5442 S3 series cams and SMD

[bigredfish]

There is an animal filter in the newest FW, you could look at the AI/IVS setings on the NVR as well as it has AI capabilities. One or the other is allowing critters.

You DO have MD/SMD turned OFF in the camera AND the NVR right?

 

[1.21 jiggawatts!]

There is an animal filter in the newest FW, you could look at the AI/IVS setings on the NVR as well as it has AI capabilities. One or the other is allowing critters.

You DO have MD/SMD turned OFF in the camera AND the NVR right?

it appears SMD and MD is turned off. but i noticed under event/recorder/mode, there is a selection for acupick or ai mode. acupick was selected. should it be in AI mode? i just switched it to that because i had disabled accupick on all the cams anyway.

 

[jharrell]

My 5442 s3 cameras work perfect with SMD you just have to make sure normal motion detection is setup right so it doesn't also trigger. What I have found since the documentation is non existent or wrong is that if you just want SMD without normal motion events you need to have normal motion on (because that is required for SMD), have the detection area setup for motion (I have red covering the entire view because red means where it will detect, not where it will blocks oddly enough, gets me every time) then ,the key part, you must set sensitivity to zero and threshold to 100 so normal motion won't trigger. With this config SMD only triggers on vehicles and people and is very reliable in doing so, plus it triggers normal ONVIF motions events that other programs can utilize easily which IVS does not.

Maybe its different with a Dahua NVR and its somehow going in and getting normal motion too or doing its own off camera motion detection in the NVR, maybe its overwriting camera setting on its own after you change them, I had that issue with Synology.

Never had an issue with Chrome/Edge browser on the S3's, if they have code in the new UI that requires IE to operate correctly then Dahua has some serious design problems and I haven't seen it, I do web development for a living and that hasn't been an issue in 10+ years, its actually pretty difficult to use IE specific stuff now days you would need to go out of your way to use it or have code you haven't touched or tested in 10+ years (hope not). It would be painful to actually write code for IE because you would need to be running IE to test the code you wrote while almost everyone runs Chrome or Edge for development because of its compatibility and far superior development tools. I have seen it switch codec bitrates when adjusting resolution etc, but that just seems to be Dahua trying to "help" you set what they think is a good bitrate for the settings, pretty annoying honestly not an IE thing unless maybe that helper code is broken in IE and actually makes it better lol.

I have tried IVS multiple times, maybe its great with a Dahua NVR or Blue Iris, but it seems very finicky and poorly documented and its features are way overkill for my situation, which is just a residential yard that I want notified if a person or vehicle is moving in it which SMD has been by far the most reliable for me. There seems to be conflicting information whether you need a boundary around an IVS intrusion box and how many zigzags you need to draw with tripwire to get reliable detection, neither is documented as far as I can find. When I tried intrusion it would trigger on and off all night long with my parked cars because they would "appear" to the AI then disappear and reappear, so that checkbox seems useless to me but that means your intrusion box can't really be looking down a driveway where the vehicle may appear rather than crossing the boundary.

 

[wittaj]

My 5442 s3 cameras work perfect with SMD you just have to make sure normal motion detection is setup right so it doesn't also trigger. What I have found since the documentation is non existent or wrong is that if you just want SMD without normal motion events you need to have normal motion on (because that is required for SMD), have the detection area setup for motion (I have red covering the entire view because red means where it will detect, not where it will blocks oddly enough, gets me every time) then ,the key part, you must set sensitivity to zero and threshold to 100 so normal motion won't trigger. With this config SMD only triggers on vehicles and people and is very reliable in doing so, plus it triggers normal ONVIF motions events that other programs can utilize easily which IVS does not.

Maybe its different with a Dahua NVR and its somehow going in and getting normal motion too or doing its own off camera motion detection in the NVR, maybe its overwriting camera setting on its own after you change them, I had that issue with Synology.

Never had an issue with Chrome/Edge browser on the S3's, if they have code in the new UI that requires IE to operate correctly then Dahua has some serious design problems and I haven't seen it, I do web development for a living and that hasn't been an issue in 10+ years, its actually pretty difficult to use IE specific stuff now days you would need to go out of your way to use it or have code you haven't touched or tested in 10+ years (hope not). It would be painful to actually write code for IE because you would need to be running IE to test the code you wrote while almost everyone runs Chrome or Edge for development because of its compatibility and far superior development tools. I have seen it switch codec bitrates when adjusting resolution etc, but that just seems to be Dahua trying to "help" you set what they think is a good bitrate for the settings, pretty annoying honestly not an IE thing unless maybe that helper code is broken in IE and actually makes it better lol.

