tell me if I’m right about this:

First a more background about my system and what I’m basing my knowledge or assumptions on.

I have a Dahua branded system set up by an installer but I’m needing to add cameras and will have to get NVR with more capability. My current Dahua 8 ch NVR is set up to (apparently) only record a ‘high res’ stream from each of 5 cameras and I get about ten days of looped data from the 5 cameras on a 4TB drive. I’ve been told that the 320 KBPS is the max data rate into the NVR. I need about 5 more cameras and plan on getting the cameras and a new NVR. I was told that one option would be to add another NVR and keep the old one and use it for redundancy or perhaps secondary stream storage with more days storage as a result of low res storage. I am understanding that a second NVR would just capture one stream and the old one would do the same. In the same way, I guess I could get a smaller NVR and use it for the new cameras separately.

I might keep the old one on line for low res. Makes sense. But I would buy a fully capable larger, 16 ch unit to handle the new configuration for all cameras.

My understanding of what’s going on with the system is this:

IP camera puts out one or more (I’ve seen specs that show 3 streams on one camera) real time video data streams, compressed by the stated codec as per the specs. There is typically a high and low data rate stream. It looks like the camera (higher end Dahua and others I presume) may be programmed for different data rates on the streams but I’m not certain about that. That would be the ideal situation, for the user to be able to strike a compromise between image quality and data load / system storage and bandwidth limitations. For ex, full res on a 4K camera seems to be almost a GB . . . not practical or even possible to do but looks like maybe it’s programmable through perhaps a Dahua app on the network (or remotely?) Here is a reference to a 4K Dahua dome camera I’m looking at that does 3 streams.

http://nl.dahuasecurity.com/download/DH-IPC-HDBW5431E-ZE_Datasheet_20170630.pdf

And here is a capture of part of the same document

24 PM

19 PM
19 PM429×741 64.6 KB

Would I be correct in assuming I could program this cam to custom data rate specs for each ‘stream’? I’m guessing that streams could be turned on or off (?) Why clutter the network with unwanted data. Another reason I want to know about programming the data rate is this - their 8K dome cam is way more than I need or want to manage in terms of data. BUT . . . it’s only $40 more. If I could simply program it to a lower data rate and / or just use the lesser pixel options then that would leave a possibility for upgrading the video quality if I should ever want to sample at a higher res or data rate?

And it looks like cameras do a lot on their own as well. There is stuff in the specs about motion zones, trip wires, privacy zones. I would have thought those were implemented either during stream acquisition and storage by the NVR or at ‘playback’ according to the user’s criteria.

So I guess the various streams are always just flooding the network and it’s up to the NVR to capture what it wants? Is this about right? I know this is basic.

BTW, @StanSimmons mentioned this NVR and I see it states a “160Mb Bandwidth 16 Built-in PoE”

Is that the total incoming BW from all cameras? The one I have is a couple of years old and I think its BW is 320K. Would 160 be a limitation? in a 16 camera system?

Thanks.

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Thanks for reply Stan. It’s quite a new camera and it’s a genuine HV. Model DS-2CD2035FWD-I. Running V5.5.51 build 180314 which I think is the latest.