Alibi camera video no longer appears on preview screen but when clicked to full screen live video, shows up, why?

emptech

n3wb
Nov 25, 2021
5
2
Sacramento
Working on a customer's Alibi NVR5016P. Original complaint one of the outdoor cameras no longer worked. In a 200 foot run outside in metallic conduit I found some opens in the CAT5 cable. The opens were 86 feet from the camera, right in the middle of a 1/2" EMT conduit. Removing the bad cable, have not been able to find why the wires 2, 5, and 7 were open. There is no obvious physical damage. I pulled in a new line, terminated both ends and things worked perfect. It makes sense that if wire 2 was opened, that means the first pair is bad, wht/org, orange. The other lines open shouldn't have affected things since only 12, 36 are used, including POE.

Weeks later I get a call, the entire system is down. None of the lights on the NVR are on. The customer said there was recently a power surge. I found that the 12 volt/53 volt power supply had died. I replaced the power supply and the system seemed to be back up, no other damage done. I get another call, the camera on the bad CAT5 line was no longer working. On the NVR end I connect to my Triplett CamView IP Pro+. It sees the camera, is able to take a snap shot and can see live video. Going back to the customer's computer which sees the NVR over their intranet, I see on the screen 16 cameras with video, all except one camera. It has a blank screen. When clicking on it for full screen live video, sees a perfect picture.

I tried different POE ports, put other cameras on the same port, check OK. I move the problem camera to another port, still doesn't work. I have not tried swapping out the camera, but this just doesn't make sense. I've tried contacting Alibi's technical support, they are not responding. I don't think it's a physical problem, perhaps a setting in the software got changed somewhere, I'm puzzled. I don't have the system in front of me, so I can't play with it in real time right now. I can't say what version the software is until I get back to it.

Ideas? Jim
 
That occurred to me, when I get back to the customer, I'll check it. In answering your question I'm assuming that the live screen is main stream.
One thing that bothers me, the manager logs in as admin, which gives her lots of power, can make changes without knowing it. She should create a regular user account for herself and others and log in as admin only when necessary. Other issue, I seldom work on this system and don't know their program, so when I get down there I'll have to snoop around. I downloaded the manuals from Albi Security's website. They don't like answering their emails.

Thanks for the help. I'm pretty much retired, used to do lots of IT work, but not a lot anymore, everybody is now an expert.

Jim
 
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Bingo! I'd lay odds, that's the problem.....the manager.
When you are viewing more than one camera that's is typically showing the substream on each cam. When you go full screen with one camera, that is then typically showing the main stream.
 
From what I know, it's all about bandwidth. I've read that mainstream is 2048bps and substream is 512bps. For that camera, I'll have to find that setting. I'm not accusing the manager of hitting the wrong key, but it happens.

I finally got an email back from Alibi directing me to the manuals, which I eventually found.

Another complaint they have, the recorder only goes back three days. I haven't verified, but I think they have all cameras (16) recording all the time, that uses up a lot of unnecessary disk space, I recommended that they only record when motion is sensed, I don't know what the advantage would be if they are always recording.

Jim
 
Continuous recording along with motion alerts is good and recommended incase a motion event is missed, you can then go through the full video to find out what happened.
Even if you have the motion event it still may have missed what led up to the motion event or even what happened afterwards.
The solution is a bigger hard drive.