Over the last month, a group of people have broken into cars and homes on my parents' street, including theirs, stealing one car. They've asked me to help pull the footage from their security cameras, to look at and provide to the police. I don't know whether it's my inexperience with security systems, poor design on Dahua's part, or (as I suspect) both, but it's becoming the most frustrating and baffling experience I've ever had with a piece of technology and I'd really appreciate any guidance anyone could offer.
Identifying the hardware I'm working with is the first challenge. There is no label or SKU on the recording unit, and I can't see any models for sale anywhere that match what I see. In the software, the value for 'Device Model' is simply 'HCVR.' They have no manuals or receipts. It most closely resembles the 5104H-S2, with blue lights and the arrow buttons on the front and a 1TB magnetic disk. It was installed less than six months ago by a contractor whose name they've forgotten.
Running the software at all is the second challenge. I had to install Windows and an old 32-bit browser to run their ancient NPAPI browser plugins (which incidentally triggered Windows' built-in malware detection, but oh well), only to find that their HTML+JS client application is unusably buggy (clicking anywhere in a timeline has a 50% chance of crashing the tab and a 50% chance of selecting a completely different time; playing backwards at all means playing forward from now on will only do a 'skip 1s forward and then play 1s backward, then skip 1s forward again' stuttering mode, etc). So I looked up my options and tried out SmartPSS instead.
Here's where I am now, struggling to use SmartPSS. The cameras are set to record 'Regular' (as opposed to MD, Alarm, etc), which I can only imagine means 'Continuously.' But the only footage available to search for, watch, or export is tiny 5/10-second motion detected clips; the timelines are empty stretches of black with yellow moments, rather than the green with yellow moments I expect to see based on online manuals. If I change it to MD mode, it behaves exactly the same. So what on Earth is 'Regular' mode and how can I get them to record continuously, if at all? Under Schedule, the entire timeline is green -- 'Regular' mode all day, every day. But it never produces anything but yellow/MD moments.
At one point a burglar is actually moving around on screen 5 feet from the camera when the clip ends, apparently no longer detecting motion, and resumes 20 seconds later. I just want continuous footage for the future, but damned if I can find any option for that, or any article online explaining how to activate it. One helpfully explains every mode but 'Regular.'
The same problem applies to the substream and snapshot modes. There's a snap interval of 5 S/Sheet (which I assume means every 5 seconds, I can't find an English explanation of what 'Sheet' refers to, but there should at least be snapshots somewhere at some point, right?), and in Schedule, snapshots are scheduled 'Regular' 24/7. Yet when I search for any time period at all, there are never pictures found. It would be tremendously useful if we did have a snapshot every 5 seconds, to more quickly scan around footage.
The real trouble is in exporting. This is where I feel I might be doing something dumb, because it can't possibly work this way by design, but I can't find any alternative. I want to export all the footage to my laptop. The only way thus far I've found to be able to do this is to Playback -> Search, select a channel, select a day, open a file list, select all files, select export, and transfer ~2,500 files over, taking around 1.5 hours. With 4 cameras over about 50 days, this means almost two weeks of my laptop running 24/7 sitting there receiving tiny clips. I wouldn't even mind that so much if I didn't have to click click click click to select a channel, select a day, select another channel, select another day, select another channel, select another day, etc, with ~20 second application hangs between each one, making it an entire day's work to export this way. There's an FTP export option (funnily enough only an insecure one), I could set up an FTP server, but if there's an option to export the entire backlog this way I can't find it, it seems more a scheduled upload of the last week sort of thing.
How am I supposed to export footage or browse it in a sane fashion? I'd kill right now to be able to simply SSH into this thing and touch the video files.
Identifying the hardware I'm working with is the first challenge. There is no label or SKU on the recording unit, and I can't see any models for sale anywhere that match what I see. In the software, the value for 'Device Model' is simply 'HCVR.' They have no manuals or receipts. It most closely resembles the 5104H-S2, with blue lights and the arrow buttons on the front and a 1TB magnetic disk. It was installed less than six months ago by a contractor whose name they've forgotten.
Running the software at all is the second challenge. I had to install Windows and an old 32-bit browser to run their ancient NPAPI browser plugins (which incidentally triggered Windows' built-in malware detection, but oh well), only to find that their HTML+JS client application is unusably buggy (clicking anywhere in a timeline has a 50% chance of crashing the tab and a 50% chance of selecting a completely different time; playing backwards at all means playing forward from now on will only do a 'skip 1s forward and then play 1s backward, then skip 1s forward again' stuttering mode, etc). So I looked up my options and tried out SmartPSS instead.
Here's where I am now, struggling to use SmartPSS. The cameras are set to record 'Regular' (as opposed to MD, Alarm, etc), which I can only imagine means 'Continuously.' But the only footage available to search for, watch, or export is tiny 5/10-second motion detected clips; the timelines are empty stretches of black with yellow moments, rather than the green with yellow moments I expect to see based on online manuals. If I change it to MD mode, it behaves exactly the same. So what on Earth is 'Regular' mode and how can I get them to record continuously, if at all? Under Schedule, the entire timeline is green -- 'Regular' mode all day, every day. But it never produces anything but yellow/MD moments.
At one point a burglar is actually moving around on screen 5 feet from the camera when the clip ends, apparently no longer detecting motion, and resumes 20 seconds later. I just want continuous footage for the future, but damned if I can find any option for that, or any article online explaining how to activate it. One helpfully explains every mode but 'Regular.'
The same problem applies to the substream and snapshot modes. There's a snap interval of 5 S/Sheet (which I assume means every 5 seconds, I can't find an English explanation of what 'Sheet' refers to, but there should at least be snapshots somewhere at some point, right?), and in Schedule, snapshots are scheduled 'Regular' 24/7. Yet when I search for any time period at all, there are never pictures found. It would be tremendously useful if we did have a snapshot every 5 seconds, to more quickly scan around footage.
The real trouble is in exporting. This is where I feel I might be doing something dumb, because it can't possibly work this way by design, but I can't find any alternative. I want to export all the footage to my laptop. The only way thus far I've found to be able to do this is to Playback -> Search, select a channel, select a day, open a file list, select all files, select export, and transfer ~2,500 files over, taking around 1.5 hours. With 4 cameras over about 50 days, this means almost two weeks of my laptop running 24/7 sitting there receiving tiny clips. I wouldn't even mind that so much if I didn't have to click click click click to select a channel, select a day, select another channel, select another day, select another channel, select another day, etc, with ~20 second application hangs between each one, making it an entire day's work to export this way. There's an FTP export option (funnily enough only an insecure one), I could set up an FTP server, but if there's an option to export the entire backlog this way I can't find it, it seems more a scheduled upload of the last week sort of thing.
How am I supposed to export footage or browse it in a sane fashion? I'd kill right now to be able to simply SSH into this thing and touch the video files.
