Dragon
Getting the hang of it
- Mar 19, 2016
- 68
- 30
I set the main stream max bitrate from default 15k to its max which is 50k. I had target bitrate set to 50k for awhile but saw no quality improvement so moved it back to 12k (default). Having max at 50k is probably pointless but shouldn't hurt.
It can do substream and MJPEG encoding at the same time as main stream, but it warns MJPEG quality can degrade if the system is overloaded with other tasks. I haven't tried MJPEG since I have nothing to really complain about in the quality of the main stream. Maybe I'll mess with it at some point but I've spent too much time with the camera the last few days and need to catch up on other stuff.
Dinion 8000 has been around for a few years so it only supports H.264. I assume that means it's using what would now be called H.264 Base Profile, not Main or High Profile. That's fine since Milestone 2016 doesn't support H.265 and seems a little glitchy with the High profile setting on Dahua. Bosch does let you tweak advanced settings for the H.264 encoder but I haven't tried changing them. Apparently you can alter the Quantization Parameter (QP) which controls the size and quality of the video. QP for I-frames and P-frames can be adjusted individually. Manual says:
I'm happy with default settings for now, but nice to know artifacts could potentially be reduced further. I double checked and Dahua doesn't have any of those advanced settings so stream quality is what it is. I did try VBR and "Smart codec" with a slider set to max quality but it seemed no better than CBR at max bitrate. You can also set a rectangular region of interest which keeps that area detailed and makes everything else very blocky. The ROI artifacting wasn't obviously reduced vs not using ROI.
Dahua 8232 is still one of the best bang for the buck low light cameras and makes a good secondary. On the other hand, you could spend half the cost on a higher res camera and beef up your IR which is probably better any time you can force a subject to approach within 20-25 feet. It's much better to disable internal camera IR and use external IR because it eliminates fog and every little particle and insect getting seen by the camera. I'm finding it preferable to have one or two 100degree FOV cameras watching to see what generally happens in an area without necessarily being able to identify anything, then a second low-light camera zoomed in somewhere that intruders likely can't avoid passing for identification. Point an IR "cannon" light at where cams are zoomed in on. Unfortunately, Dahua 8232 only zooms out to ~80FOV and being a lower res 1080p camera makes it less ideal for wide angle watching. I'm probably going to move mine to a choke point and keep it relatively zoomed in.
Bosch tech support did respond within a few hours and linked me to the spec sheet with recommended lenses (same sheet I'd already looked at) and they said I'll need to call sales to see if they have other lens suggestions.
Last edited:
