kohai Posted May 31, 2018 Share Posted May 31, 2018 What is a decent mid-level NVR and security cameras? Will I be happy with a hikvision kit and their software? My needs are pretty basic: - I don't want to suck my internet connection bandwidth by storing in the cloud - I do want to be able to remotely see the cameras on demand - an appliance seems straight forward and easy to maintain rather than building my own box but maybe a NAS is a good idea? - I'd like a little future proof by having some functionality like triggering the ISY - Many budget NVR software is never maintained, age, and are poorly designed. I want something that receives updates and isn't end of life (EOL) the day I buy it. This may push me to more than an appliance? - I want good video quality, not old school stuff you see on TV when the gas station gets robbed and nobody can identify the criminal from the picture. - In the future I may add a camera that stays zoomed in and can monitor traffic on our street (close enough to see license plates) - my first task is to setup a camera to focus on a fish tank so I can look at it while I'm on vacation Any suggestions? Link to comment
asbril Posted May 31, 2018 Share Posted May 31, 2018 10 hours ago, kohai said: What is a decent mid-level NVR and security cameras? Will I be happy with a hikvision kit and their software? My needs are pretty basic: - I don't want to suck my internet connection bandwidth by storing in the cloud - I do want to be able to remotely see the cameras on demand - an appliance seems straight forward and easy to maintain rather than building my own box but maybe a NAS is a good idea? - I'd like a little future proof by having some functionality like triggering the ISY - Many budget NVR software is never maintained, age, and are poorly designed. I want something that receives updates and isn't end of life (EOL) the day I buy it. This may push me to more than an appliance? - I want good video quality, not old school stuff you see on TV when the gas station gets robbed and nobody can identify the criminal from the picture. - In the future I may add a camera that stays zoomed in and can monitor traffic on our street (close enough to see license plates) - my first task is to setup a camera to focus on a fish tank so I can look at it while I'm on vacation Any suggestions? I have 6 Foscam cameras and 1 Foscam NCR, that works with 4 cameras. The setup was relatively easy though for the initial setup (only) I needed to connect the NVR directly to a monitor. I added a 1 TB usb disk drive and it has been working perfectly for several years now. It saves recordings for about a year which is way more than I need. I do not record continuously but motion activated, with a 5 seconds pre-recording. As I mentioned my NVR only works with 4 cameras but I believe that they have another NVR for 8 cameras. If my memory is right the NVR was cheap at around $ 60. You can choose to have either the camera or the NVR send you pictures upon motion and/or sound detection. One option sends you 3 pictures and another sends you one picture. Note that I have not been able to make the Foscam App work remotely to look back at recordings and only do that from my computer when at home. In reality I don't do that very often and only when one of the pictures draws my curiosity. Link to comment
kohai Posted May 31, 2018 Author Share Posted May 31, 2018 That sounds similar to what I'm looking for. I've noticed QNAP as a NAS option as well that provides flexibility on what it can run (can do flex?). There are so many options and so many appear to be low end stuff. I know Blue Iris has been mentioned quite a bit on this site as well as a couple mentions for Sighthound. Link to comment
Scottmichaelj Posted May 31, 2018 Share Posted May 31, 2018 That sounds similar to what I'm looking for. I've noticed QNAP as a NAS option as well that provides flexibility on what it can run (can do flex?). There are so many options and so many appear to be low end stuff. I know Blue Iris has been mentioned quite a bit on this site as well as a couple mentions for Sighthound. How many cameras do you want to run? Will they all be wired? What resolution do you want? Is this for 24/7 recording or just at motion? Are there any features you want?QNAP NAS is nice but for quick stuff. As a full time NVR your better with a dedicated NVR with higher bandwidth allocation. Hikvision is pretty nice and hard to beat. Be careful of other “grey market” cameras as they can open you up to calling home and security issues.LTS Security sells rebranded Hikvision and can be trusted. I am an authorized reseller for Hikvision and LTS and happy to help if you need anything. Feel free to PM me. Happy to help regardless what you do. Link to comment
io_guy Posted May 31, 2018 Share Posted May 31, 2018 All my Amcrests phone home, I just block it in my router's firewall. Synology Surveillance Station here. Not cheap (you pay per camera) but a great product. Link to comment