I have tried IVS multiple times, maybe its great with a Dahua NVR or Blue Iris, but it seems very finicky and poorly documented and its features are way overkill for my situation, which is just a residential yard that I want notified if a person or vehicle is moving in it which SMD has been by far the most reliable for me. There seems to be conflicting information whether you need a boundary around an IVS intrusion box and how many zigzags you need to draw with tripwire to get reliable detection, neither is documented as far as I can find. When I tried intrusion it would trigger on and off all night long with my parked cars because they would "appear" to the AI then disappear and reappear, so that checkbox seems useless to me but that means your intrusion box can't really be looking down a driveway where the vehicle may appear rather than crossing the boundary.

That is why many times we say YMMV.

My 5542 with IVS doesn't trigger for anything other than I want. No triggers for leaves, shadows, parked cars, etc. Only what I want.


So you say you are a web developer....maybe you are better than most....but we have found that these manufacturers don't want to recreate the wheel and instead try to use older code as the baseline....


While newer cameras are supposed to work with other browsers, keep in mind to ensure full compatibility, IE is still preferred. And this isn't specific to just Dahua either.

It comes down to IE was the most popular browser when these cameras started to be made, so they centered the firmware around one particular browser and they got lazy and never updated the internals of the program to play nice with other browsers as more became available and IE started to fade.

Back when the firmware was written, it was probably a pain to get it to play nice with every different browser, so they went with the most popular one.

They haven't had a need to address this because their intended market (hint it isn't us) is mainly businesses where they have enough light they can stay in default settings so they don't have a need to login to the camera via browser. It is us homeowners that push these to the limits and actually change settings.

So we either deal with outdated browsers but better cameras or go with crap consumer grade cameras that use fancy apps (but probably more vulnerabilities than this plug-in) and modern browsers but horrible images.


A trusted member here wildcat_1, who works closely with Dahua and gets "under the hood" of the firmware, including this new GUI, said in this thread:

"Not a case of only using IE for testing, it's more the case that this is the only fully compatible browser that truly work with Dahua GUI's. As we've all discussed before, other browsers unfortunately (up to Firefox support most recently) cause anomalies in config, maintenance modes, updates etc. All of this reported back to Dahua to tackle in future but while we all await compatibility with wider browser and platform acceptance OR browser agnostic GUI's, this is unfortunately where we're all at."

So while Dahua claims other browsers are supported, someone that looks at the fine details of the firmware, coupled with many users experience here, that Internet Explorer provides the best opportunity to set up the camera and the setting stick.

Doesn't mean you won't have a problem with another browser, but it is rolling the dice.

Simply use Internet Explorer or Pale Moon and be done with it.

Even brand new NVRs still have Explorer coded into them to access the cameras:

And sometimes you don't know what you are missing by using another browser:

For those that do not know...use IE browser for Dahua (and others?) camera GUI to see more options
I've been using Chrome since I bought my first Dahua camera from Andy last year (the good 'ol 4231's). I was able to log in, see menu options, do the config, save, logout....all done. Always wondered how folks were able to see the AI detection boxes livestream and other stuff which I thought...



Or this one where someone showed that with a brand new 2024 camera model, downloading files from an SD card is 100Mbps with Explorer and only 10Mbps with other browsers.

Downloading videos files directly from camera via web interface (using other than IE) seems to be capped at TEN Mbps
UPDATE: If you use Internet Explorer (with plug-in), you can download videos via the web interface at the full 100Mbps speed - note you can't go any faster because the NIC doesn't support GigE. Thanks @TheOtherMike for pointing that out on the data sheet (maybe for 2024, Dahua will go with...


Or even post #16 in this thread! Which could be why IVS didn't work for you because you were using Edge and it was leaving MD turned on even though Edge showed it off and as such was using default crappy MD settings....




And as always YMMV....

 

[jharrell]

My 5542 with IVS doesn't trigger for anything other than I want. No triggers for leaves, shadows, parked cars, etc. Only what I want.

