In addition to my testing in my environment, I tested it as a stand-alone camera and using
Blue Iris instead of an NVR to see if that would replicate or resolve the issue.
My testing was equally as poor. The only thing consistent was the inconsistency. Literally from day to day it would do something different.
Personally, I think Dahua tried to do too much with the camera. Having a visual and a thermal and heater and illuminator (both IR and white LED) and IVS and such all in a turret form factor probably meant something needed to give. I think the CPU processor in it is probably maxing out and stutters just enough to cause an issue. I think if it were a bullet form and thermal only, it might work better, and probably would then have the room to beef up the processor a little bit.
So I saw all of the same issues with the camera that Jesse did. I tested it as a stand-alone and with Blue Iris and not connected to an NVR to see if there was some miscommunication between the camera and the NVR. End result is the same issues. I won't bore you with all the different tests I have run, but will show you two examples.
EXAMPLE 1:
So my one neighbor runs every morning, so I gave it a test of the visual camera on the thermal versus the thermal.
And the results are shocking. Despite it being dark, the visual found him all 4 times (left image), the thermal not once (right image). Despite playing back thermal and he is clear as day.
EXAMPLE #2
Here is a snapshot from the available clips on the SD card versus what it sent to Blue Iris. For this test, I downrezed the visual camera to the lowest resolution and bitrate and turned everything off of it and not even streaming it - basically tried to take as much load off the processor as I could to give the thermal the best chance to operate smoothly.
One would think that if anything, the SD card would show all the triggers and it would mess up on sending out the ONVIF alerts.
But nope, take a look at this.
So on the left is the data on the SD card - it only had 3 triggers. On the right are all the external triggers Blue Iris received from the camera. Blue Iris received double the amount of triggers from the camera than the camera recorded. Two of them match (albeit a 6 second delay from the camera to Blue Iris) and one of the triggers on the SD card isn't in Blue Iris.
So we have 3 total on the SD card, two of which were also sent to Blue Iris (6 second lag) and we have 6 triggers on Blue Iris from the camera, but only two of the six show up in the camera as a trigger.
How is that possible? How does it send out the external trigger yet not record it on it's own device? And it doesn't count the few obvious misses that I found as well.
In the end, we concluded that these cameras were basically unreliable. Cool toys, but certainly not up to the task that Jesse needed them for.