kohai Posted June 1, 2018 Author Share Posted June 1, 2018 1 hour ago, Scottmichaelj said: How many cameras do you want to run? Will they all be wired? What resolution do you want? Is this for 24/7 recording or just at motion? Are there any features you want? QNAP NAS is nice but for quick stuff. As a full time NVR your better with a dedicated NVR with higher bandwidth allocation. Hikvision is pretty nice and hard to beat. Be careful of other “grey market” cameras as they can open you up to calling home and security issues. LTS Security sells rebranded Hikvision and can be trusted. I am an authorized reseller for Hikvision and LTS and happy to help if you need anything. Feel free to PM me. Happy to help regardless what you do. I much prefer a wired camera. My house has two separate attics and my wiring closet is in the basement. I'm hoping there's a pipe run from each attic to the basement. If I can get cable to the attics, I can imagine 4-6 cameras if I can place them discreetly (nice way of saying not ugly). I don't think I have a need for 24/7 recording. Motion may work. However, I have a lot of trees and suspect their movement may trigger the motion a lot. I'm not sure what features I should want. Are there things I should be watching for? Thanks for the tip on grey market cameras, I wouldn't have known that for sure. My brother in law got cameras and at first thought, "I live in a nice neighborhood, nice town, why would I need cameras?" Then he was surprised to have two events in a short period with people going in his backyard. The first was a young neighbor kid swiping something from his yard and another was someone running from the police that hid a backpack in his yard. Link to comment
kohai Posted June 1, 2018 Author Share Posted June 1, 2018 1 hour ago, io_guy said: All my Amcrests phone home, I just block it in my router's firewall. Synology Surveillance Station here. Not cheap (you pay per camera) but a great product. Oh yeah, Synology is the other popular one posted on this forum a lot. Link to comment
Scottmichaelj Posted June 1, 2018 Share Posted June 1, 2018 So if your not going to record 24/7 on multiple cameras then I think you would be OK going with a low end PC with software like Blue Iris or a NAS. It’s when you have 5+ cameras all recording 24/7 at 4K resolution is when you need the backbone to support it properly. As already posted be mindful of the amount of licenses per camera if you go with a NAS. Some higher end NAS models have more camera licenses while the lower end models have less. Check out the cost to add a license too and compare between QNAP and Synology. I like QNAP but it’s all a matter of what your needs are and really they are both good systems. You’ll also have to make sure the camera is supported by the NAS and Blue Iris. IIRC Blue Iris does not support x265+ encoding yet either. Not a big deal really though unless you are doing 24/7 recording. Link to comment
Scottmichaelj Posted June 1, 2018 Share Posted June 1, 2018 All my Amcrests phone home, I just block it in my router's firewall. Synology Surveillance Station here. Not cheap (you pay per camera) but a great product. Yup this is a easy fix but most consumers have no idea this is happening nor can configure it to stop. ??♂️ Link to comment
asbril Posted June 1, 2018 Share Posted June 1, 2018 2 hours ago, Scottmichaelj said: Synology Surveillance Station here. Not cheap (you pay per camera) but a great product. The user comments on Amazon are not encouraging. Link to comment
Scottmichaelj Posted June 1, 2018 Share Posted June 1, 2018 The user comments on Amazon are not encouraging. All goes back to how many cameras, resolution, always recording or not, and backbone switches, etc. YMMV - Under 5 cameras, maybe 1080p recording at motion only, you’ll probably be ok. That said the camera intelligence is key. With Hikvision you can desensitize (or make it more sensitive) for the motion, mask out certain areas, etc at camera level. Making the recording “dumb”. Link to comment
kohai Posted June 2, 2018 Author Share Posted June 2, 2018 24 minutes ago, Scottmichaelj said: All goes back to how many cameras, resolution, always recording or not, and backbone switches, etc. YMMV - Under 5 cameras, maybe 1080p recording at motion only, you’ll probably be ok. That said the camera intelligence is key. With Hikvision you can desensitize (or make it more sensitive) for the motion, mask out certain areas, etc at camera level. Making the recording “dumb”. What's your go to solution? I'm guessing you have an approach you like. Link to comment
Scottmichaelj Posted June 2, 2018 Share Posted June 2, 2018 What's your go to solution? I'm guessing you have an approach you like. There’s no real “right” or “wrong” solution. Nor is anything “one size fits all”. Everyone has different needs. I am not going to tell you want YOU need. You tell people what YOU need and budget. Then I configure based on that if reasonable.Overall if you want something decent get Hikvision cameras with NVR to fit the need. Need cheaper go with LTS Security Cameras and a NVR. As an installer my clients want things to just work and not DIYers. Not that you have to spend a ton. Link to comment
Scottmichaelj Posted June 2, 2018 Share Posted June 2, 2018 I’ll also add if your just doing motion recording and don’t need weeks back you could toss a SD card in the camera and not even do a NVR. You can add the NVR later if needed. May ways to do things which is nice. Link to comment
