Nuisance: Max Bitrate changing to 32 Kbps all the time

J

Jeroen68

n3wb
Oct 27, 2015
28
3
THE NETHERLANDS
Hi have a 2 year old Hikvision DS-2CD2185FWD-IS which was working fine until recently and is giving me crap image quality most of the time.

If I check I find my Video settings have changed without me doing this (and I am the only one with access, or do I?)

So I set the system to
3840x2160
constant bitrate
frame rate 20
max bitrate 16384
video encoding H.264
H.264 off
main profile
I frame 25
and SVC on

But the camera changes the max bitrate setting to 32 Kbps for some reason itself at random delays when I go in and set the rate back to 16384

Note that 32 is not even an option for me to set it at myself, lowest is 256

Why and how does this happen?

I hope its not Corona
 
I don't know what would cause that. But one possible explanation is your camera getting hacked.

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My only frontdoor is my admin account with a long difficult PW. I have more cameras in the system (with the same PW) and they keep their config.

I forgot to mention I use a HIK NVR as well, the DS 7608NI 8P
 
Can config settings be changed on Hik cameras by access not entering credentials? If this is happening why only change the max bitrate and not mess with anything else (like my events or just resolution or put the brightness on max etc?). And why only this cam and not the rest if the hacker comes via my WAN, I have more HIKs and an NVR running.

It's a real mystery to me still.
 
Jeroen68 said:
Can config settings be changed on Hik cameras by access not entering credentials?
Click to expand...

The short answer is yes.

Jeroen68 said:
If this is happening why only change the max bitrate and not mess with anything else (like my events or just resolution or put the brightness on max etc?).
Click to expand...

No idea.

Jeroen68 said:
And why only this cam and not the rest if the hacker comes via my WAN, I have more HIKs and an NVR running.
Click to expand...

Possibly that is the cam which asked your router to expose it online first, and all the others got denied because the first one had already taken the requested ports.
 
GRC Port Authority Report created on UTC: 2020-05-28 at 22:28:39

Results from scan of ports: 8000-8063

0 Ports Open
0 Ports Closed
64 Ports Stealth
---------------------
64 Ports Tested

ALL PORTS tested were found to be: STEALTH.
 
There are 2x 8MP and 2x4MP Hik IPcams on the DS 7608NI 8P. None of the cams are using the NVR´s POE ports, all are on the same network and fed by Ubiquity switch power. This worked fine for a long while I dont see this has deteriorated somehow.

I tried changing many settings and ran the camera on a lower resolution, switched to H.265, used UDP instead of TCP, variable bitrate vs constant, reduced the i-frame rate but nothing keep my max bitrate 16384 and over time (sometimes immediately sometimes within 2 minutes or half a day etc..) it is set at 32

note that 32 is not even an option from my dropdown menu - not via the GUI on the cam itself.

Is there a way my NVR is meddling with these settings when it finds it struggles maintaining a solid stream or so?

I am not keen uninstalling the cam and running if off a different powersource, switch and wiring, but that would be a test I would like to do, but at this stage this is too much of an effort since the cam is pretty difficult to access.

I was hoping if this was standard HIK functionality (to throttle bitrate when struggling?) that other know how to bypass or a glitch in my setup I overlooked and somebody else had the same thing happening but solved it - hence this post :)

Again, the setup worked fine for at least one year in this configuration and only recently this started happening. What could have happened to cause this?
I tried almost all the ShieldsUp! scanning and diagnostics functionality and it returns all green and stealth and closed and stable on my WAN address.
 
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I have/had the DS-7608NI-I2/8P with one 8MP camera, five 4MP cameras and two 2MP cameras. On occasion the 8MP camera would drop down from 4K to 1k or lower all by itself. I would have to go back in and reset things by unplugging the camera and plug it back in again. Now I just purchased a DS-7716NI-I4/16P and I am only using 8 ports. So far so good. By the way I installed 48GB worth of hard drives in it.

Are you running the latest software upgrade in your NVR?
 
48 TERAbytes, i think

and WOW. I just use 4TB which gives me 7 days uninterrupted recording time on 4 channels.

Ok i will try feed it from a different POE source this weekend and see what happens.
 
Jeroen68 said:
48 TERAbytes, i think

and WOW. I just use 4TB which gives me 7 days uninterrupted recording time on 4 channels.

Ok i will try feed it from a different POE source this weekend and see what happens.
Click to expand...
Right, 48TB. I hope this will give me 60 days of recording for the 8 channels I am using. I have dealt with the neighbors and the police before and they have asked my to go back that far.
 
I recently had a similar situation where I was viewing a particular camera on my phone, and I could see the bitrate change back and forth randomly. I could tell that it was bitrate, not the resolution. It stumped me for a couple days until I figured it out! When you look at the picture setting in the NVR, there is now 3 Stream options in the drop down menu. I think this was a recent change because I don’t recall there always being 3... but anyhow, there are settings for “event” and the bitrate was set low there. So every time there was motion in the picture, the bitrate would drop. Something to check out!
 
Jeroen68 said:
Hi have a 2 year old Hikvision DS-2CD2185FWD-IS which was working fine until recently and is giving me crap image quality most of the time.

If I check I find my Video settings have changed without me doing this (and I am the only one with access, or do I?)

