bigredfish
Known around here
Note that the LPR camera shows a 50mm lens and the 5231 has a 64mm lens. Not certain the usable distance you'll get with the 50mm? Perhaps someone with more knowledge on lenses can help..
Note that the LPR camera shows a 50mm lens and the 5231 has a 64mm lens. Not certain the usable distance you'll get with the 50mm? Perhaps someone with more knowledge on lenses can help..
If you haven't already found this, check out the IP Cam Talk Cliff Notes. It's a great reference for for many IP camera questions/situations.At-least that is my understanding of the IP Cameras so far.
You're right, it is definitely a matter of the amount of traffic going by your home. I live on a street that connects two major arteries from the downtown area, so I get about 1000 cars a week driving by. OpenALPR is useful for me. If you live on a side street that only sees a couple of dozen cars a day, then I would agree that OpenALPR may be overkill. But in any case, it is an interesting exercise to learn how to make it all work.I suppose it will somewhat depend on how much traffic you're watching. For my little street, over the past 5 years we've had the need for plates for LE a couple of dozen times and each time I was able to provide actionable overview and tag video in a matter of say 10-20 minutes, even from 7-10 days past with just a date and rough time.
If you haven't already found this, check out the IP Cam Talk Cliff Notes. It's a great reference for for many IP camera questions/situations.
I would agree that OpenALPR may be overkill. But in any case, it is an interesting exercise to learn how to make it all work.
Both of my LPR cameras are IPC-HFW5231E-Z12 models (the earlier version of the Z12E). As others have mentioned, you can purchase cameras with the LPR function built in, but it is much more economical to buy standard cameras with good optics and use a PC to process the video using the OpenALPR client.Thank You for the Cliff notes.
Quick question did you make the IPC-HFW5231E-Z12E work with open ALPR app to make the camera tag the vehicle ? Because if yes that is what I am planning to do get the non ALPR camera as big red fish said and if needed I will just download OPENALPR to try to make it tag vehicles.
Is it easy to do ?
Both of my LPR cameras are IPC-HFW5231E-Z12 models (the earlier version of the Z12E). As others have mentioned, you can purchase cameras with the LPR function built in, but it is much more economical to buy standard cameras with good optics and use a PC to process the video using the OpenALPR client.
It is not particularly difficult to set up the OpenALPR client, but it is not trivial either. You have to enable the substream function in the video settings on your cameras, and also correctly configure the client on your PC to receive the video feed from the camera's IP address. There is plenty of documentation online. If you are comfortable using the web configuration built into Dahua cameras, and if you understand the fundamentals of computer networking, you can probably get it set up in a few hours.
One other thing you'll probably want to do is install the Dahua Sunrise / Sunset utility on your PC, and use it to control when the cameras go into daytime / nighttime mode. You can find a link to the utility in this forum, as it was written by one of the users.
The only difference between the "actually DAHUA camera brand" and what Andy sells is that Andy's doesn't have the Dahua logo on the box, hardware, or firmware. Dahua makes both of them the same, they just don't stick their own logo on the OEM version that Andy (and others) resell under their own brands (TekEmpire).
One nice thing about IP cameras is that since the video is 100% digital, PAL/NTSC doesn't matter much. I'm in the US and all of my cameras run perfectly on the PAL firmware. It is definitely *not* like the analog video days when you couldn't display PAL content on a NTSC display.He also said he can send a firmware to make it do NTSC for US instead of PAL.