Happy New Year All !
As promised, I’ve been testing this new version of the 5A425 FW and wanted to report back on my findings. Long story short,
I wouldn’t overly recommend this FW update. Let me detail my findings below:
- Tested across multiple units and found that Internet Explorer (IE) could not be used to successfully upgrade, many times would hang, not complete or result in a reboot resulting in an unsucessful FW update. Firefox worked without issue but again you would still want to use IE for primary setup and config changes
- PTZ auto tracking (Alarm Track) response is a little better and the algorithm has been tweaked slightly to crispen the performance but not a huge change here in real-world testing. My reminder here is to always dial your tracking into your FOV, location and desired targets and that will lead to better success
- SMD while not bad in current FW (6/08) was tweaked in a similar way to the feedback I provided (along with others) on the 5442 vari. Therefore in this case even more accurate SMD results now although I never saw too many issues with SMD on this PTZ anyway
So while those changes are OK why wouldn’t I recommend the update ? Well that depends on your use case and your thoughts based on my next update below.
Specifically,
Video Metadata changes are NOT GOOD. As you may recall from earlier posts I mentioned and showed that this cam has the ability to do ANPR and certainly captures both vehicle details and license plate caps. However my findings in the latest release version (6/08) that I shared with Dahua were that although these plates were captured, the camera was not processing them into metadata and therefore would not a) identify the license plate itself in metadata even though clearly shown and b) would also not be able to be used for black/white listing on an attached NVR.
I provided this feedback to Dahua to ideally have them resolve this issue and allow the camera to process the metadata from these caps correctly
BUT unfortunately it instead appears that they have removed the capability (or masked it) in this new FW release (11/23) which in my opinion is not a good move. Specifically you will notice that rather than your green video metadata box in GUI that tracks plates, it has been removed. With that said,
the cam is still capturing plates BUT the new FW simply crops the image to remove the plate, in other words you literally end up with black/blank space around where the plate was at the bottom of the cap in AI Live etc. How do I know this is the approach thats been taken ? Well, when I look at code you can see this has been implemented locally i.e. for local cam caps, checking SD card also confirms the output. However, if still connected to an NVR, the NVR continues to receive the full image with plate attached
BUT again no processing of the plate for metadata. In my opinion this is a step backwards, not forwards.
To me, this is not the right approach to take with this feature and instead should actually have focus on improving the FW to process the metadata rather than just mask details in cam to effectively remove the feature.
I am sharing this feedback again with
@EMPIRETECANDY & Dahua in hopes to get this functionality re-instated and working as it should which is to process plates and post / tag metadata to the caps. Will continue to update on this as we move forward.
So, in summary, not a bad FW update for the other areas I addressed above (just remember to use Firefox for the update) BUT bear in mind if you like the ANPR feature (albeit not implemented in its full state yet) or solely rely on in cam caps (no NVR in the mix) then I would certainly consider staying on 6/08 for now.
HTH and as always, please let me know with any questions