Dahua Starlight Fixed Lens Turret (IPC-HDW4231EM-AS)

slogik

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Man it only took me one night of the "bug party" to look for an alt strategy for motion events. Spring on a mountain in Georgia is bug city. IVS intelligent functionality on the HDW5231R-Z was the ticket for sure! Not one single false alarm in two days (not a long time I know) but it's properly identified tripwire event every single time. I manually tested it about 8 times, even trying to trick it a few times by hugging the wall or moving very fast and it nailed me every time. It has grabbed every person walking towards my house and all coming/ going vehicles which is how I wanted it to behave. Beats the fuckerdoodles out of using motion events. I'm definitely going to snag one of these fixed turrets for my front door and I think my back yard (there's nothing in my backyard that makes sense to zoom on), then hopefully find a 6mm or maybe another 5231R in stock at some point for my driveway.
Does the IVS on the new cameras work that well?

I remember just trying the motion detection back on the Hikvision cameras to try to avoid upgrading my server as doing the video analytics on the server can be CPU intensive. My experience then was pretty poor. I remember reviewing the video after a week and seeing in-between clips where a car would appear or disappear in front of my house; that was a complete show-stopper for me if the camera could miss an event like that. How could I count on that? Server side VMS and analytics that never happened, so I've insisted on that ever since. So no bug recordings with the IVS tripwire? I may have to give this a second try, could be useful at night on two of my cameras.
 

thomaswde

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Does the IVS on the new cameras work that well?

I remember just trying the motion detection back on the Hikvision cameras to try to avoid upgrading my server as doing the video analytics on the server can be CPU intensive. My experience then was pretty poor. I remember reviewing the video after a week and seeing in-between clips where a car would appear or disappear in front of my house; that was a complete show-stopper for me if the camera could miss an event like that. How could I count on that? Server side VMS and analytics that never happened, so I've insisted on that ever since. So no bug recordings with the IVS tripwire? I may have to give this a second try, could be useful at night on two of my cameras.
SO I'm 100% sure there's someone here a lot more qualified to advise you on this but I can definitely weigh in as it seems to be working for me.
I've had excellent results by using tripwire and target filter to qualify valid targets, get snapshots and time stamps, and avoid false alarms.
So as an example I have 2 trip wires defined on one cam. Trip wire 1 is a 2-way activation at the "threshold" of my short driveway. Any cars in or out should be photographed, timestamped, and emailed to me as an alert. Tripwire 2 is a 1-way trip on pedestrians approaching my home (so about 15 ft out from the front of my home). I used target filter feature in IVS to define a maximum and minimum target size and it's caught about 12 entry/ exits so far without error, maybe more. I started using the target filter when on the first night the headlights on my wife's car created a HUGE target box that just blobbed right over my tripper. It seemed to solve it because same car, same time tonight worked perfectly.
This seemed to also teach me the value of a "redundant trip wire". By having the home approach wire aswell as the driveway one I'm twice as sure I'll get a successful trip.
I'm a TOTAL noob here but I am a huge nerd about this stuff so I think I'm learning fast, and I'm an engineer so of course I test/ re test everything. I'll be a lot more confident in this if I can go a week or two without any misses but so far I'm optimistic given my results thus far. Once I add another cam that sees the same FOV from a different perspective I can do tripwires on it cooresponding to the ones I've in place for even more confidence in the solution.
 

nayr

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Disk space is cheap; one should not be relying solely on any kind of video analytics to capture video.. Record continuously and only use such things for flagging activity on timeline or potentially notifications if they prove to be reliable enough.. Murphy's too much of a bitch to not record 24/7/365, and when you can record for 3 weeks solid for 10 cameras on 2 disks like I'm doing, why the fuck would you not.. its not like you got to rotate VHS tapes every day or using old video tech that basically saves uncompressed video; get with the times.

Compared to basic MD, Object tracking w/IVS is an order of magnitude better and more reliable; you can even use it for notifications in certain environments if configured correctly.. but nothing is perfectly foolproof, espically video analytics.
 

Shockwave199

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Disk space is cheap; one should not be relying solely on any kind of video analytics to capture video.. Record continuously and only use such things for flagging activity on timeline or potentially notifications if they prove to be reliable enough.. Murphy's too much of a bitch to not record 24/7/365, and when you can record for 3 weeks solid for 10 cameras on 2 disks like I'm doing, why the fuck would you not.. its not like you got to rotate VHS tapes every day or using old video tech that basically saves uncompressed video; get with the times.

