Hikvision 7608 NVR vs Synology Surveillance Station

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Hi All, newbie here with some system design questions.

I recently installed 3 Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I bullet cameras for my home surveillance system. The cameras are connected to gigabit network switch through POE injector. On the recording side I have Hikvision 7608 NVR connected to the same network (I am not using NVR's POE ports).

I really like the cameras (image quality, variety of settings, etc.), but I am not very impressed with the NVR. The native interface is clunky and not intuitive, remote web access is difficult due to Mac plugin problems (could not get it to work so far), lastly I don't really like the NVR's motion detection settings - unlike cameras it doesn't seem to have expert mode and I am having hard time setting it up to record only 'real' motions instead of almost everything (snow, rain, etc.).

I also have Synology 211j NAS, had it for a few years, really like it, but it is getting old and I am going to upgrade it soon. I tried playing a bit with the Surveillance Station and it seems to be more user friendly, but it runs way too slow on 211j. My thought was to upgrade to Synology DS414, switch to SSS and get rid of the NVR.

My question: what are the pros and cons of switching from dedicated NVR to SSS? Would I lose a lot of functionality by making this switch?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!
 

fenderman

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@Trespassers W Welcome to the forum! You might want to try setting up the line cross detection or intrusion detection in the cams to eliminate some false alerts...
I have not used SS but here are a couple of issues that come to mind...you get two free licenses then its 50 dollars each...the unit itself is about 500...with the licenses it will set you back 600..if you get more cams it will cost you more..synology as has FPS limitations but is not an issue if you only have 8 cams or so..(its limited to 120fps total at 3mp, tough your NVR is probably as well)..You also cannot live monitor the SS on a monitor you need to have some other device that the images can stream to....
Consider running hikvisions ivms on a pc...or if you want more functionality and scheduling options some thing like blue iris (BI will require a decent pc)....
 
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fenderman: Thank you, these are valid points. Also, I am a bit hesitant about having 'all in one' solution, i.e. file storage, media server and surveillance system on the same device.

I was playing with Hikvision NVR a bit more tonight and it is starting to make more sense to me now. I set up remote access via iVMS-4500 mobile app - works nice, really like it, so I am not that concerned about remote access problems anymore.

I have a question about motion detection settings. There are settings on the camera itself (normal and expert mode) and on the NVR (seems to have only normal mode). I like camera settings better, what do I need to do to give camera a preference? Should I turn the camera motion detection on and turn it off on the NVR?
 
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colmcille, thanks for sharing your Surveillance Station experience - this is helpful! I tried running SS with two Hikvision 2CD-2032 cameras for a couple of days in parallel with my Hikvision NVR. I still dislike the Hikvision interface, but the NVR works much faster and seems to be more reliable then SS, so I will probably keep it for now. If I could fine tune the motion detection settings, I would be completely happy with it. :)
 

alastairstevenson

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Some of my recent experience:
For quite a while I was running Surveillance Station on a QNAP NAS, originally with 720p ONVIF-compatible cameras, and it was quite functional and fairly reliable, easy enough to use.
But then I came across Hikvision's range of IP cameras and was very impressed with the image quality, the broad capabilities, the well-developed and consistent web interface, the 'feel' of a well-engineered product.
And I quickly found that the extra workload of 1080p and higher was too much for the QNAP SS, and it would actually be quite costly to add another 4 or 5 camera licences at $55 each.
Based on the Hikvision camera experience, I bought a Hikvision DS-7816N-E2/8P NVR and I'm very pleased and impressed with it. Not a single glitch since startup last October.
It now has 7 cameras connected at 1080p 25fps, and despite also supplying 1080p full streams with motion detection for 3 of the connected Hikvision cameras to my QNAP Surveillance Station, the NVR dual core 2GHz CPU runs at over 90% idle.
It's fast and reliable, easy to use, and has good features.

It's fair to say that the NVR firmware hasn't fully caught up with the more advanced features of the cameras, apparently lacking explicit support for line crossing detection, intrusion detection, PIR detection, sound detection - but with a bit of experimentation with configuring these directly on the cameras, and choosing the type of recording schedule on the NVR, these features can be made to work. Hopefully newer firmware will better support them, it's already partially built in to current firmware.

There is just one thing that my QNAP Surveillance Station does that's better than the NVR that I'd like to see.
The QNAP Playback timeline marks motion-triggered recordings with a red duration band when continuous recording is also active. It would be good to see that also on the web GUI on the Hikvision NVR.
 
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