Any reason to use SmartIR on door/porch camera?

Dave88LX

Dave88LX

Getting the hang of it
Jul 13, 2016
141
63
York, PA
I'm working on getting things set up, and have my first camera installed next to my front door, a IPC-HDW5231R-Z.
(It's been sitting in a box for a few years, so may also need firmware updated, not sure yet, haven't searched).

I did a little bit of testing with the kids outside, and pretty much any amount of IR basically blows out faces.
Any reason to use the IR?
I'll try getting a color screencap as well to see how that looks, I didn't think of that last night when I was messing around.

Being that the intent is for "front door" and covering this area, I am wondering if I should rotate the camera 90* and/or tighten up the view a bit as well.
Me at 6'1", it kind of cuts the top of my head off.

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You need IR if you don't have enough light to go in color.

Smart IR is supposed to compensate for those close shots and turn the IR down.

You can do that or try not to do too much with one camera view and don't worry about getting captures (that would be poor out at the street) and dial the IR down manually to where it doesn't wash out.
 
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No longer can load it in Edge (IE mode), but it works in Chrome (which is good?)...but I have to do some more digging on that. I've heard different browsers show different options.

Just upgraded the firmware, appears to be working.

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And yep just to clarify...don't care too much about the street. Will have other cameras to handle that. Just want the best I can get for the door.
 
Don't have the button to record video anymore, only a snapshot or record audio?

Those snapshots also no longer get dropped into my C:\Users\<user>\WebDownload\LiveSnapshot directory on my PC...I'll have to dig into that for the reason why.
UPDATE: Disabled P2P after doing some reading, now it works, but just goes straight to my Windows Downloads directory.

I'll try to get someone in front of it tomorrow to test the IR...can't record video anymore to walk outside myself.

I think I have a decent amount of light...


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Last edited:
Would it make sense to rotate the camera 90°?

Do you know if the new firmware removes that ability to hit "record" from the camera's webpage, or is it hidden because of browser settings?
 
You could try it but think I'd leave that one as it is. Sometimes a corridor/portrait view works better but what you have there it's better for your case I think. You get at least some view of both vehicles and someone short-cutting the walk that way and there's nothing above or below of particular interest. I guess corridor might get you a view of packages left if you want. Maybe try angling it up a little if it's cutting your head off closer.
 
Dave88LX said:
Would it make sense to rotate the camera 90°?

Do you know if the new firmware removes that ability to hit "record" from the camera's webpage, or is it hidden because of browser settings?
Click to expand...
Probably due to browser.
Use either Palemoon 32bit browser, or Chrome with the IE tab extension installed.
Install the plugin when requested.
 
Updated Chrome. Trying IE tab extension.
I can get it into playback...but man, it's quite cumbersome and trying to "seek" is just frustrating.

I'll give Palemoon a try.
 
The cumbersome playback is why many of us use Blue Iris!

One of the many areas where I think BI does a better job is how it displays the alerts/timeline, and I believe it is still the same as when I last ran SmartPSS and DMSS.

In the camera GUI, it gives a timeline with lines at various times to show when it triggered. Over to the right is a text log of the time for each trigger, but no image of the trigger.

So when I wanted to find or look at something, I needed to click each one until I found what I was looking for.

Wanna know when UPS came by in an NVR....well just start clicking on the timeline triggers till you see the UPS truck. May take awhile depending on the amount of traffic that goes by.

With BI, it gives alert thumbnails, so I can quickly scroll and find UPS way quicker than I ever could with an NVR playback timeline.

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Or if you want to be notified when UPS, or FEDEX, or USPS comes by, with BI AI, you can set up an alert just for those vehicles. Good luck doing that with an NVR.

But to me, the thumbnails are invaluable. I can quickly scroll it at night and look for any activity instead of having to click each one and be like "oh that is John coming home" If I recognize the vehicle or person in the image, no need to investigate further.
 
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Ah. Yeah, this project is a few years in the making. I ordered a handful of items (see below) from Andy in 2017 when we had people breaking into cars etc. I ordered a bunch of stuff, started messing with it, caught up in life, and am finally trying to piece it together.

At the time, BlueIris and getting a dedicated PC to run it seemed cumbersome at the time to spec out another PC to run it...didn't want it overbuilt ($), and didn't want it underbuilt...so I figured a dedicated NVR would do just what I needed at the time.

Of course, I'm not going to be able to have any alerts or anything without digging into triggers/zones and all of that...which I haven't read up on or taken the time to understand how to set up yet. That will be great to have for people poking around who don't do anything noticeable.

My goal at the time was to be able to look back and review footage if something happened overnight. Which, technically I guess it still can do just fine. If the user interface is going to continue to be annoying like this though, I can see myself switching over to something more user-friendly from the GUI/interface POV.

I can see why you find BI much more intuitive! It'd be nice to eventually get into the LPR/LPC stuff too.

For now, I'm just looking to get basic usability and coverage...and then expand as I have time to "play" per se.

I have a decent little start going here...

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I know we're getting into a different conversation now. One that may have been covered already.

Not much luck here either. I can view the cam via its IP (haven't changed it yet).
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I can log into the NVR, but the cam won't load.
Time to eat. Mess with it more later.
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Yep that is a good start.

You can see in the post above it says "transferring data" so there is a bottleneck somewhere in your network topology.

Make sure you have the substreams active and being used in the NVR as those are a lot less resources when showing multi-view.
 
Stream and substream settings, in the camera:
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NVR:
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Went to the basement to see if it was working on the NVR. That was looking weird like it'd been reset somewhat and not saved. Weird.
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Uh. OK. Change the camera password in the NVR...realizing I never updated the NVR after I defaulted the camera to update the firmware in it...haha.
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That's better.
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30FPS is way too much. Drop it to 15 and watch how much more responsive it will get.

Make it 15FPS and 15 iframes.
 
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OK updated that. I knew what FPS was, and looked up what IFrames were.

If I'm following, at 15 FPS and 15 IFrames, I'm sending 15 full captures per second and no PFrames?
 
An IFrame is a complete image frame that is coded without reference to other pictures. Compression is achieved by comparing frames following an IFrame and only sending the changes until the next IFrame is generated. The IFrame is the frame that is used as the primary reference point that is compared to the other frames in the stream. This method allows for frames that are much smaller in size because they are only pulling the changes in reference to the original IFrame.

So the iframe is in reference to the FPS.

So if they match, it is one full frame every second.

If it is 15FPS and 30 iframes, then every 2 seconds it sends a full frame.
 
Tested it quick walking outside.
All camera settings are default for now. Wish I could convince my wife to walk around out there, be a lot easier haha.

...nevermind. Now off to learn how to convert .dav into .mp4.
 
wittaj said:
An IFrame is a complete image frame that is coded without reference to other pictures. Compression is achieved by comparing frames following an IFrame and only sending the changes until the next IFrame is generated. The IFrame is the frame that is used as the primary reference point that is compared to the other frames in the stream. This method allows for frames that are much smaller in size because they are only pulling the changes in reference to the original IFrame.

So the iframe is in reference to the FPS.

So if they match, it is one full frame every second.

If it is 15FPS and 30 iframes, then every 2 seconds it sends a full frame.
Click to expand...
OK that makes a lot more sense then...I had the math off on that one there. Thanks!
 
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