Howdy from LSD (Lower Slower Delaware)

[RavenDave]

Hi All,

Found this forum while searching for a solution to my Lorex NVR no longer communicating with the network. I'm retired accountant and love to tinker with electronics. Lorex tells me the NVR is no good and out of warranty. So I bought a PoE switch. After some playing around got one camera (of six) working. Will add the others shortly. Now I need a replacement for the NVR. I am thinking of using my own hard drives and some NVR software. Currently have a Synology setup with 4-4TB drives, 75% full of movies and music. Thinking of going down that path for the storage, but have no idea about software. Any comments would be welcome.

Dave

 

[sebastiantombs]

You'll find most here are using Blue Iris and/or an NVR with the majority being Blue Iris users. Synology has its' uses but the camera licensing makes it not as "friendly" as Blue Iris. You can download a trial version, two week trial, and evaluate it for yourself.

It runs best on a dedicated machine. Anything from a 5th generation or higher Intel CPU. 8th generation of you anticipate joining the Win11 crowd, otherwise Win10/Pro with updates shut off is fine. Blue Iris supports sub streams which means constant recording in low res but switching to full res when a camera is triggered for the duration of the trigger. It also supports SenseAI artificial intelligence and older versions, 5.5.7.11 or earlier, support DeepStack AI. Those are two significant advantages over Synology Surveillance Station to me. DeepStack supports offloading the AI function onto a CUDA capable video card which unloads the CPU from AI duties for the most part. SenseAI is relatively new and is still working on a GPU capable version.

Generally everyone writes video to local platter drives, surveillance rated. Keep in mind that video is constant and can load things pretty badly if there's not enough speed or buffering in the storage array system. You can also write to a platter drive then move the files to a NAS periodically. That will work because the stream can start/stop as the NAS requests more data. It does add some overhead to the VMS but nothing really significant.