Two new HikVison Cameras, both having similar issue

E

erikf

n3wb
Apr 17, 2015
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Hey Guys,
I'm new here... but I've been using IP cameras for a while. Had a couple wifi Foscams and still running a nice Panasonic indoor cam.

I just picked up a couple Hikvision cameras. I really liked the mini-bullet, so I grabbed a dome for the front door.

The dome camera is a DS-2CD2332-I and the bullet is a DS-2CD2032-I; basically the same camera. I checked the firmware, both are on V5.2.0 build 140721, out of the box.

They are running through a PoE injector into a Cisco 3560G switch. I see no errors on the ports.

Problem I'm having appears to me to be in the actual camera... my assumption is when it's digitizing the image it's having an issue. This is much more prevalent on the dome camera at the front door, but I also get it occasionally on the bullet cam in the alley (attached). The software I'm using (Sighthound now, thinking about moving to iSpy) sees these glitches as movement, so I get nice captures of these effects. I've attached one as an example.

Any suggestions or ideas around this? Or is this a common problem with these? I was thinking about forcing the cam & switch to be 100/Full to rule out any parity negotiations that might be happening on the switch ports... but that seems like a fix for a problem that hasn't existed in years.

Thanks,
Erik
 

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erikf said:
Hey Guys,
I'm new here... but I've been using IP cameras for a while. Had a couple wifi Foscams and still running a nice Panasonic indoor cam.

I just picked up a couple Hikvision cameras. I really liked the mini-bullet, so I grabbed a dome for the front door.

The dome camera is a DS-2CD2332-I and the bullet is a DS-2CD2032-I; basically the same camera. I checked the firmware, both are on V5.2.0 build 140721, out of the box.

They are running through a PoE injector into a Cisco 3560G switch. I see no errors on the ports.

Problem I'm having appears to me to be in the actual camera... my assumption is when it's digitizing the image it's having an issue. This is much more prevalent on the dome camera at the front door, but I also get it occasionally on the bullet cam in the alley (attached). The software I'm using (Sighthound now, thinking about moving to iSpy) sees these glitches as movement, so I get nice captures of these effects. I've attached one as an example.

Any suggestions or ideas around this? Or is this a common problem with these? I was thinking about forcing the cam & switch to be 100/Full to rule out any parity negotiations that might be happening on the switch ports... but that seems like a fix for a problem that hasn't existed in years.

Thanks,
Erik
Click to expand...
Welcome to the forum..the most common reason for this problem is the iframe interval..in your camera settings match your iframe interval to your Frames per second....
I would not use ispy, they charge a monthly fee for alerts and remote viewing...
 
Thank you. My iFrame was set to 50 and my fps was at 30... I've made them both 30 and hopefully that'll fix it.

I wasn't aware the iSpy had fees associated with it. Any recomondations for other software? BlueIris seems to be very popular but I wasn't a big fan of the GUI when I initially loaded it. Maybe I'll revisit that...
 
erikf said:
Thank you. My iFrame was set to 50 and my fps was at 30... I've made them both 30 and hopefully that'll fix it.

I wasn't aware the iSpy had fees associated with it. Any recomondations for other software? BlueIris seems to be very popular but I wasn't a big fan of the GUI when I initially loaded it. Maybe I'll revisit that...
Click to expand...
Blue iris is my go to choice..its reasonably priced and is loaded with options...
 
I only use Blue Iris myself, though if you're looking for a free option there is "Genius Vision" community edition. http://geniusvision.net/ I didn't like it much when I tried it a couple years ago but maybe they have improved since then.

Can we assume that none of the network path is wireless? What about powerline networking? Just looking for any potential network bottlenecks here. It could even be possible to choke the camera stream a little if you did a large file transfer over a 100 Mbps network that shares the camera data.

How about the CPU usage of the computers involved?
 
bp2008 said:
I only use Blue Iris myself, though if you're looking for a free option there is "Genius Vision" community edition. http://geniusvision.net/ I didn't like it much when I tried it a couple years ago but maybe they have improved since then.

Can we assume that none of the network path is wireless? What about powerline networking? Just looking for any potential network bottlenecks here. It could even be possible to choke the camera stream a little if you did a large file transfer over a 100 Mbps network that shares the camera data.

How about the CPU usage of the computers involved?
Click to expand...

All my cameras are wired now. I had enough of the wifi drops and my Foscam got to the point were it needed to be reset about once a week when it would just drop wifi. So all wired. Both Hikvisions are Cat6 from the PoE injector. They both feed directly into the gig switch and the drops seem very random so I don't believe it's other traffic (especially since nobody is home during the day and I still see drops).

