Dahua 4431C-A vs Dahua 4231C-A vs CCTV-TOP IMX322

[Kawboy12R]

Mine have almost no white light there and one 940nm IR flood lighting up the trees in the background. The cams are mounted on the end of a picnic table for critter watching. No reason for the 940nm there over 850nm except that it was available. I put a 6 LED 850nm CMVision flood there once to compare and the 850nm was significantly brighter.

 

[Kawboy12R]

Well, both Dahua cams reverted to poor video some time overnight. I loaded SmartPSS to eliminate a Blue Iris decoding issue of some kind and the blocky, twitchy, blurry video exists in the SmartPSS live view as well. Turns out it's hard to tell exactly when it starts on both cameras because 8-10pm last night both were fine but they're on motion recording so the next recorded video for both was this morning. The 4231 was fuzzy BEFORE the night/day switch and the 4431 had no motion until after the switch but was fuzzy then. In BI, the fuzziness exists in both the live view and recorded video. I didn't do anything with the web interface to change anything in either cam yesterday or last night, so it is looking like something the cams are doing by themselves. I'm tempted to stick them on record 24/7 and see if I can see exactly when it happens. I had 5 good days though so if I decide to complain to the seller then it might be quite a while before it happens again if he wants to view it live if I do both at once. Both cams came from the same place.

edit- I went into the web interface of the 4231 and changed the FPS from 25 to 20 and left the bitrate the same. Changing the FPS changed the i-frame interval automatically to 40. After I saved it the video cleared up again, so it's not just a bitrate issue, it's associated with resaving at least some of the parameters.

 

[bp2008]

I had a similar problem with my 4K Dahua, except it only took 10-30 seconds after changing an encoding setting before quality was significantly worsened. It was fixed by updating to the latest firmware .. which was a November 2015 version after the September 2015 version and all older versions still had the bug.

 

[Kawboy12R]

Definitely looking like a firmware problem...

 

[nayr]

@cor35vet made a custom multi-lang firmware for the 4431, mebe that will help yeh.. odd both your cameras, different models.. are fine for 5 days then wam, nearly start at the exact same time.. something's weird.

 

[Kawboy12R]

I asked the seller this morning and got a speedy reply. I will try it after I get home.

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isn't the firmware have a problem !

is you webpage dahua plugin is wrong !


Delete C: \ Program Files \ webrec \ Torch (all files)

please Then clear all Google Chrome browsing data (chrome://settings/clearBrowserData)
Contains history and cookies and plug-ins!

then visit the camera ip address webpage ,Restore your camcorder to factory settings
and Install the new dahua plug-in ,everything will be ok

 

[Kawboy12R]

Just for giggles I hooked up one of my old Swann branded Hikvision 2032 bullets running in 1080P to compare to the other newer cameras. Same spot as the 4431 and the same conditions- almost pitch black but 3 other sources of IR- the 940nm flood lighting up the trees and the 4231 and IMX322 eyeball dome mounted to the picnic table, er I mean test bench. Very fuzzy and grainy in comparison, and it's a lot worse without the extra help.

 

[Kawboy12R]

Well, I may have found a smoking gun for the recurring poor video problem with the Dahuas. Both the 4431 and 4231 had crappy video this morning and I traced it back to 2am. Both were fine just before 2am, both were recording at 2am, both recorded streams froze in BI while trying to watch what happened, and both cameras were fuzzy after that. The Clip window on the 4231 showed No Signal being displayed on the cam's snapshot at 1:59:49 and the error "invalid datetime invalid" in the information that BI displays beside it. 2am is a common time for things to reboot so I started sniffing in the web interface. Guess what? Both cams are set to reboot every Tuesday at 2am under System>Auto Maintain. The reboot causes the problem for some reason and changing a setting and saving it again corrects the video problem. The easy short term solution is to uncheck that box I guess...

 

[bp2008]

Isn't 2 AM also the usual time for BI to repair its clip database?

 

[Kawboy12R]

Mmm... not sure. Not at home atm to check..

 

[Kawboy12R]

Well, I just set the 4231 to reboot at 22:47 and watched it reboot, go offline, and come back online within Blue Iris. It came back fuzzy so it's definitely the camera reboot that's doing it. Changing the bitrate setting and saving it fixed the fuzzy issue and brought it back to normal.

 

[Kawboy12R]

Well, I just set the 4231 to reboot at 22:47 and watched it reboot, go offline, and come back online within Blue Iris. It came back fuzzy so it's definitely the camera reboot that's doing it. Changing the bitrate setting and saving it fixed the fuzzy issue and brought it back to normal.

 

[nayr]

have you tried to reset them to default yet? Ive seen that fix issues where config's wont stick.

 

[Kawboy12R]

No. Seems to me that I saw a thread about how to revive a Dahua from Chinese after being reset to defaults. Mine's an Ali special so I don't want to go there unless it's necessary.

Also, I mentioned earlier that the 4431 was a 6mm and the view WAS slightly narrower than the 3.6mm lenses in 4231 and the generic IMX322. Well, I *meant* to order a 6mm but I was kinda thinking that the difference in FOV wasn't nearly as much as I thought it should be but, hey, different sensor, etc etc... Well, I remounted the 4431 in my driveway where I've had a 6mm 4mp Hik and a Huisun 5.1-51x MiniPTZ. There's no way that 4431 is a 6mm even with a different sensor. The FOV is way wider than even the Huisun at 5.1mm. When I plugged it into the IPVM calculator with 4mp, 1/3" sensor, and 3.6mm lens the calculator's view was just about identical to what the camera shows when I measure it against neighbouring landmarks. I checked my order and it shows that I apparently checked the 3.6mm lens option somehow and the box shows 3.6mm in tiny print. Sooo, I guess the good news is that it's an apples to apples camera comparison here because all of the lenses are nominally 3.6mm. There ARE slight but noticeable differences in the FOV of all three cameras. The bad news is that I really wanted a 6mm for the spot I was going to put it at work after I got the kinks out of this one so I have to order another in 6mm.