NVR with POE ports, do you have to use them??

wozzzzza

Pulling my weight
Jan 5, 2015
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i have a hikvision NVR that has half of the channels POE ports, i cant seem to add any more cameras as it says i dont have room but half the POE ports are empty and i have cameras plugged into a POE switch.
do the cameras have to be plugged into the NVR's poe ports in order to use these channels on the NVR?? if not how do i do it?
 
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i have a hikvision NVR that has half of the channels POE ports, i cant seem to add any more cameras as it says i dont have room but half the POE ports are empty and i have cameras plugged into a POE switch.
do the cameras have to be plugged into the NVR's poe ports in order to use these channels on the NVR?? if not how do i do it?

Hi @wozzzzza

In general, NVR have X channels ( 4, 8, 16 typically ) and you can add as many "cameras" ( main streams ) as channels.
If the NVR has PoE ports, you can use those also .. but not required.

on Dahua NVRs .. you have to "manually add" cameras which are on the LAN port. I suspect something similar with Hikvision NVRs
 
Regardless of how many are plugged into the NVR PoE ports and how many are on an external switch, you can't exceed the total number of cameras the NVR is set to use. If you have a 16ch NVR, you can only run max 16 cameras total
 
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ive got 20 cameras, want to add 22nd but says full, thats where im confused a bit. theres around 10 not used on the POE ports all others are attached via switches around the building going back to main switch to NVR
 
How many unused ports is irrelevant.

As was mentioned, you can only add the number of cameras that the NVR is rated for, so how many channels is the NVR rated at?

If it is rated for more channels than you are using, then it means you have overloaded the bandwidth of the NVR and need to cut back on resolution, FPS, and bitrate.

Just because an NVR is rated for X number of cameras doesn't mean it can actually run X number of cameras depending on how someone configures the system.

Many people have to run multiple NVRs because they have too many higher MP cams and one NVR cannot run them all.
 
Well you have enough channels, so I'm guessing your 20 cameras are maxxing out the bandwidth capacity
 
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20 cameras using only 27mbps?
That seems a little low for 20 cameras.

And a 32 channel NVR that only has 80mbps bandwidth? seems unlikely.

Where are you seeing these readings?
oh no, its 160mbps incoming according to this and on the camera management screen it says bandwidth at the bottom, now 30mbps. i have cameras set on variable
also looking at getting a new NVR as this one is ancient and hasnt got the capacity per channel for my newer cameras at full settings.
 
half the POE ports are empty
For 'unable to add more cameras' -

If you are not going to connect anything into these, you can re-assign them them to connect to LAN-connected cameras either by unticking the 'PoE' box for the channel (newest firmware, varies with NVR model) or changing the channel to Manual instead of Plug&Play and specifying the LAN IP address and password for the camera.
 
For 'unable to add more cameras' -

If you are not going to connect anything into these, you can re-assign them them to connect to LAN-connected cameras either by unticking the 'PoE' box for the channel (newest firmware, varies with NVR model) or changing the channel to Manual instead of Plug&Play and specifying the LAN IP address and password for the camera.
i see, found it. i will give that a go. thanks.