Thats great, so how much border in pixels do you leave around intrusion boxes and how many zig zags do you draw? Whats the trick to get AI to not lose lock on a parked car does it need a certain amount of light? Seemed like it was worse with my parked RV thinking it was a car sometimes, was random throughout night, pretty hard to troubleshoot, lighting wasn't changing. Again I don't care about things appearing and standing still, I care about something MOVING, I know someone trying to count cars in a parking lot might care about parked vehicles, but for home security I just want to know something is happening outside, which denotes movement of a person or a vehicle, animals would be nice too.

So you say you are a web developer....maybe you are better than most....but we have found that these manufacturers don't want to recreate the wheel and instead try to use older code as the baseline....

Sorry I went through this years ago, large code base working great in IE, lot of IE specific features because it as the only browser that could do those things when the code was written. IE got progressively worse to develop for and Chrome was far better and still supported a lot of IE's quirks, IE being a security risk and MS moving on to Edge running on Chromes engine pretty much mandated Edge support and IE being considered a red flag for security compliance. This is all long done water under the bridge, to have an IE requirement nowadays is a joke considering the Chromium engine can do just about anything you have needed IE for including plug ins. In fact a lot of software is written using the Chrome engine even for desktop using things like Electron. VsCode, MS teams, Zoom, Synology Surveillance client, 1password, this list goes on. Synology required their client for certain features up until a few years ago because it injected some native plugin code to handle video into the Chrome engine, for the last couple of years this hasn't been necessary as the browser engine is able to handling everything a NVR needs to do.

A trusted member here wildcat_1, who works closely with Dahua and gets "under the hood" of the firmware, including this new GUI, said in this thread:

"Not a case of only using IE for testing, it's more the case that this is the only fully compatible browser that truly work with Dahua GUI's. As we've all discussed before, other browsers unfortunately (up to Firefox support most recently) cause anomalies in config, maintenance modes, updates etc. All of this reported back to Dahua to tackle in future but while we all await compatibility with wider browser and platform acceptance OR browser agnostic GUI's, this is unfortunately where we're all at."

Absolutely zero reason of this other than not wanting to update ancient code that is going to be riddle with security problems. The only thing IE offers over Chrome/Edge is the ability to use Active X plugins which are a security nightmare and one of the main reasons IE has gone away. In the past to do things like draw detection zones or just play weird video codecs you needed those plugins to config an IPCam, Those limitation haven't really existed in modern browsers for years, the built api could do everything including playing video, drawing on it, audio etc. codec support is more limited although better nowadays h.264 is the main web standard, h.265 is pretty well supported now, browser always supported mjpeg and mpeg2, plus cameras can have multiple streams or you can just do transcoding on the server.

And sometimes you don't know what you are missing by using another browser:

For those that do not know...use IE browser for Dahua (and others?) camera GUI to see more options
I've been using Chrome since I bought my first Dahua camera from Andy last year (the good 'ol 4231's). I was able to log in, see menu options, do the config, save, logout....all done. Always wondered how folks were able to see the AI detection boxes livestream and other stuff which I thought...

Not sure what thats about I see AI detection boxes in the livestream in Edge and have since I first turned on IVS in my 5442's. I am not sure why they would not show certain config in Chrome or menu other than being lazy, saving and loading settings in one of the most trivial web app things you can do and there is nothing special about IE that helps that. Again if it was some old UI that needed a plugin to work then they should just draw a box that says function not supported where the plugin would be rather than making it disappear which would just lead to confusion, pretty sure my old Dahua 720p bullets just showed a blank box if you didnt run IE with the plugin for drawing detection area.

Or this one where someone showed that with a brand new 2024 camera model, downloading files from an SD card is 100Mbps with Explorer and only 10Mbps with other browsers.

Not sure what to say with that one other than someone doesn't know how to code download. Browsers haven't changed how they handle file downloads since well the first browsers, definitely not a IE vs Chrome thing unless they are doing something insane to get the file, I know for a fact any browser can handle hundreds of megabytes per second download so long as you know how to code the file response from the web server, its just a byte stream usually written in loop from a file on the server (camera), its about as simple as it gets if you understand that sort of thing.

 

[jharrell]

Just as a side note since wittaj got me curious as to what Dahua is using to develop their web app now with the new UI, looks like they are using Ant Design as their web app framework, hard to tell which version since its all web packed up and I don't feel like digging further. Makes sense as Ant design is a modern React framework but developed by a Chinese group. It is generally considered a high quality modern framework that works very well with modern browsers, it is up to version 5.0 now which fully DROPPED support for IE as you can see in the provided link as pretty much every framework has. So they must be using an older version of Ant that still supports it.

