Synology NVR for Dahua or Hikvision?

[mercfh]

So i've been researching NVR's for a bit, and every single one I find (At least on Amazon) has terrible reviews. I have a unifi switch that has 3 POE (af) ports that will be able to supply power to at least the 3 cameras.

I've been looking into Synology NVR's but im not sure how well they fair, and if the Hikvision or Dahua (Im leaning towards Dahua) cameras will work with them.

Are the amazon reviews just not reliable? Do I really need an NVR that powers the cameras (Might be nice if I ever have more than 3 cameras...but I might be able to just get a larger switch).

Is there an NVR for Dahuas (Less than 8 cameras for sure) that is recommended? or is it really to just "build your own".

 

[J Sigmo]

My recommendation is to set up a PC to run Blue Iris rather than using an NVR. Blue Iris offers more features and flexibility than any NVR that I know of. And it is constantly being updated with features added.

And your BI system will work with virtually any camera you decide to get. I have three brands of cameras working in my BI system, with no hitches at all.

Get a BIG POE switch to connect and power your cameras. You will almost certainly need more cameras than you think you do right now. Lots more. So get a switch with a lot of POE channels right from the start.

Get an Asus router with built-in OpenVPN to secure your network and provide a secure way to connect with it remotely.

I looked at Synology for a while, but they charge you a fee per camera. And the NVR functions were not nearly as well developed as BI.

 

[aristobrat]

@mercfh, if you're wanting to do motion detection, you'll either want to consider running Blue Iris on a PC, or picking a NVR that's the same brand as your cameras.

The Dahua and Hikvision cameras that are popular here have two types of motion detection on them... basic (which is just called "motion detection"), and advanced... Hikvision calls their advanced MD "Smart Events" and Dahua calls theirs "IVS". Basic motion detection if often next-to-impossible to get configured properly. Out of the box, it's usually too sensitive (so you get a gazillion false alerts). You can tune it down some, which is great for reducing the false alerts, but then it'll often sometimes start missing real motion.

The catch with these cameras' advanced motion detection is that it usually only works with a NVR that's the same brand as the cameras. So if you buy some of the super-popular Dahua Starlight cameras, you can only use their IVS features when you're recording to a Dahua NVR. If you record those to a Hikvision NVR, you're stuck with basic motion detection. Blue Iris is interesting in that it can record Dahua and Hikvision advanced motion detection, but Blue Iris's own built-in motion detection is so good that most folks use that and forget about the stuff on the camera.

I started with Synology Surveillance Station when I got my first camera three years ago. I already had the Synology, and the first two license were free. At that time, it could not use the camera's advanced motion detection... not sure if it can now. While it had its own built-in motion detection, the processor on my Synology was so wimpy that trying to do motion detection with just one camera made the NAS so slow it wasn't worth it. I'm now on Blue Iris with my cameras connecting to a 16-port Unifi POE switch.

 

[mercfh]

Hmmmm well sounds like going with "their" NVR is the best bet. I'll prolly stick with Dahua TBH. Are there NVR's actually halfway decent? I would just build a PC for Blue-Iris...but this seems cheaper. Although I have a server rack so getting an old server that could run Blue-Iris for the NVR would be ideal....

 

[J Sigmo]

While I'm sure you can get an NVR for fairly cheap, I'd still recommend setting up a PC with Blue Iris instead. It really makes remotely viewing your live cameras and your recorded clips easy and convenient, via both UI3 and the BI app. And the capabilities are amazing by comparison with any NVR I'm aware of.

 

[mercfh]

I've been eyeballing some of the Dell Poweredge R210 servers on ebay as they are relatively inexpensive....but I can't seem to find anyone that has used those servers specifically.

 

[FoxCR]

good thread, I also have a synoloy nas running surveillance station. I have reolink cameras.. works well.

 

[aristobrat]

Hmmmm well sounds like going with "their" NVR is the best bet. I'll prolly stick with Dahua TBH. Are there NVR's actually halfway decent?

Spend some time poking around in the review threads on the Dahua sub-forum here... folks here who own the equipment (cameras and NVRs) are pretty good about sharing their experiences with them. I think you'll get a ton more info than found in Amazon reviews!

Blue Iris can offload H.264 processing to the GPU on Intel processors that support the QuickSync feature, which can really lower processor usage. Not all server-grade Intel processors have QuickSync, though. At the top of the page here, there should be a Wiki option in the blue bar. If you're interested in BI, there are a few short articles on that, and a longer article called "Cliff Notes" which has a ton of info about cameras/NVRs/etc that has been collected from various threads. Def. worth going over, if you haven't found them already.