Compared to basic MD, Object tracking w/IVS is an order of magnitude better and more reliable; you can even use it for notifications in certain environments if configured correctly.. but nothing is perfectly foolproof, espically video analytics.
100% agree. I learned a long time ago that if you're not recording you're missing something. Always record every camera 24/7. I used to be so diligent about saving disc space I'd turn off cameras in the rain,until I learned that vandals have absolutely no problem destroying public property in the rain and like a schmuck I missed it. Always record every second.
 

hmjgriffon

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Disk space is cheap; one should not be relying solely on any kind of video analytics to capture video.. Record continuously and only use such things for flagging activity on timeline or potentially notifications if they prove to be reliable enough.. Murphy's too much of a bitch to not record 24/7/365, and when you can record for 3 weeks solid for 10 cameras on 2 disks like I'm doing, why the fuck would you not.. its not like you got to rotate VHS tapes every day or using old video tech that basically saves uncompressed video; get with the times.

Compared to basic MD, Object tracking w/IVS is an order of magnitude better and more reliable; you can even use it for notifications in certain environments if configured correctly.. but nothing is perfectly foolproof, espically video analytics.
Haha, funny, I'm actually considering just buying a dahua NVR box and going dahua only so I can just use IVS easily and be done with it, dunno yet, BI's stuff works pretty decent, but the dahua IVS is so stupid simple, and now that I'm starting to load SD cards into the cameras I'm not as worried about getting tons of snapshots off-site. I may just start using IVS on the cams to alert me of stuff, and then I'll know where to go look in the BI timeline lol.
 

bug99

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Haha, funny, I'm actually considering just buying a dahua NVR box and going dahua only so I can just use IVS easily and be done with it, dunno yet, BI's stuff works pretty decent, but the dahua IVS is so stupid simple, and now that I'm starting to load SD cards into the cameras I'm not as worried about getting tons of snapshots off-site. I may just start using IVS on the cams to alert me of stuff, and then I'll know where to go look in the BI timeline lol.
I don't understand why the low end processors in the Dahua NVRs are able to keep up with 16 or more cameras when it takes a fairly high power Intel processor with built in graphics to do the same on BI. I suspect it is because BI is decompressing then writing the stream vs just directly wiring to disk in the NVRs, but still....
 

hmjgriffon

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I don't understand why the low end processors in the Dahua NVRs are able to keep up with 16 or more cameras when it takes a fairly high power Intel processor with built in graphics to do the same on BI. I suspect it is because BI is decompressing then writing the stream vs just directly wiring to disk in the NVRs, but still....
I thought BI's direct to disk does that.
 

nayr

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I don't understand why the low end processors in the Dahua NVRs are able to keep up with 16 or more cameras when it takes a fairly high power Intel processor with built in graphics to do the same on BI. I suspect it is because BI is decompressing then writing the stream vs just directly wiring to disk in the NVRs, but still....
IVS is running off the Cameras; the NVR does nothing but accept a signal of IVS Triggered.. the object tracking lines are sent along with the video stream.. the NVR is just saving the stream directly to disk and doing zero processing of the video contents.

BlueIris has to decode the video stream and start performing video analytics on the NVR; even if saving directly to disk its still always decoding the video for analysis.. its not using the cameras onboard processing capabilities for anything at all..

At this point hmj/bug99 I'd suggest you find a copy of the http api doc and send it to the BlueIris developer asking for Dahua IVS Support to be added to BlueIris.. it might not show the lines/object tracking stuff on live preview but I do think it'd be possible for him to add code to recognize the IVS events to trigger actions.
 

hmjgriffon

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IVS is running off the Cameras; the NVR does nothing but accept a signal of IVS Triggered.. the object tracking lines are sent along with the video stream.. the NVR is just saving the stream directly to disk and doing zero processing of the video contents.

BlueIris has to decode the video stream and start performing video analytics on the NVR; even if saving directly to disk its still always decoding the video for analysis.. its not using the cameras onboard processing capabilities for anything at all..

