New to IP Cams

[Fester]

Hello,

I have experience with analog cameras, but since we just bought a new house about 3 years ago I decided to do it right and put my analog security recorder in the closet! I am still installing my network set-up in the basement (Nortel BayStack 5520-48T-PWR 48 Gig POE Switch, a Lenovo i7 3.6GHz computer with 2TB 7200 RPM drive, external 3 TB drive) but it is installed temporarily. I have installed my Dahua dome cam, and installed the Blue Iris software along with the Blue Iris Tools software.

I ran the system all day yesterday, have it set up to text me, email still pics and video in the event of motion detected, I figured I would work on setting up the ability to watch the cam over the internet later since I'm not a networking guru! Everything was working perfectly, until I woke up about 1:30 in the morning and decided to turn on my monitor and check out the picture at night.

This is what I get:

As stated above, I am in no way a networking guru! I looked up error 10051 and used a tool to fix the problem, but it did not restore my camera. Also I saw an old video on setting up a camera in Blue Iris, and I can't seem to find any screen where I specify what brand of camera I have, does the new system auto-detect your brand of camera or am I missing something? I have Blue Iris Tools installed, and chose what stats I want to overlay, but am not getting the overlay!

This is what I normally see when the system is working properly:

Also, let it be known that I am a Mac guy.... not a PC guy! That being said, I am unfamiliar with PC's and my new Lenovo has Windows 10 on it, so anything I thought I knew about PC's is out the window!!!

 

[bp2008]

The error could be any number of problems. Some things you can try:

1. Open the camera's web interface and change the i-frame interval to be equal to the frame rate.
2. In Blue Iris, Camera Properties, Video tab, click the Configure button. Change the Receive buffer to 20 (which is the maximum value it will accept). Also, this dialog is where you can choose the camera brand.
3. If the camera is running on WiFi, then wire it directly.
4. Check that the camera is still responding via its own web interface at the moment Blue Iris "loses the signal".

For the weather overlay, there may be a little extra setup required. What Blue Iris Tools does is save weather data in one or more files on your hard drive. Blue Iris is capable of reading those files to get overlay text from them. Go to Blue Iris' main options window, Macros tab, and you will see 9 macro entries here. They need to be pointed at your .txt files produced by Blue Iris Tools. Then you need to add the overlay text to the desired cameras. To do this, you need to go into Blue Iris, Camera Properties, Video tab, Text and Graphic Overlays section, click the Edit button. Then Add text/time and in the text box, put the text %1 or %2 and so on, and Blue Iris will read the associated file and put the appropriate text into the overlay.

 

[Fester]

Thanks for the info....

At this time I have no cameras operating on Wi-Fi. Very strange, I turned my system back on and waited for my switch to power up completely... port 1 (where I have the Dahua cam plugged in) did not have any lights flickering to show activity. I switched the ethernet cable to port 2 and now everything is working as it should. Hmmm.... maybe I lost port 1? (good thing I have 46 ports left! Lol) Maybe it's just some network configuration error that's preventing port 1 from working? Either way, it's working now so I'll monitor everything to make sure it continues this way.

I did find and configure my Dahua camera and added the BIT info, thanks for your help!!!

I haven't really been able to find much documentation on Blue Iris, just old YouTube videos that are out of date with the current release of the software, so I'm having a hard time, plus my inexperience with networking isn't helping either!!!!!

Here it is with the weather overlay (a little hard to see in the picture though)

Here is a better pic of weather overlay:

 

[jsr182]

Exposure set to auto?

 

[bp2008]

Switch ports do fail from time to time. Particularly on large switches in my experience, but maybe that is just because they have more ports and therefore more opportunity to fail.

You might want to choose different colors for your weather overlay that are more readable. Here is what I did on my cam with weather info:



The black box is actually just a privacy mask provided by the (Hikvision 3MP) firmware. Images from this cam are posted publicly and the neighbor's upstairs balcony and window were visible otherwise. That is, before I built that shed in front of there. Maybe I could remove the privacy mask now, but it just makes the weather text so much easier to read that I probably won't.

 

[Fester]

Jsr182 - I believe so, I've not really messed with any of the settings for the camera yet since I still have to finish grounding my cameras. And to me that is a big deal, since we've had several storms that have fried our oven, XBoxOne, LED deck lights, microwave oven, subwoofer, AppleTV and several other electronics. We recently had a whole-house surge protector installed at our electrical service panel, and had the electric company installed a special meter for a week that was designed to measure spikes - although we never heard back from them. The house was built in 2004, and our electrician checked everything out and said everything looks fine on our end.

I'm actually not even running the system today because we are supposed to get thunderstorms, so everything is disconnected! I still have to install the switch in it's permanent location along with the 48 port patch panel.

 

[Fester]

bp2008 - The yellow looks good on our monitor, it just didn't photograph very well. I'm not sure what happened to port one, but at least I have 46 other ports to choose from... I just hope I don't see more and more fail in the near future - that would make me sad, very sad. And it would make me think I'd done something wrong in the way I set it up/installed it. But it is a used unit, that is no longer manufactured, so I guess I shouldn't stress over it too much.

 

[Fester]

O.K., strange development.... We were scheduled to have thunderstorms last night (and boy did we!) So I unplugged everything. Just on a whim today I plugged the ethernet cable back into port one and powered the system on. That port is working again!! Weird! but I'll take it.

 

[Fester]

ok, never mind..... it went out again Lol