Motion Detection/SMD Questions/Issues

[wittaj]

But enough of the debating because it comes down to ones comfort level with a particular program LOL. Personally I don't find BI and Windows complicated like you do, but to each their own.

Your issue was - Can a VMS system accept motion triggers from a Dahua camera.

A Dahua NVR can.

BI can with a series of checkboxes.

Sounds like the other VMS systems can't based on your experience.

So it comes down to if you want to use Dahua cameras, do you want to use a VMS system that you have to use its AI analytics or a system that can accept Dahua AI analytics.

Like everything in life, there are compromises.

I will compromise a fancy app in favor of BI that has more functionality and a great price.

You may favor Scrypted or some other VMS for its "easier" use and setup even if it costs more.

Others go the Ring or Arlo type route because in 10 minutes the camera is up and running on a decent app on their phone. They don't care that the quality won't be good enough to ID a perp at night.

Others may do something else.

And those with the resources will develop their own thing to accomplish what they want.

 

[MR2]

somewhat of a side note, if you want a higher reliability outside of making sure you are correctly locating the right devices, I'd highly recommend using external AI Processing the built in stuff is not particularly accurate at the best of times and BI is a ridiculously cheap way to do that

 

[jharrell]

Personally I don't find BI and Windows complicated like you do, but to each their own.

My issue with BI is more about it requiring Windows, I no longer wish to maintain a windows system for anything important, I am trying to simply my life in that respect, I have done that sort of thing for many years and made a good living doing so, I don't wish to do that at home as well. If BI ran on Linux say in docker then I would probably consider using it like just about every other useful piece of server software I run at home.

Your issue was - Can a VMS system accept motion triggers from a Dahua camera.

A Dahua NVR can.

Yeah I would hope so at minimum...

I will compromise a fancy app in favor of BI that has more functionality and a great price.

HomeKit with Scrypted is free and works great with very clear and easy to setup yet powerful parameters. The one thing it doesn't do is continuous recording or above 1080P for clips, due to using iCloud storage, otherwise its does exactly what I want for home use and is my primary daily driver, the ability to quickly pull up my cameras from anywhere is extremely valuable along with the wife actually able to understand it. Plus HomeKit is doing other things like thermostats, garage door, lights etc all in one easy to use app, hard to beat.

I do want high res continuous recording of my cameras which Synology gives me and it works well and has with a few generations of Dahua cameras going back before AI features and HomeKit, I simply used to accept the false motion triggers on the timeline and would have to wade through them if something happened. Now my cameras seem to have decent AI abilities to get good discrimination and are hampered by a combination of Dahuas obtuse settings and Synology insistence on camera admin access for IVS or only supporting plain motion events with onvif (like most onvif implementations). Its simply annoying and I wanted to put that info out here for others since it was not made clear anywhere what the issues where that I could find. Dahua finally added animal support but then left it out of SMD otherwise I would just use that as it pretty close to a simple give me AI switch that Dahua has that works with most onvif software I might go back to it and forget about the animals which is an annoying compromise.

Maybe one day all the NVR/VMS systems will support full Onvif profile M analytics and this won't be an issue, not even sure if what Dahua is doing is Profile M yet with IVS, but it doesn't matter if only Blue Iris and Dahua software works with it.

 

[jharrell]

somewhat of a side note, if you want a higher reliability outside of making sure you are correctly locating the right devices, I'd highly recommend using external AI Processing the built in stuff is not particularly accurate at the best of times and BI is a ridiculously cheap way to do that

I find the Dahua AI decent at identifying stuff, it's simply a mess in configuring with odd choices throughout and limitations like no animals until recently, but only in IVS not SMD or why is SMD and IVS two separate thing to begin with??? How about I setup AI detection, draw the zones of interest and say whether it puts out motion events or more specific detection events so it can work with anything and be much more clear about it? This allows the camera to do the heavy lifting of AI processing rather than having to run server hardware that can handle it.

HomeKits nice because the AI is done on hubs like the Apple TV without any special config and without noticeable overhead or power draw. Setting up BlueIris or other off board AI typically requires more hefty hardware requirements that for instance my Synology won't do or will peg the CPU when it does. At least Blue Iris supports the camera doing the work if you know how to set it up on both sides.

 

[MR2]

the SMD camera's I have let you do some of the SMD functionality within the IVS rules (create the IVS rule and area's then tick the boxes to say only on vehicle or humans), I still find they are not that accurate nor that flexible for what I'd like to do

 

[8bitbanger]

Just want to echo what @jharrell has been struggling with Re: Synology Integration of Dahua IVS/SMD/events. I've documented my issues I think on a Synology forum, maybe here actually. Sorry if this detracts from the discussion but it's unfortunate that Synology hasn't fixed this, or that there isn't a means to customize the payload handling/parsing - something I suspect BI is capable of doing. Though it sounds like maybe not necc in this specific case - I only used BI for a hot minute back in XP days. Chaulk it up as a win for BI.

I do recognize the better granularity and configuration of IVS but unfortunately have fallen back to only enabling SMD and MD. I'm exclusively using T5442 cams (ten of them H264), and I know Synology is seeing and interpreting the tripwire/intrusion events, because if I setup a webhook it will fire.

The real miss for me is that they aren't showing on timeline, and unable to be filtered in recordings like SMD.

Not being able to easily scrub for IVS events is a deal breaker, (so SMD it is for now). I prefer to leave MD enabled also because sometimes I do want to scrub for motion that's intentionally not setup to be captured by IVS/SMD otherwise.

Anyway since Synology released their own (crummy) cameras I suspect this is definitely less of a priority for them to fix. It's too bad because the Synology interface has a lot to like otherwise.

Synology screwing with camera settings is very obnoxious... In fact I think it was crashing one camera with Admin login ins/outs every like 5-10seconds, I read not sure if it's true that's Syno polling for digital input changes

 

[jharrell]

The real miss for me is that they aren't showing on timeline, and unable to be filtered in recordings like SMD.

Not being able to easily scrub for IVS events is a deal breaker, (so SMD it is for now). I prefer to leave MD enabled also because sometimes I do want to scrub for motion that's intentionally not setup to be captured by IVS/SMD otherwise.

I forgot about some of these issues when trying to setup IVS with Synology before and ended up back on SMD, which I just went back to again after attempting to get animal detection working. The Dahua / Synology combo is an exercise in frustration mostly from Dahua and its crazy undocumented settings and all the trial and error lore that has to be remembered to get it to work while Synology is just limited in flexibility when setting up.

Not sure why Dahua can't be set to send normal motion events when IVS trips or why SMD and IVS are two different things, its a bonkers design, you should just go to events on the camera and check off which events you want draw a detection area set schedules if desired and what onvif events will be sent out from those events. Having events and AI be separate with overlapping settings is nuts.

Was hoping Unifi support Onvif would be viable but it doesn't even support motion events from camera yet so their AI only works with their cameras, Scrypted has a nice NVR but does object detection on server and requires decent hardware to do so at this time so I just use the for HomeKit.

Currently running SMD again and works perfect full frame just wish it got the animal checkbox like IVS, running Onvif profile because I don't want Synology overwriting camera settings and reverting AAC audio back to G711 etc. but I do give up motion details in Synology so it doesn't know if person or vehicle for searching but at least the motion events are only persons or vehicles in the timeline. Be sure to crank up threshold and down sensitivity in the motion area setup or you get normal motion s events too, be sure to leave detection area on the way you want because SMD does care about that, just not threshold/sensitivity.