At this point hmj/bug99 I'd suggest you find a copy of the http api doc and send it to the BlueIris developer asking for Dahua IVS Support to be added to BlueIris.. it might not show the lines/object tracking stuff on live preview but I do think it'd be possible for him to add code to recognize the IVS events to trigger actions.
I think so too, it recognizes the PIR getting triggered on the hik cube.
 

slogik

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Disk space is cheap; one should not be relying solely on any kind of video analytics to capture video.. Record continuously and only use such things for flagging activity on timeline or potentially notifications if they prove to be reliable enough.. Murphy's too much of a bitch to not record 24/7/365, and when you can record for 3 weeks solid for 10 cameras on 2 disks like I'm doing, why the fuck would you not.. its not like you got to rotate VHS tapes every day or using old video tech that basically saves uncompressed video; get with the times.

Compared to basic MD, Object tracking w/IVS is an order of magnitude better and more reliable; you can even use it for notifications in certain environments if configured correctly.. but nothing is perfectly foolproof, espically video analytics.
I'll respectably disagree with you on the 24x7 recording for every camera. I do that on some of my cameras; I record the low-res stream 24x7 and the 4k stream when there is motion. On some of my other cameras, like my backyard where there isn't a single recording, sometimes for 5 days if I or the kids didn't go back there, I don't want constant recordings of that. In reviewing the footage in the backyard, there hasn't been a single instance of someone stepping one foot back there that I haven't recorded. The storage analytics in my application is telling me I'll have around 4 to 6 months of recording; you may not have need for anything that long, this is why I'd prefer longer: The police wanted all the footage I had from one of my cameras that covered my front yard and my neighbors (the vandalizing ones). One of their cars was keyed and they claimed it wasn't that morning, and that we must have done it when they weren't home that day. Luckily the camera I had was a 4Mp, and I could prove it was there longer. You could only see the key mark for about 5 hours in the morning when the sun was reflecting on it, and I could prove it was there at least 8 days, but I couldn't go back further. I bumped up my capacity then, and now I'd rather have a longer archive of relative footage then days of nothing on my other cameras. I'm comfortable with this decision, others may not, it's up to the individual.

On your second point I don't think we disagree. "basic MD" was terrible for me, on camera or on the server, that's why I went to Axxon and it was much better. Object tracking, direction, speed (funny to watch the clips with trailing lines of my kids riding their bikes seeing where they came from and the direction they were headed). Solved many of the issues with basic (keyword there) motion detection. I still had bug recordings at night (not as many as with motion detection, slower moving bugs in frame long enough it thought were objects), and because you set the size of the object and the sensitivity for the entire area, I found it's not ideal for the overview cameras. If I set the object size small enough to detect my kids when they are playing on the other side of the cul de sac (exactly 162' from the camera at 4mm) it will detect every bird, clump of grass, changes in brightness, you name it, as an object and record it, making it not much more useful than basic motion detection. Nothing is perfect, and if you are recording 24x7 or buy an additional camera zoomed out that is one way to deal with where object tracking falls short.

With Advanced motion detection, I'm getting the best of both worlds. That same spot 162' away? Detects the motion there and switches from low to hi-res and records them playing. The rabbit 40' feet away from the same camera right in front? Doesn't detect it or record it in hi-res as it's less sensitive there. But a person? Every time. Object tracking can't do that yet, at least not with what I've seen. Unless you can define a half dozen areas with a different size object for each changing with the distance the object is from the camera, it's a poor solution for an overview camera over a large area (but far better than basic motion detection).

As nothing is perfect, including advanced motion detection, where it is still susceptible to problems is at night, with on-camera IR, recording bugs as events, more so than object tracking. I'm deciding how I want to deal with that; the external IR I have in the front eliminates the issue, but I have two cameras that I'm still using the IR on. Perhaps enabling object tracking on those cameras only at night is another option vs additional external IR. If anyone wants to see a few screen shots of what I'm referring to (regarding the low-hi res recording and granularity in motion) I can post a few.

Hopefully this doesn't come across negatively in any way, as that's not my intention. Just pointing out that while I think there are basic guidelines that are generally true, there isn't a single right way for everyone's situation. Lots of ways to engineer a different solution to the same problem. I enjoy your video's and comments by the way, always good food for thought.
 

nayr

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4-6 months of archive capability? I have >3 weeks and in the last 4 years the furthest Ive ever needed to go back in time is 10 days.. I have 3 week retention only because we try to take a 2 week vacation every year..