jasont Posted June 2, 2018 Share Posted June 2, 2018 On 5/31/2018 at 12:02 AM, kohai said: - I'd like a little future proof by having some functionality like triggering the ISY - Many budget NVR software is never maintained, age, and are poorly designed. I want something that receives updates and isn't end of life (EOL) the day I buy it. This may push me to more than an appliance? - I want good video quality, not old school stuff you see on TV when the gas station gets robbed and nobody can identify the criminal from the picture. - In the future I may add a camera that stays zoomed in and can monitor traffic on our street (close enough to see license plates) - my first task is to setup a camera to focus on a fish tank so I can look at it while I'm on vacation Any suggestions? I've only been focusing on outdoor cameras. If you want something that does the best in low-light as possible (i.e. static scenes that aren't grainy, and scenes with motion that aren't a useless blur), look for 2/3MP cameras that use a Sony STARVIS image sensor. The relatively low MP allows for a bigger pixel size (which allows more light to hit the sensor), and the sensor is a new back-illuminated technology, which lets it capture more light. Dahua (international, not US) has a big line of these cameras (called Starlights), and Hikvision has a smaller lined (called Ultra-Low Light). In the day of 4K cameras, it may seem ridiculous to consider a 2MP camera, but these are leaps and bounds better at night than anything else, including higher MP cameras with STARVIS sensors. Here's a link to a thread listing the Dahua Starlights over on ipcamtalk.com, a very cool forum for cameras/NVRs.https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/dahua-2mp-starlight-lineup.14793/ For a NVR, I started with Surveillance Station (SS) on Synology, then moved to a Dahua NVR, and am now currently using Blue Iris. I absolutely positively did not want a dedicated Windows machine for my NVR, but it's turned out to be awesome, and I kind of regret not having done it sooner. The problem I had with SS was around motion detection. The only way I could get my Hikvision and Dahua cameras to trigger a recording on SS was to use the cameras' basic version of motion detection, which really stunk. It initially generated a huge amount of false alerts, and as I tuned it to lessen those, it started missing real motion. Grrrrrr. Both cameras offered a better version of motion detection... Hikvision calls theirs Smart Events (IIRC), and Dahua calls theirs IVS. Gives you capabilities like tripwire, intrusion boxes, etc. This advanced motion detection was so much better at not giving false alarms, but ... and this is a huge deal-breaking but .... SS was not able to start recordings based on these advanced motion detection alerts. The best I could do was have the camera send me an email with a picture when the cool advanced motion detection went off, but leave SS recording when basic motion detection went off. So I'd come home to like 100+ clips of mostly nothing (false alert recordings from the basic motion detection), and then I'd look at my inbox for the times I got an email from when the advanced motion detection had gone off, and try to manually find that clip. Not much fun. Last effort was to try SS"s built-in motion detection, where SS watches the video streams coming in from the camera, and it tries to detect motion. I played with that for a bit, but it wasn't much more advanced than the cameras basic motion detection, and it was a huge CPU hog, making the whole NAS slow as heck. That's what let me to a Dahua NVR. It had no problems recording when the cameras had an advanced motion detection event. But it had a few firmware bugs that drove me crazy. To Dahua's credit, they fixed all of them eventually, but while waiting, I tried Blue Iris on an old PC that I had. Like SS, Blue Iris wasn't able to start recording when the cameras had an advanced motion detection alert, but BI's built-in motion detection capabilities was awesome for me. I found it to be more capable than the advanced stuff on the cameras, although it had a pretty big learning curve. Love it now. BI gets regular bug-fixes and new features... usually a couple of new releases every month. BI can talk the ISY's web interface, and ISY can talk to BI's web interface. Reading license plates at night is half art, half science. You'll need to set the shutter speed to something super-duper high (to reduce blur even more), and while that will usually do a good job of seeing plates, plates is about all that camera will see when tuned like that. Everything else (other than the car lights) comes out so dark, you prob won't be able to make out the car, etc. There are some good threads on this topic over at ipcamtalk.com with pictures and videos. Def worth a look! Link to comment
kohai Posted June 2, 2018 Author Share Posted June 2, 2018 Awesome info. Thanks jasont. Is h265+ support a big thing I should really make sure to get? Link to comment
larryllix Posted June 3, 2018 Share Posted June 3, 2018 On 6/1/2018 at 10:55 PM, kohai said: Awesome info. Thanks jasont. Is h265+ support a big thing I should really make sure to get? I found this. http://www.atss.in/smart-h-265-plus-dahua/ Link to comment