The point with this is all of the config and settings screen should fully support modern browsers for data entry and it would be very difficult to do something IE specific that prevents proper viewing or editing of configuration other than needing a plugin for say drawing areas or viewing video, which I know they aren't using since those things are working fine in Edge and I can see they are using a Canvas Element as to be expected in the last decade.

 

[wittaj]

Hmm, I use an intrusion box with a perfect square with the box in each corner of the entire field of view and I capture everything - no pixels or other boundary. The appears checkbox does wonders in that regard. But it is a checkbox... no zig zags or any of that stuff...simple 4 square intrusion works for me.



But maybe mine works because I have a field of view the camera AI was designed for and that is for people in the vertical.

I hear you about the browser development, just sharing with you actual experience of the members here.

Maybe you should get a job with Dahua to overhaul their GUI experience!

 

[steve1225]

Hmm, I use an intrusion box with a perfect square with the box in each corner of the entire field of view and I capture everything - no pixels or other boundary. The appears checkbox does wonders in that regard. But it is a checkbox... no zig zags or any of that stuff...simple 4 square intrusion works for me.

View attachment 205358

But maybe mine works because I have a field of view the camera AI was designed for and that is for people in the vertical.

I hear you about the browser development, just sharing with you actual experience of the members here.

Maybe you should get a job with Dahua to overhaul their GUI experience!

Both Intrusion with rectangle box and tripwire with zigzag works very well on 5442-S3..
there is of course difference between them - tripwire can generate many events from different parts of view (crossing with zigzag), intrusion only one (more like SMD)...

for me web ui on 5442-S3 works with any modern browser (safari, chrome, edge) on both windows & Mac.. zero problems at all..

 

[wittaj]

Both Intrusion with rectangle box and tripwire with zigzag works very well on 5442-S3..
there is of course difference between them - tripwire can generate many events from different parts of view (crossing with zigzag), intrusion only one (more like SMD)...

for me web ui on 5442-S3 works with any modern browser (safari, chrome, edge) on both windows & Mac.. zero problems at all..

That is why most of us say YMMV.

Many people have seen MD off in edge and chrome yet on in Explorer and explains why they were getting false triggers using IVS.

And some don't experience issues. But we know they are problematic so I, and many others here, will continue to use IE as we know it works....

 

[jharrell]

Hmm, I use an intrusion box with a perfect square with the box in each corner of the entire field of view and I capture everything - no pixels or other boundary. The appears checkbox does wonders in that regard. But it is a checkbox... no zig zags or any of that stuff...simple 4 square intrusion works for me.

Yet basically every post here describing how to setup intrusion says something like this from earlier in thread, that nobody corrected:

Nope, leave some space around the edges. It takes a moment for the object to be detected. Movement toward a boundary and then crossing that line (edge of the box) seems to work best. "Appears" is ok, but I have had better luck with "Cross."

So where are the docs that describe exactly what intrusion does and how it should be setup from Dahua? Space around edges or no space? Appear or no Appear? SMD doesn't need this stuff if something moves in the detection area it fires as is to be expected. This pretty much says to leave a buffer and only detects thing entering and leaving area, not moving around within it: Dahua Wiki - "It needs to leave some space for target movement outside the perimeter if it is to detect enter and leave event"

I hear you about the browser development, just sharing with you actual experience of the members here.

Maybe you should get a job with Dahua to overhaul their GUI experience!

I do very good at my current job thanks, and I am telling you that requiring IE is a huge security risk and any Chrome issues should have been corrected a decade ago on top of that the code the actual camera is using doesn't seem to have any IE dependencies in the new UI. Pretty sure they are blaming Chrome vs IE is to divert blame from buggy code written by them. I will say I have seen zero issues with Edge just as steve1225 has.

 

[bigredfish]

Point being missed relative to IE
Yes most browsers will work on the newer Dahua cameras.

But sometimes things don’t save correctly, especially cameras prior to the latest 3 UI

Also on most Dahua NVRs if you don’t use IE or Edge in IE mode, some controls simply don’t appear. Try playback on a Dahua NVR using chrome and then on IE. You’ll see controls not available in Chrome

Regardless, the OPs problem is seeing events on the NVR time line that don’t give him alerts.

That’s why I said there may be something set in the NVR that us not set to send alerts.

