I am using Hikvision DS-6704HFI encoders and they work fine but they have their glitches. The issues are only firmware interface related, my browsers seem to hate them and times and it will crash IE and the like. The firmware is unique and different than the cameras I have used anyway, but the image quality is great! After installing 5-10 of these I think the image quality is better on these than on the analog capture cards built into our hybrid DVRs which is impressive.
You can see all four cameras on the main live view screen but that almost never works for me. I can't even get one half the time, but I don't care either so I've not tried too many settings to make it work. Other than that, they are great encoders for sure. Motion detection works very well and I have not had to ever reboot or anything either as they have just worked since install.
I did try the alarm inputs on one of them but they did not work well at all. I had three motion detectors set to normally closed and connected to the encoder and every few seconds they would flicker to alarm and back. Tried it for a week in different combos of sensors in different ports and could never make it work, POE vs external power, nothing helped. Connected the alarms to an IO module that had alarm inputs and they worked fine so the sensors were perfectly fine, it was just the inputs not working correctly. I need to try them again but I was not happy about that in general.
