Fisheye cameras?

[Tolting Colt Acres]

anyone have experience working with the DS-2CD63C2F-I or DS-2CD6362F-I?

I am thinking of replacing the 4mp bullet I have at the end of my driveway with a fisheye which would give me a 180 degree view of the street.

Wondering if folks have any experience with these models, their pros/cons, caveats, performance, etc.

Thanks,

 

[nayr]

fisheyes are terrible cameras outside; they are designed for retail environments indoors.. they have tiny aperatures and and cant identify anyone further than 6ft away from it... low light is horrible, just about everything about fisheye camera is shit.

if you want a 180 degree camera designed for outdoors this is what you want: IPC-PFW8601-A180 | Dahua Technology

 

[Camit]

fisheyes are terrible cameras outside; they are designed for retail environments indoors.. they have tiny aperatures and and cant identify anyone further than 6ft away from it... low light is horrible, just about everything about fisheye camera is shit.

if you want a 180 degree camera designed for outdoors this is what you want: IPC-PFW8601-A180 | Dahua Technology

Yeah I can only image how much this will cost. I'm guessing over 500 or around...still don't buy a fisheye maybe if your in a small room this would be ok but not outside

 

[nayr]

$650 for the Dahua; but the Hik he's linked is $500-$700 so its in his range.

installing a fisheye on the wall means over 50% of the image is looking at nothing at all interesting, like the sky or the dirt.. its 180 degrees left to right and 180 degrees up and down.. they are designed to be horizontally mounted on a celing; and thats it.. mount it any other way and your throwing away money.

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

I'm heavily invested in Hikvision at my stables (14 cameras throughout my stables) so I wanted to stay with a Hikvision product for compatibility. The DS-2CD6986F-H is way outside my price range, at $1000 off amazon. I thought perhaps the outdoor 12MP fisheye might be a reasonable compromise, but I know little about them, so I asked the experts -- you folks I could always add a second bullet camera for $100 and adjust the mounts so they point in both directions with a little bit of overlap, but then I'm managing two streams rather than one.

 

[nayr]

just add more cameras and forget fisheye then; but if you have a Hik NVR that can handle 4k video.. then it should handle that Dahua just fine as it needs no dewarping.

Anyone who installs a fisheye on a wall outside deserves to get kicked in the face by a horse

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

No Hik NVR... I use a Dell PowerEdge 730 with 4x4-port GigE cards, each port with its own IP address, running Linux w/ 6 6TB drives, carved out into 14 1TB virtual disks at the moment. I just set up the NetHDD feature on each camera to stream to the Dell on a unique IP address. Each camera is directly connected via a home-run to the Dell. Its a bit of overkill, but I work for a fairly large government agency which buys a huge amount of Dell gear, so I can purchase my own through work at a rather substantial discount.
Adding another camera on the street just means I have to pull another line through conduit back to the wiring closet.

 

[nayr]

If your not using a Hik NVR then your not locked into Hikvision in the least.. The Dahua supports NAS storage too.. Its really 3x Starlight cameras w/6mm lenses that are stitched together into a single stream

you should consider loading BlueIris on that machine, your cameras will be so much more usefull with a real NVR Software instead of dumping to a nas.. or BlueCherry if you want to keep w/linux.

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

Somewhat off the topic of fisheye at the moment, but I did look at BlueIris at one point. The problem with it is the Dell would be streaming each camera to a single IP address -- that is, BlueIris would establish the connection outbound to the camera, and since all the cameras are within the same IP address range, the server would only use 1 of its 16 GigE ports to "pull" data from the cameras. Using the NAS setup I have at the moment, I can get full use out of 16Gb of bandwidth, as each camera is "pushing" its data to the NAS over its own wire.

I tried the former configuration (without BlueIris) where I had each camera set up to stream to its own SMB share with a single IP address (using the on-board GigE ports) and I got an astonishingly huge amount of stutter on all my feeds. I have 13 4mp bullets and 1 3mp varifocal .