 

[bigredfish]

it appears SMD and MD is turned off. but i noticed under event/recorder/mode, there is a selection for acupick or ai mode. acupick was selected. should it be in AI mode? i just switched it to that because i had disabled accupick on all the cams anyway.

Yes

 

[1.21 jiggawatts!]

in addition to the previous steps i took mentioned in this thread (accupick, metadata in ivs on all cams disabled, disabled accupick on nvr and put it in AI mode) , made sure on the nvr camera settings that ai was by camera and not nvr. i also went into motion detection (under event/video detection/area) on every camera, deleted the detection zone for area 1 which was drawn for the whole screen, put the threshold to the highest setting and the sensitivity to the lowest setting. everything was done using edge in internet explorer mode. made sure to see the ie symbol in the address bar for edge. motion detection was already off when i did this but i have a sneaky feeling that it is somehow on in the background. maybe i should apply it and remove it in IE, but so far, i don't seem to have any false alarms. it's a remote site and nobody is there to walk around and test, so when i saw a possum, i enabled animal detection just to see if it would work and it did. then i shut off animal detection. when i know everyting is running perfect, i may reset everything and start from scratch, applying everying i learned. gonna let it run for a while before i do that though and see how it works when people are around.

im not getting all the massive amount of markers on the timeline either, thanks to accupick and metadata being disabled. i think all those accupick and metadata events took up a massive amount of space on the hdd. the NVR seems to be eating drive space slower now.

is the only way to get IVS intrusion and tripwire events on the timelne in DMSS by enabling +event linkage/enable recording? does this result in an actual seprate recording from the continuous (all the time) recording? (having a double recording) or does it just tag that part of the recording?

 

[steve1225]

im not getting all the massive amount of markers on the timeline either, thanks to accupick and metadata being disabled. i think all those accupick and metadata events took up a massive amount of space on the hdd. the NVR seems to be eating drive space slower now.

No, they don't eat any additional space (if you have 24/7 recordings)...
Simply the same video feed is cut for more smaller files and they have attributes which say what type events they have inside..

 

[bigredfish]

is the only way to get IVS intrusion and tripwire events on the timelne in DMSS by enabling +event linkage/enable recording? does this result in an actual seprate recording from the continuous (all the time) recording? (having a double recording) or does it just tag that part of the recording?

Yes, you have to enable IVS recording /Event linkage and yes IVS/SMD events are separate files

 

[1.21 jiggawatts!]

unfortunately, still happening. even a ze version of the cam monitoring a stairs (intrusion area) got tripped by a squirrel (and it's not even a big area), others with birds and squirrels. i enabled SMD on one cam (disabled IVS), put sensitivity all the way down and threshold all the way up in MD. i wanna see what happens with that.

i don't know. maybe a default is not enough? maybe needs a factory reset? maybe it's the firmware version?

p.s, i know the cams have 2 update files, do the nvrs need 2 files as well?

anyone know of a firmware version which is the best?

update: even spiders dangling on webs at night near the camera setoff IVS human detection. i just don't get it.

 

[jharrell]

update: even spiders dangling on webs at night near the camera setoff IVS human detection. i just don't get it.

I did have one spider hanging down in front of a camera once that triggered SMD human detection, but reviewing the video I mean it really kinda look like a more distant person waving their arms around since it was using two legs together looking like two arms and two legs. So I couldn't blame it, haven't seen that since, If I switch normal motion on get all sorts of spiders and bugs tripping it during the night. Really has been accurate for me.

Almost seems like your NVR is doing off camera motion detection, you can use the alarms panel in the camera UI and turn them on there and so long as your logged in it will record what the camera triggers on if you have everything checked. Problem is its hard to keep UI logged in because of their super security that always has a session timeout instead letting me just leave a browser tab connected without kicking me off, newest firmware has a setting for session timeout with a "all" setting doesn't seem to do anything, can at least set to 60 minutes now vs like 5 minutes in previous firmwares.

Other thing you can try and run is Onvif Device Manager and connect to camera with onvif account and watch event log, this will let you know what the camera is actually emitting vs say an NVR doing some other kind of detection.

I haven't had an issue turning off standard motion detection completely when testing IVS, but IVS did seem pretty sensitive last time I tried it would trigger on bushes moving a certain way in the wind etc, I could see it drawing AI boxes around stuff on the live view randomly, didnt dig much further since I wasn't happy with the events it was emitting anyway vs SMD which I wanted the standard motion events for other programs like scrypted and onvif Synology.