I figure if something goes missing and I dont notice it for 3 weeks; then I suppose I really didnt need it in the first place.. yeah my backyard cameras have never once picked up anything shady going on, nor has a few other cameras.. but they still record 24/7/365.. even if for the one in a trillion chance an aeroplane crashes (im in a couple flight paths) or a bolide explodes in midair (remember all them russian videos?).. I can show you tons of security camera footage online that caught some crazy insane shit that woulda never been picked up if they were recording only on MD.. And many of those people if they monetized there youtube video probably got enough views to pay for there entire video surveillance system.

My indoor cameras dont record unless the security system is armed; but thats for our own privacy.. not to save disk space.. Murphy is an asshole, a while back I upgraded my NVR with a new 6TB HDD so I could increase retention, as I had the NVR in my lap hooking up the HDD @ Midnight I get a notification that my mailbox was just accessed, I look over at my cameras that are no longer recording to see some punk kid trying to steal my mail.. He'd been stealing mail from everyone and I got the fastest police response ever, and while my big PTZ camera automatically zoomed right in on his face I had absolutely no evidence to show the police.. What can go wrong, will go wrong.. Now my cameras all have SD storage so they are still recording just incase the NVR is not.
 

hmjgriffon

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I'll respectably disagree with you on the 24x7 recording for every camera. I do that on some of my cameras; I record the low-res stream 24x7 and the 4k stream when there is motion. On some of my other cameras, like my backyard where there isn't a single recording, sometimes for 5 days if I or the kids didn't go back there, I don't want constant recordings of that. In reviewing the footage in the backyard, there hasn't been a single instance of someone stepping one foot back there that I haven't recorded. The storage analytics in my application is telling me I'll have around 4 to 6 months of recording; you may not have need for anything that long, this is why I'd prefer longer: The police wanted all the footage I had from one of my cameras that covered my front yard and my neighbors (the vandalizing ones). One of their cars was keyed and they claimed it wasn't that morning, and that we must have done it when they weren't home that day. Luckily the camera I had was a 4Mp, and I could prove it was there longer. You could only see the key mark for about 5 hours in the morning when the sun was reflecting on it, and I could prove it was there at least 8 days, but I couldn't go back further. I bumped up my capacity then, and now I'd rather have a longer archive of relative footage then days of nothing on my other cameras. I'm comfortable with this decision, others may not, it's up to the individual.

On your second point I don't think we disagree. "basic MD" was terrible for me, on camera or on the server, that's why I went to Axxon and it was much better. Object tracking, direction, speed (funny to watch the clips with trailing lines of my kids riding their bikes seeing where they came from and the direction they were headed). Solved many of the issues with basic (keyword there) motion detection. I still had bug recordings at night (not as many as with motion detection, slower moving bugs in frame long enough it thought were objects), and because you set the size of the object and the sensitivity for the entire area, I found it's not ideal for the overview cameras. If I set the object size small enough to detect my kids when they are playing on the other side of the cul de sac (exactly 162' from the camera at 4mm) it will detect every bird, clump of grass, changes in brightness, you name it, as an object and record it, making it not much more useful than basic motion detection. Nothing is perfect, and if you are recording 24x7 or buy an additional camera zoomed out that is one way to deal with where object tracking falls short.

With Advanced motion detection, I'm getting the best of both worlds. That same spot 162' away? Detects the motion there and switches from low to hi-res and records them playing. The rabbit 40' feet away from the same camera right in front? Doesn't detect it or record it in hi-res as it's less sensitive there. But a person? Every time. Object tracking can't do that yet, at least not with what I've seen. Unless you can define a half dozen areas with a different size object for each changing with the distance the object is from the camera, it's a poor solution for an overview camera over a large area (but far better than basic motion detection).

As nothing is perfect, including advanced motion detection, where it is still susceptible to problems is at night, with on-camera IR, recording bugs as events, more so than object tracking. I'm deciding how I want to deal with that; the external IR I have in the front eliminates the issue, but I have two cameras that I'm still using the IR on. Perhaps enabling object tracking on those cameras only at night is another option vs additional external IR. If anyone wants to see a few screen shots of what I'm referring to (regarding the low-hi res recording and granularity in motion) I can post a few.

Hopefully this doesn't come across negatively in any way, as that's not my intention. Just pointing out that while I think there are basic guidelines that are generally true, there isn't a single right way for everyone's situation. Lots of ways to engineer a different solution to the same problem. I enjoy your video's and comments by the way, always good food for thought.
do any of your cams send you push alerts or anything when they are triggered?
 

slogik

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4-6 months of archive capability? I have >3 weeks and in the last 4 years the furthest Ive ever needed to go back in time is 10 days.. I have 3 week retention only because we try to take a 2 week vacation every year..