So I set the system to
3840x2160
constant bitrate
frame rate 20
max bitrate 16384
video encoding H.264
H.264 off
main profile
I frame 25
and SVC on

But the camera changes the max bitrate setting to 32 Kbps for some reason itself at random delays when I go in and set the rate back to 16384

Note that 32 is not even an option for me to set it at myself, lowest is 256

Why and how does this happen?

I hope its not Corona
Click to expand...

Its 100% the NVR doing this. Mine does it too but not to 32kbs. My maths might be wrong but I think HIK nvrs have 10mbps bandwidth 'port', so an 8 camera NVR can do 80mbps so is 16,384kbs not 16.3mbps? If you have less than 8 cams it's usually okay but if all your cams are >10mbps it seems to downgrade one keep it within the budget. I just set mine to 8192kbps, with H265+ I think that's plenty. Btw I a bit of a noob, its just my own observations. Note the substream seems to factor into this equation also.
 
I've never had any luck changing bitrate on the NVR - it has to be changed directly on the camera interface or you get these problems. Once changed on the camera, you likely won't see the change on the NVR interface until you click away to another tab and then go back. I can't say why it does this, but it does happen.
 
Trax95008 said:
I recently had a similar situation where I was viewing a particular camera on my phone, and I could see the bitrate change back and forth randomly. I could tell that it was bitrate, not the resolution. It stumped me for a couple days until I figured it out! When you look at the picture setting in the NVR, there is now 3 Stream options in the drop down menu. I think this was a recent change because I don’t recall there always being 3... but anyhow, there are settings for “event” and the bitrate was set low there. So every time there was motion in the picture, the bitrate would drop. Something to check out!
Click to expand...

OH WOW THANK YOU TRAX !!!!!!

This is it!!! This fixed my issue - THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!

the setting I found there was the despised 32Kbit/s setting and i put it back to 16384 - it is the stream that is filming movement why would I want to throttle or limit on the quality?

For users that have the same problem, this is what I did:
The NVR is changing your camera bitrates and this is where you find it:
Go to CONFIGURATION at the top of your GUI when accessing the NVR through a browser, then
go to VIDEO/AUDIO and in the VIDEO setting you select the camera you want to config
go to the next tap under this VIDEO setting whcih is STREAM TYPE and find (a new???) stream called MAIN STREAM (EVENT)
this is where you can adjust a couple of settings that you want changed when the camera is going into event mode.

This way you can limit the bandwidth your monitoring streams take up but take max bandwidth when stuff happens on the IPCAM.

AWESOME - I never knew about this setting and for me it also feels this is a new option I never saw before

PROBEM SOLVED (for me) and let´s keep this threat online for the next person who experiences this same thing.

__
I have some more feedback and questions:

The DS-7608NI-I2/8P definitely has one 1000Mbit/s port for LAN and 100Mbit/s ports for IPCAMs. My config is heavier on my LAN as there is constant data in the circuit while using the POE ports on my NVR would have saved me bandwidth to use for my other applications on the LAN (just APs and desktops, NAS and streamers etc). I use ubiquity unifi gear only, everthing is controlled from a cloudkey and it is holding up perfectly.

I noticed that the same camera that was giving me the issue with dropping the bitrate also does not want to give me a SUBSTREAM anylonger? It says it does not exist, but on the IPCAM GUI it definately makes this available too. Its not a showstopper, but this I do not understand why?

I also wanted to mention (I did not before) I have 2 real cheapo PTZ cams I bought from China and have incorporated these on the NVR succesfully as well, using ONVIF. They were less than $25 a pop and they are good fun. On a batterypack they are made portable and sometimes I used them to quickly setup an extra PTZ eye on my kids or any other occasional situation. They appear beautifully onto the NVR and iVMS as if they were HIK cams.

Then I noticed I use firmware V3.4.104 build 190128 on my NVR and there is a V4.4 available. Why does it not want to update using the update button?
I am thinking of doing this firmware update today using a USB flash drive. Are there any not so obvious hints or tips I should take into account before attempting this? I am always a little anxious updating firmware - I have enough bricks around :)
 
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Glad to hear you found the issue. BTW I just checked the spec for your NVR and it's incoming/outgoing Bandwidth is 80 Mbps / 256 Mbps. The ports might be 100Mbps but the overall bandwidth is limited to 80 between all of them.
 
As above I had it on 2 of my old hik cams.


It's the NVR changing it.

Log 8nto the NVR gui and change the bitrate in there then correspond it to what you put in on the NVR on the camera gui and it should then work ok


Tool me weeks to figure it out
 
I'm wondering about being able to change the bitrate on an event. My Hikvision NVR is set up to 15 fps for "Mainstream (Normal)" and 30 fps for "Mainstream (Event)". However, the max bitrate that I set for "Mainstream (Normal)" is also used for "Mainstream (Event)" and it's grayed out so I can't increase it for the greater number of frames per second (I'm using h265+, under h.264 I believe it's not grayed out).

Is this something that for h265+ I have to just set one max bitrate and the system auto-adjusts for the greater framerate when an event occurs?
I'm using a Variable bitrate, so I'm hoping that at 15fps it's smart enough to scale down the bitrate vs 30 fps.
 
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