Can you mix and match camera brands
- Thread starter Alan Carter
- Start date
What did you learn from Ghostbusters? As long as you don’t cross the streams, you should be fine...
Just kidding. Decent cameras/NVRs support ONVIF, which is a protocol that allows different brands to work together, at least at high levels. If you have a Hikvision NVR, it should be able to use ONVIF to record from Dahua cameras (and vice-versa).
One area where brands seems to matter is Dahua IVS/Hikvision Smart Events. These are advanced motion detection features built into the cameras... using them (instead of regular motion detection) can really help reduce false alerts. Anyhow, getting these to work with NVRs is brand specific, meaning if you NVR is Hikvision and you have Dahua cameras, it can’t use the IVS feature on the Dahua cameras.
Personally, mixing and matching cameras is one reason why I really like Blue Iris. While BI supports both IVS on Dahua cameras and Smart Events on Hikvision cameras (using a feature called PullPoint subscription), it has its own built-in motion detection that has some options that the advanced stuff on the cameras don’t.
Just kidding. Decent cameras/NVRs support ONVIF, which is a protocol that allows different brands to work together, at least at high levels. If you have a Hikvision NVR, it should be able to use ONVIF to record from Dahua cameras (and vice-versa).
One area where brands seems to matter is Dahua IVS/Hikvision Smart Events. These are advanced motion detection features built into the cameras... using them (instead of regular motion detection) can really help reduce false alerts. Anyhow, getting these to work with NVRs is brand specific, meaning if you NVR is Hikvision and you have Dahua cameras, it can’t use the IVS feature on the Dahua cameras.
Personally, mixing and matching cameras is one reason why I really like Blue Iris. While BI supports both IVS on Dahua cameras and Smart Events on Hikvision cameras (using a feature called PullPoint subscription), it has its own built-in motion detection that has some options that the advanced stuff on the cameras don’t.
mat200
IPCT Contributor
- Jan 17, 2017
- 16,074
- 27,005
eg. Dahua and Hikvision and Lorex etc
Or is that really dumb question?
HI @Alan Carter
General rule:
If using a NVR or OEM VMS ( like Dahua's SmartPSS or Hikvision's iVMS-4200 ) stick with the same OEM products for better compatibility ( as aristobrat points out the more advanced features called IVS/advanced features ) as both Dahua and HIkvision use different APIs.
That noted, there are products like Blue Iris which will work well with both ..
And there's always ONVIF and the various compatibility levels which allow at least a base level of functionality between products. You'll want to check what ONVIF profiles are supported by the NVR and cameras.
LCBrevard
n3wb
My Blueiris setup includes 25 cameras from Panasonic (from 2008), Foscam, Amcrest (now all deactivated), Ubiquiti, SV3C, and even a Nest Hello video doorbell.
It's one of the great things about Blueiris to allow integration of all those different cameras.
My latest inexpensive cameras are a pair of TP-Link Kasa KC100 ($40 each) but, alas, there appears to be no way to get their video to Blueiris.
Note that Blueiris accesses my Ubiquiti cameras via their RTSP streams from the UniFi Cloud Key Gen2 Plus controller/NVR.
The other weirdness is the Nest Hello sends everything to the cloud but I can use a guest view URL to bring it into Blueiris.
Here is a shot showing Blueiris directly on the right with my 15 main house cameras and web access on the left showing the 10 at the guest-house.
Here is a diagram showing the approximate connectivity to get to the various cameras.
It is not showing the Kasa KC100 at this time.
It's one of the great things about Blueiris to allow integration of all those different cameras.
My latest inexpensive cameras are a pair of TP-Link Kasa KC100 ($40 each) but, alas, there appears to be no way to get their video to Blueiris.
Note that Blueiris accesses my Ubiquiti cameras via their RTSP streams from the UniFi Cloud Key Gen2 Plus controller/NVR.
The other weirdness is the Nest Hello sends everything to the cloud but I can use a guest view URL to bring it into Blueiris.
Here is a shot showing Blueiris directly on the right with my 15 main house cameras and web access on the left showing the 10 at the guest-house.
Here is a diagram showing the approximate connectivity to get to the various cameras.
It is not showing the Kasa KC100 at this time.