probably a really dumb question on a new ANPR

[wayneh]

I finally broke down last week and bought a DS-2CD7A26G0/P-IZHS8 ANPR camera. It seems to work well, and if I navigate to "Road Traffic" I can see the last 20 plates it captured. Awesome. Now if I go to "Picture" and look at file type vehicle detection, and set a start/stop date I see all the files of pictures of the plates. Awesome.
What I want to do though is view the file of the plates only, not the picture of them. It's not clear how to do that, and after spending an hour on hold with HIKVISION North America I was informed that since I don't have a corporate web site they won't help me. Even though I have a state and federal tax ID for my LLC and I am a registered LLC.... They suggested I call an installer for help... Not what I was hoping to hear...
So... please somebody, take pity on me and point me in the right direction to retrieve the file with the ANPR results in it!!

Thanks in advance
Wayno

 

[wittaj]

Yep, you just found out what most of us already know....

Most of us here know that the Dahua and Hikvisions of the world do not cater to the "consumer" market - their target audience is professional installers, so we are considered "prosumer" and we are fortunate to get our hands on these types of cameras and NVRs instead of consumer grade junk and not having to go thru professional installers to get quality gear. Now the downside is we get them at a discount and without manuals and support and thus are on our own to figure it out. And we are just fine with that! That is what Google search and this forum is for!

We are fortunate a forum like this exists to help with that. We do not exist in their world and that is their business model and they made the business decision to not compete with the Rings and Nests and Reolinks of the world and as such to do offer these cameras at box stores for consumers to purchase directly. Dahua and Hik cater to the professional installers...and would tell you to contact the vendor you got them from or an installer if you have questions or need support...

Contrast that with consumer grade units. You can call a Night Owl or Arlo or Reolink or Lorex or Amcrest or DLink or Google Nest or Ring and speak to a representative (now whether they can help you or not is another story) and for most novice callers they provide good customer service, but they will not tell you to talk to Best Buy where you purchased it...and several of these cost the same or more as Dahua or Hikvision...

Personally I will take better quality cameras and no support and forums like this than crap cameras with customer support that I end up knowing more than the call center person I am calling...

With that said, hopefully someone here answers you soon, but not as many run with ANPR cameras, most of us use another camera that we have dialed in the settings to read plates, and then use OpenALPR for the actual reading of the plates. I pulled up the manual, and it was less than informative LOL.

 

[wayneh]

Wittaj,

Yes, you are exactly right. And... up until last week I had an inexpensive camera I was using for LPR, but we had a big thunder storm... and my five year old GW camera is no more... So I went and bought this fancy LPR from B+H! Yes on the prosumer.... but, I gave up on my Cisco ASA firewalls in place of the Unifi line... Much more prosumer oriented. I'll get this figured out, I just hope somebody is online who can help since I've already invested a bunch of time in it. I know it has the info!! And, it seems to work well. See pics.

Wayno

 

[looney2ns]

Did you call B&H and ask them? Are you using an NVR or other for recording.

 

[wayneh]

Did you call B&H and ask them? Are you using an NVR or other for recording.

I have not called B+H, maybe I'll give them a shout. I run Blue Iris, but for this cam I disabled it in BI since all I want is the plate numbers. I have another camera that gets a shot of the vehicle.
Thanks
Wayno

 

[watchful_ip]

On my camera when it's in ANPR mode it will put the plate in the filename itself.

Thus it wouldn't be hard to simply get it from there with a script.

Not that it shouldn't be easier - perhaps someone knows a better way

edit: ah I see from your pic yours does too.

 

[wayneh]

Well here's the answer.... No thanks at all to the very unhelpful people at HIKVISION NA for their lack of help.... It's simple.
Go to the "Picture" menu.
2) Pick a range of dates you want to see
3) Click search
4) Now click export and a csv file shows up in your download folder.

The export button only shows up after you do a search. See attached. It exports as a CSV, but I can't attach a CSV file in the post.

Wayno