Having a nightmare with Hikvision NVR not seeing my Hikvision Cam

[sharpharp]

Hi,

On the advice of you guys, I purchased a Hikvision DS-7604-E1/4P NVR and also a Hikvision DS-2CD2332-I cam thinking these would work seamlessly together, but I've battled to get these working and getting nowhere....

Firstly I have the Camera Hardwired to the Router on the 192.168.1 network via an POE injector.
Secondly I have the NVR Hardwired also to the Router on the same 192.168.1

I have spent days trying to get the NVR to find/add the Camera but it simply cannot locate it, even when the cam and nvr are on the same Network....
In frustration I reset the Camera to default and attached it to back of the NVR which works instantly and assigns its own 192.168.254.x address...

So yes the camera works via the NVR, but the problem is I use the IPCam viewer app on the iphone to view the camera and the picture is not anywhere as good as the picture I was getting when I went direct to the camera....
I presume this is because the NVR has about 30% of the settings that the Camera has. But because the damn camera is on the 254 NVR network, I can't access to change any settings...
I set the NVR to the same settings as I had on the camera itself, but picture quality isn't anywhere as good and like I said, half the options are missing in the NVR compared to the camera.

Why can't the bloody NVR allow me to add the Camera via the 192.168.1 Network? That way at least I could access the camera directly and tweak all the settings which made it perfect???

Surely there must be a way to add camera to this NVR which are on the network and not plugged into the rear of it?

Please help, this is doing my head in.

All I want to do is retain the camera on its current IP address on the 192.168.1 network (so that I can access it via iphone app and have the best settings) and then also have a NVR which records the stream from the camera. I bought both Hikvisions items thinking I wouldn't have any issues, but man its been anything but....

 

[alastairstevenson]

Of course the camera can be connected to your normal LAN address range and added to the NVR. But you will need to change the mode of one of your PoE ports, as the NVR will not allow you to add another as you are already using the maximum of 4.

The PoE ports on the NVR do have their own separate IP address range. If your NVR has the 'Virtual Host' facility and it's enabled, you can access the PoE connected cameras directly via the URLs shown in the right-hand column of 'Camera Management'.
And if you don't have the 'Virtual Host' facility, there are still some ways to access cameras directly that are on the PoE ports.

But you want to connect the camera to your LAN, access it with another device, and still have it connected to the NVR.
The summary is: Connect the camera to the normal LAN, find the camera with SADP, change it's IP address to a spare one on your LAN.
On the NVR, edit a spare PoE port to 'Manual' (not Plug and Play), set the IP address to the same as the camera, use 'Hikvision' protocol, add the username and password, click OK and job done.

There is a thread on a similar topic with more detail - let me see if I can search for it.
I think this is what I was thinking of: http://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/3261-Connecting-IP-Cameras-TO-Hikvision-NVR

 

[sharpharp]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply Alastair...

Ideally I am hoping to have the camera plugged into the back of the POE port of the NVR and be able to access it directly and change all the settings directly on the camera and all continue accessing it on the ipcam viewer iphone app.

One of the reasons I bought the NVR was because of the POE ports, otherwise it means I will still need to use a separate POE injector for my camera (as it is setup currently)

I will have a look later today to see if I have the Virtual Host option you mentioned and report back.

 

[alastairstevenson]

If you want to use a PoE port - but still want direct access to the cameras - and there is no 'Virtual Host', then there is some info and ideas in this thread:
http://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/3292-Hikvision-NVR-POE-port-IP-address
But be aware that it could be a bit fiddly, depending on the method you use.

 

[sharpharp]

Managed to get it working, left the cam on the separate POE injector on its own IP, changed NVR to manual and then configured the cam direct for all the proper settings.
Set the NVR to record and its working beautifully. Just a shame I gotta have the separate mains plug for the poe injector, just that a small compromise.

Interestingly, I got the iphone app to display the picture via the direct cam and also via the nvr on the port 55x and the difference is obvious. The direct cam is sharp, while the nvr picture is fudgy.

Either way, got the best of both, recording via nvr, email alerts and sharp picture (be it with a 2 second lag) via the direct cam.

I was messing about with the video download button. When I click on PLAYBACK and pick a video file in the NVR menu and click download, it does download it.... My question, where the hell does it put it on your PC desktop? I looked everywhere and can't see it anywhere. Anyone got a clue?

Thanks again Alastair for your help ya wee fella.

 

[alastairstevenson]

Excellent, well done!
No particular reason why the NVR picture should be poor - unless you have configured the so-called 'channel zero' which is aimed at being used on a low-bandwidth connection.
Not many people know this but - the Hikvision NVRs supply RTSP streams for each channel, which you can connect to given an App that will listen to an RTSP stream.
Like so, shown by the very good Windows open-source tool 'ONVIF Device Manager' from sourceforge.net:
The numbers at the end allow selection of main or sub stream.

I too puzzled a lot over where downloads went on a Windows PC.
The path is shown in the 'Local configuration' page of the web admin GUI.

Save record files to Save snapshots in live view to
Save snapshots when playback to
Save clips to
Save downloaded files to
Encryption Key

But Windows doesn't allow programs to save there, so hides the files elsewhere using the 'Virtualstore' redirection in the user profile tree.
Because I can never find this each time, I added a new 'Library' entry to the 'Public pictures' link once I'd figured it out by doing a large extract and then doing a search for a large .mp4 file.