 

[nayr]

Most cameras use about 6-10Mbps of bandwidth; they have absolutely no need for each to have a dedicated GigE port.. It would take >1600 cameras to use 16Gb of bandwidth.

what made you think this convoluted setup was needed? Ive setup systems pulling 64 HD cameras through a single ethernet port; on BlueIris.. whatever your problem was wasent your NIC

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

The only way I was able to eliminate the stutter in the feeds was to isolate each camera on its own GigE port. The minute I start combining video feeds on a single port, I get stagger in the streams, especially when there is a huge amount of movement. I'm set up to only record +/- 30 seconds motion detection. So, yes, if I had one camera idle due to no motion, another could stream okay... but the moment both cameras start to stream, I get the stagger on both.

It may have worked equally as well with 1 camera per 10/100 port, but I have an endless supply of Intel quad-port server NICs, so there was no out-of-pocket expense for me to go that way (aka: "cheap fix"). My switch wasn't an issue, I have a 48-port Dell S3100.

I see the same symptom on the workstation I have in my office (hard-wired to my switch) when I launch HikVision's iVMS desktop software. I get a lot of artifacting and stagger on all my streams displayed on the screen when I put more than, say, 2 of my cameras on the "main view" and there is a significant amount of movement.

 

[Razer]

I have a couple of the DS-2CD6362F-I cameras, and I have used a couple Vivotek, a few ACTi and one Axis 360 camera like these. The Hikvision is my favorite by far but in general stay away from these cameras. The use case is very small and I agree outdoors would be useless.

In the areas I use them they work great, hallway intersections or areas where a discreet camera is needed. The Vivotek and ACTi especially look like smoke detectors and no one gives them a second glance so I get great face shots in hallways and the like as they can be mounted on a wall 6 foot high and people walk by and never look away from the cam as they do not know it is a camera. Need good lighting, and the motion detection can be screwy. Take a look at the motion detection grid on a Hik cam, now imagine it is catching an outdoor shot and each square is covering a real life 20-30 feet of area. Hard to detect people or even horses at any distance as the motion is too small.

Last note - Gigabit x14 is surely not needed. (Not saying you were not seeing a problem though, just that you should never need that as a solution) I have a ton of cameras (over 1,300) on a lot of servers with no issues on a single gigabit connection on them. I just checked an example server to see what is it doing, this is a basic HP Prodesk i7 desktop running 39 mostly 2-3mp Hik IP cameras (one 6mp and one analog) and it is running a quad view rotation of the 39 cameras live on screen. Gigabit network card is sending 6-7 Mbps and it is receiving 50-60 Mbps. Recording on motion with Exacq software, CPU is running at 19%. I have seen it hit 90 Mbps in the rain and the like when all recording at once but it is rare.

 

[nayr]

sounds like your network has a UDP issue; try switching your streams to TCP and it'll likely go away.. A lil bit of network tuning is required for high performance UDP, most OS defaults are inadequate to handle heavy UDP loads.

has nothing to do w/the network interfaces through or bandwidth saturation; UDP issues are also widely attributed to poor cabling, its very intolerant of any network errors since it does not re-transmit on them.

 

[Tolting Colt Acres]

sounds like your network has a UDP issue; try switching your streams to TCP and it'll likely go away..

Where is this configured in the Hik menus? The only option I see for changing stream protocol is under "local -> Live view parameters", and all my cameras are set to TCP (they came this way out of the box).

I cannot argue cabling one way or the other, since the cabling was installed and tested with a rudimentary line tester (the network techs at work aren't going to let me take their LanTek III home to qualify my cabling, so its the home depot cabling tester for me)... all I can say is everything is Cat5E with Cat5E connectors, and the problem is "reproducible" no matter which cameras in my group I use.

 

[nayr]

its the client thats streaming the video picks if it wants to use RTSP over UDP or TCP; most default to UDP.