Welcome Steve!
I don't want to start your IPCT experience off on a negative but that Oswoo stuff you got is most likely total junk. It is prob. some old D1/960 system that might look great on your phone but if you need it to ID someone after theft or robbery it would most likely have you kicking yourself for buying it. Don't get me wrong - when you can get a 16 camera kit for $300 almost anyone would be "excited" but sadly that stuff is crap.
Sadly the majority of these are garbage as well - BI won't fix the quality of these cameras.
Again, Steve, I am not trying to be an ass here after your first post. But if you are serious about protecting your business with video security I would spend a little more time looking around this forum and consider grabbing some quality IP cameras. You can get some high quality trusted brand cams for sub $100 and then look to launch BI with great hardware vs. continuing to throw money at crap. In the end you'll spend more going the route you are and have sub par results.
Again, Welcome!
Hello!
I appreciate your advice, I sold power
tools to professional contractors for decades and I pretty much told them the same thing, you buy cheap tools, you get what you paid for. That being said I forgot to mention my camera system experience started off with a trip to our local Costco store where they had a 8 camera 720p system on sale. I picked one up took it up to my store unpacked it and decided it was too much for me and hired a guy to run the cables. He pretty much mutilated the ends on all of the cables, told me he knew what he was doing and started hacking at my wiring. I guess he knew enough to get it wired up and viola! I had my camera system. The DVR (NVR?) box that came with it supported 8 cameras and that is what I had so we were good to go. About 18 months later I decided to rent a different space for my shop so we packed up the unit and took it to a new location, this time the place has drop ceilings which are amazingly simple to install the cameras in. Once installed I decided I wanted more! Who doesn't, right? The menus and operating system on the Lorex system were complicated and some aspects I never did figure out so I said heck with it and jumped on eBay thinking maybe the cheap system would have a little bit more simple operating system. Not the case! So I currently have all of the Lorex cameras wired up and all of the OSWOO cameras are still in the box, they are 720P cameras. I bought a 3TB purple drive for the oswoo system and fired it up, connected all of my Lorex camers and all of them were in black and white. I whined to the supplier that something was wrong with the system, of course the language barrier prohibiteed me from getting anywhere there but one evening I decided to take one of the oswoo cameras out of the box and hook it up... What do you know? It's in color! So as of now I have 8 ameras hooked to my 3TB Onswoo system that record in black and white and one camera laying on a shelf, facing a wall that records in color on a system that I believe you would have to be mostly asian to operate. The intent was to take the Lorex DVR (NVR?) home and use that system at the house. Since then I bought a DBPower IP camera on ebay cheap... it showed up, the power supply was toast right out of the box. I told the seller and he said throw the who thing away and he credited me back my $20. I jumped right back into the crazy pool and bought an identical DBPower ip camera and it showed up. I plugged the power supply in and it fired right up. I tried the same power supply with the other camera and it worked as well so I ordered a replacement power supply. Mind you I have a total of about $25 in 2 DBPower IP cameras that are 720P and they pan and tilt. Crappy cameras I'm sure but they have been fun to mess with... in fact my wife now uses one of them to talk to me when I am up at the shop. Just before I found this forum I bought 4 more cheap IP cameras and have been messing with them. I'm kinda fascinated by them to be honest, but now I am at a place where I feel like I not only do not know what to do I'm not even sure what I want them to do. I was sitting at home last night and I plugged in one of the new H.View pan/tilt 720p cameras and accidentally typed in the CAM ID number into the crappy app that I downloaded for these cameras, I now can watch a little old lady that I believe might be in China. I can beep her camera and she looks at it but has no idea who or what is happening, I can move it all over and see everything within range and I have even tried to communicate through it to tell her to change the factory password so the world can not see her. No luck there. I was at work today and accidentally deleted the Asian woman from my app. Kinda like losing a friend on facebook, so I started guessing what the camera ID number is and low and behold I found another camera that also appears to be somewhere not in the USA. This time there were people moving around, I tried to communicate to them to change their camera password, again no luck. I did however upgrade their firmware since I was there ;-) Anyway I am now more than ever intrigued as to the capabilities and vulnerabilities of these cameras. I have some questions and know there may not be answers for them but here we go...
1. Since it sounds like I started off down a horrible path of buying a crappy NVR or whatever the box is that runs these cameras is there a good recommendation for a unit that would be compatible with my 8 lorex cameras and possibly with my onswoo cameras as well that has menus that are primarily in English that might make sense to a normal, just geeky enough to get himself in trouble kinds of guy?
2. Do I really even need the above item? It looks as if there are computer programs and possibly hardware to do pretty much the same thing that are maybe a little easier on the user?
3. Since I have only giving a tiny amount of my time is that what
Blue Iris does? How about Ispy? Is there a miracle unit that would make tying all of these IP cameras and the non-ip cameras together and if so is that something I really want to do?
4. Is there a multi brand camera friendly app that works on android so I can delete 20 other apps that I have downloaded in search of the miracle app that might view all of these crappy cameras without bouncing around to other apps?
Thank you again for your time!
I have just bought some cheap IP cameras and was getting frustrated with the lack of support from the Chinese manufacturers. I suppose I could have spent some more $ on better cameras but I'm not sure I am convinced the documentation is any better. I have a small shop where I sell auto parts and I have a camera system up there that is a oswoo system I picked up on ebay. I am running 8 cameras with it but it is a 16 camera system. I added a couple of dbpower IP cameras to my shop and we have fun playing with them on our android phones but would like to be able to record with them and use them through a windows computer. I am intrigued by the blue iris software and I'm hoping maybe it will make these crappy little IP cameras easier to deal with... Thanks in advance for your help!!!