I figure if something goes missing and I dont notice it for 3 weeks; then I suppose I really didnt need it in the first place.. yeah my backyard cameras have never once picked up anything shady going on, nor has a few other cameras.. but they still record 24/7/365.. even if for the one in a trillion chance an aeroplane crashes (im in a couple flight paths) or a bolide explodes in midair (remember all them russian videos?).. I can show you tons of security camera footage online that caught some crazy insane shit that woulda never been picked up if they were recording only on MD.. And many of those people if they monetized there youtube video probably got enough views to pay for there entire video surveillance system.

My indoor cameras dont record unless the security system is armed; but thats for our own privacy.. not to save disk space.. Murphy is an asshole, a while back I upgraded my NVR with a new 6TB HDD so I could increase retention, as I had the NVR in my lap hooking up the HDD @ Midnight I get a notification that my mailbox was just accessed, I look over at my cameras that are no longer recording to see some punk kid trying to steal my mail.. He'd been stealing mail from everyone and I got the fastest police response ever, and while my big PTZ camera automatically zoomed right in on his face I had absolutely no evidence to show the police.. What can go wrong, will go wrong.. Now my cameras all have SD storage so they are still recording just incase the NVR is not.
It would have been nice for me to have been able to go back and show the police that their car was keyed on some date 2 months ago; although it seemed just proving that they were off by more than 8 days was enough for the police. Not long after that, I saw a squad car in front of their house again; different one of their cars. Looking at the video I saw them doing quite a bit of clean-up, talking to the police and pointing at our house. The police didn't even come over and ask to see if we had any video. I looked at the video overnight, and saw a raccoon crawl out from underneath their car at around 3am. Going back further, it appeared they left the driver window open, probably had food in there and the raccoon went to town.

The advanced motion detection is actually recording all the time in memory, so when there is an event I have it set to 5 seconds of pre and post recording. A little less than two months ago we had a meteor fly over and explode over Lake Michigan, was seen across the entire state, at about 1:25am. None of my cams are pointing at the sky, but all recorded the 5 seconds before, the bright light and shadows as it passed over, and 5 seconds post.

That's a great idea about when the system is down having the SD as a backup. Most of my cams don't have SD cards though. What I could do is have another VM with something like Zoneminder (since it's free) recording with as short a retention as possible, a day or a few hours if possible. That could be another way I could give myself the same protection if my server is down.
 

hmjgriffon

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It would have been nice for me to have been able to go back and show the police that their car was keyed on some date 2 months ago; although it seemed just proving that they were off by more than 8 days was enough for the police. Not long after that, I saw a squad car in front of their house again; different one of their cars. Looking at the video I saw them doing quite a bit of clean-up, talking to the police and pointing at our house. The police didn't even come over and ask to see if we had any video. I looked at the video overnight, and saw a raccoon crawl out from underneath their car at around 3am. Going back further, it appeared they left the driver window open, probably had food in there and the raccoon went to town.

The advanced motion detection is actually recording all the time in memory, so when there is an event I have it set to 5 seconds of pre and post recording. A little less than two months ago we had a meteor fly over and explode over Lake Michigan, was seen across the entire state, at about 1:25am. None of my cams are pointing at the sky, but all recorded the 5 seconds before, the bright light and shadows as it passed over, and 5 seconds post.

That's a great idea about when the system is down having the SD as a backup. Most of my cams don't have SD cards though. What I could do is have another VM with something like Zoneminder (since it's free) recording with as short a retention as possible, a day or a few hours if possible. That could be another way I could give myself the same protection if my server is down.

yep, the local storage is awesome, I'm prolly gonna turn off the emails that spam me when the cams get triggered with snapshots attached and only have myself get alerted, I will then probably have all outdoor cameras do alerting 24/7, indoor cams only alerting when armed home or armed state is active. I was wondering if you have your camera system send an alert to your phone when it detects motion, I like to get a notification so I know if someone is screwing around when I'm not home. If Ken could make IVS work with blue iris that would be friggin awesome, I do want to incorporate PIR sensors into the system but honestly if IVS works well enough I could save the trouble and money of putting motion sensors outside.
 
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