I just checked, I got one glitch since I updated the iFrame at about 30 mins ago. But it looks different. More blocky and more colors... I'm going to try and drop the fps and iframe and see if that helps even more.

Thanks!
e.
 
erikf said:
How about the "Bitrate Type"? I have them set to variable... would Constant be better?
Click to expand...
Sometimes that helps...also if you have a high frame rate and high resolution make sure you bitrate is not set too low.
 
If that is 1920x1080 at 30 FPS, I would say a bit rate of 6000 Kbps or more is best. 30 FPS can be pretty demanding. You might try 15 FPS instead. Then 4000-6000 Kbps is pretty good.

The only time I ever had that video corruption problem myself, it was with some chinese 5MP / 10FPS cameras I bought years ago. They would stream just fine at night but the only thing that would make the stream stable during the day was setting the iframe interval equal to the frame rate (which was as low as the iframe setting would go on that camera model). I also found with those cameras that lower bit rates were more stable than higher bit rates. So for the longest time I ran them at 5 MP, 10 FPS, 2000 Kbps bit rate which was really quite low and it did not provide the best looking video. Since then I've obtained firmware updates that allowed me to use a more reasonable 6000 Kbps bit rate without problems.

I never had this problem with Hikvision cameras though. It isn't necessarily a good sign that they came with firmware 5.2.0 as that is a fairly old version now. Where did you buy them from?
 
If you use the live web browser interface with "webcomponents" plugin, do you still have the issue? This is exactly the trouble that I've been having when accessing the RTSP feed through VLC media player, but I don't get the problem using a web browswer with webcomponents plugin.
 
I didn't realize I was on an older firmware? I checked at the Hikvision site and it appears to be the latest. Is there another source that I'm missing?

I thought the problem was fixed. It hasn't shown up at all on the bullet camera since I made adjustments from suggestions here. However, after reviewing my videos, it is still happening on the dome camera. I'm wondering if it's in the capture software and I'm hitting a limitation of my host computer... but why only on one camera? I'm going to try and monitor the live web interface as suggested by wxman. I've been curious if it's showing up on the 'raw' feed, but watching the feed all day is not really something I've got time for... we'll see.

I think my next step is going to be kicking it down to 15fps. I'm at 25 now, at 720p. I bumped the frame rate up to 8192 (more than enough) and I'm still not seeing errors on the switch.

Thanks for all the suggestions and info. I'll let you know what I find next.
e.
 
You should hunt around on this forum if you want to find links to newer firmware, though it is definitely safer if you can get it working on the current firmware since if you got the cameras from china you have to take additional steps to keep the camera in English after a firmware update, and those steps can lead to bricking the camera if done incorrectly.

... once "bricked" they are usually fixable but it is not something you want to have to do if you can help it.
 
I bought the cameras from a US vendor on Amazon... supposedly they were the US models. I checked the s/n and I do believe this is true. That being said, I have bricked and unbricked many varieties of devices over the years... so that doesn't really bother me. I found v5.2.3_141024.zip on hikvisioneurope.com. Is that a good site and version?

So I've been trying to keep my eye on the Webcomponents view and am really starting to wonder if the pixelation (if that's what it is) is being caused by the host computer or surveillance software. I have not seen the effect on the live feed.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I've used that 5.2.3 firmware from hikvisioneurope.com on a couple of cameras so far - the latest one just tonight on a DS-2CD2032-I that had 5.2.0 firmware, a language value=1 in prtHardInfo, and a language byte=2 in mtdblock5&6
In other words a Chinese camera with a little non-Hikvision seller modification to make it behave as English.
The only reason for the update was to get the more obvious configuration for the 'Basic events' and 'Smart events'.

The expected and actual result was a Chinese-only web interface.
The fix was to write back a modified version of mtdblock5 & 6 with the updated language byte=1 for all hardware descriptor segments, and the updated checksums. Still Checksum-16 in HxD parlance, and the camera was a 2014 manufacture.
So check out the language value 'prtHardInfo' at a telnet/SSH prompt. And take a look at byte 0x10 in mtdblock6 and see if they match.
 
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If you have WR in the serial number stick to the US site for downloads, 5.2.0 v140721 is the latest for say a 2032, 5.2.3 v141024 is latest for the WiFi variants of the 2xx2 family. 5.2.0 version on US site supports 'basic events' and 'smart events'
 
wozzzzza said:
so if I TFTP this to me 2332 that is running 5.2.3 hacked then it will still be English and not bricked and also change to international region so if I upgrade to the latest US firmware it will remain English??
Click to expand...

No it's just a custom firmware, not unless you do the mtd5 & mtd6 region hack
 
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