jasont Posted June 4, 2018 Share Posted June 4, 2018 On 6/1/2018 at 10:55 PM, kohai said: Awesome info. Thanks jasont. Is h265+ support a big thing I should really make sure to get? They both can save a good deal of disk space! Some cameras can't do onboard advanced motion detection when h.265+ is enabled, but work fine with h.265... I was always curious if this was due to a camera resource issue, maybe h.265+ consumes so much CPU that there isn't enough left to do the advanced motion detection. Link to comment
larryllix Posted June 5, 2018 Share Posted June 5, 2018 They both can save a good deal of disk space! Some cameras can't do onboard advanced motion detection when h.265+ is enabled, but work fine with h.265... I was always curious if this was due to a camera resource issue, maybe h.265+ consumes so much CPU that there isn't enough left to do the advanced motion detection. I just ordered s dahua camera but it seems to get anything supporting the h.265+ protocol I would have spend more than $400 per camera. It also seems on the US models support it ad well. That may explain some of the much higher prices. It seems every sales centre has completely different model numbers and nine cross reference well. It seems this cheaper priced model may not be upgradable or app accessible without an NVR. This makes very little sense to me. Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk Link to comment
TrojanHorse Posted June 5, 2018 Share Posted June 5, 2018 I just ordered s dahua camera but it seems to get anything supporting the h.265+ protocol I would have spend more than $400 per camera. It also seems on the US models support it ad well. That may explain some of the much higher prices. It seems every sales centre has completely different model numbers and nine cross reference well. It seems this cheaper priced model may not be upgradable or app accessible without an NVR. This makes very little sense to me. Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk Hi Larry,What did you order?Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Link to comment
larryllix Posted June 6, 2018 Share Posted June 6, 2018 23 hours ago, TrojanHorse said: Hi Larry, What did you order? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Dahua 4MP Dome POE IP Camera IPC-HDBW4433R-ZS( HDBW4431R-ZS Upgraded Model ),2.7-12mm Motorized Varifocal Lens Optical Zoom,IR Day and Night,SD Slot,Outdoor Security Surveillance Camera H.265 ONVIF Link to comment
Scottmichaelj Posted June 6, 2018 Share Posted June 6, 2018 Dahua is a good camera. I also heard a lot of people like Sunba as well. I been meaning to test both. Link to comment
larryllix Posted June 6, 2018 Share Posted June 6, 2018 18 minutes ago, Scottmichaelj said: Dahua is a good camera. I also heard a lot of people like Sunba as well. I been meaning to test both. Very small text tells me it doesn't work with their app unless you use an NVR. That needs to be investigated in a few weeks when it arrives. Link to comment
Scottmichaelj Posted June 6, 2018 Share Posted June 6, 2018 Very small text tells me it doesn't work with their app unless you use an NVR. That needs to be investigated in a few weeks when it arrives. Strange as any IP camera that has a mpeg stream should be able to be viewed in any app you want, including a web browser. Some cameras have a secondary stream-one stream for the NVR then the second for the remote control or app on a phone/tablet usually at a lower resolution. I will be shocked if it doesn’t work. Maybe the “advanced” features or full resolution, but again strange. Hope that’s not the case for you. You may need a PoE injectors as well. TPLink makes a decent one at a low price, just make sure the camera doesn’t need more than 15W of power.TP-LINK TL-PoE150S PoE Injector Adapter, IEEE 802.3af compliant, up to 100 meters (325 Feet) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001PS9E5I/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_0D1fBb60AN0J7 Link to comment
larryllix Posted June 6, 2018 Share Posted June 6, 2018 9 hours ago, Scottmichaelj said: Strange as any IP camera that has a mpeg stream should be able to be viewed in any app you want, including a web browser. Some cameras have a secondary stream-one stream for the NVR then the second for the remote control or app on a phone/tablet usually at a lower resolution. I will be shocked if it doesn’t work. Maybe the “advanced” features or full resolution, but again strange. Hope that’s not the case for you. You may need a PoE injectors as well. TPLink makes a decent one at a low price, just make sure the camera doesn’t need more than 15W of power. TP-LINK TL-PoE150S PoE Injector Adapter, IEEE 802.3af compliant, up to 100 meters (325 Feet)https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001PS9E5I/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_0D1fBb60AN0J7 Thanks Scott! I understand that POE uses a higher voltage. Is POE a standard voltage, a universal voltage, or a particulat voltage dependant on the device you are feeding? Were you recommending this particular brand/device or just a sample? (Darn amazon won't show a price for that unit???) What about combo devices like such?https://www.amazon.ca/BQLZR-Injector-Ethernet-Adapter-Indicator/dp/B00S5RP3GQ/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1528289900&sr=8-4&keywords=POE+injector Link to comment
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