rural IP camera trained on chicken coop

S

soyrunner

Young grasshopper
Feb 6, 2020
37
7
Georgia
Hi, soyrunner here. Retired electronics tech mostly worked on Long Island, formerly a bitcoin miner until US home power costs made that untenable, and have 3 acres in the deep south.

I have two SV3C cameras, first is a SV-B06POE 4MP and the second a SD6W-1080PS-HX for watching my birds and cats. I have them working okay. I only recently started to record. Recording on the SD6W works giving .jpg or .264 video. Have a good size SD card so that's where they get stored. Since I keep my trailcam stills on a Win7 hard drive I'd like to move the recorded files from the SD6W without having to remove the SD card. I probably will be setting up a network drive for ftp storage but for now I'd like to drag and drop the files from the SD card to the Win7 drive. Won't work now though as only links are transferred and a jpg slideshow won't work. I hope when I get around to upgrading the firmware on the SV3C that it includes the humanoid capture option as chickens and cats would quickly fill up drives and take too long to review.

I'd like to get this recording because things have recently started disappearing from my yard and my home. Security has just become much more important.

Regards,

soyrunner
 
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I recommend not upgrading the SV3C cameras. Cameras when upgraded do not add advance features. The fastest way to wreck a camera is trying to upgrade it, read all the post on bricked cameras. The cameras with advanced features have much higher speed processors.

I originally purchased SV3C cameras, they work fine for low quality daytime recording, but were useless at night. I no longer use them.
 
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SouthernYankee said:
I recommend not upgrading the SV3C cameras. Cameras when upgraded do not add advance features. The fastest way to wreck a camera is trying to upgrade it, read all the post on bricked cameras. The cameras with advanced features have much higher speed processors.

I originally purchased SV3C cameras, they work fine for low quality daytime recording, but were useless at night. I no longer use them.
Click to expand...

I agree about the SV3C IP cameras, they are worth what you pay for them.
Once you have a good camera, you will not want to go back.
They tend to send data over the internet if you don't have them blocked.

For more features, I would recommend you pick up a couple new cameras that have that feature.
There are a lot of reviews on this site that have everything from $59 Amcrest cameras, to $1,000
and up cameras, take your pick. Several of the Amcrest and Dahua cameras will drop them right on your NAS.

Take a little time and read the Wiki and notes

IP Cam Talk Cliff Notes

Information in this section was contributed by [URL='https://ipcamtalk.com/members/mat200.29441/'][COLOR=#0000b3]@matt200[/COLOR][/URL] and [URL='https://ipcamtalk.com/members/giomania.36271/'][COLOR=#0000b3]@giomania [/COLOR][/URL] [/LIST] Any dedicated manufacturer NVR should match...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com

Resource Guide on IP Technology for all Noobs

First off - Welcome to the forum. This forum is a great wealth of knowledge and can most likely get you where you need to go as well as cause you to spend way to much money :) Here are some guides for you to use in getting up to speed on IP technology if you are a novice or even someone just...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
 
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SouthernYankee said:
I recommend not upgrading the SV3C cameras. Cameras when upgraded do not add advance features. The fastest way to wreck a camera is trying to upgrade it, read all the post on bricked cameras. The cameras with advanced features have much higher speed processors.

I originally purchased SV3C cameras, they work fine for low quality daytime recording, but were useless at night. I no longer use them.
Click to expand...

The SV3C SD6W 1080 I purchased earlier this year (Feb. 5, 2020) has always had an alarm fault. I put off trying to correct it but now that I want it fixed I find the Amazon product support for it has expired, very short window. The audio alarm is very loud. When I have the humanoid detection on the alarm sounds no matter if the alarm is switched off. And if I set the alarm volume to 1, setting choice 1-100, it makes no difference to the alarm volume. There is no human detection that doesn't sound that very loud alarm. My choice would be to change the firmware to that in the newer camera or to go in and disconnect the speaker. If I chose the latter I can do a minute inspection of the PCB for solder splashes. This has software and webware. The newer camera has software version V19.1.11.15.22-20200528 and webware version V3.0.7.1. While the more expensive and a little older camera having the faulty audio has software version V20.1.31.5.19-20191009 and webware version V3.0.7.0. How one changes one or the other of those without a firmware upgrade I don't know.
 
This brand comes up easily on an Amazon search so there are lots of SV3C cameras out there. Perhaps there should be a forum category for SV3C.
 
Quick like rabbit I ran out and bought an SD card for one of my RPI's and set up an ftp server. I have the newest camera logging in and leaving the humanoid photos of me in my place as I have that setup on a shelf while working out the bugs. It works. Couldn't get the email to work with yahoo pop3. Next will either be ripping apart the SD6W 1800 to see if the fault is on a circuit board or mowing the lawn if it's dry.

soyrunner
 
Won't be taking apart the SV3C SD6W 1080 for troubleshooting. It seems that the audio alarm trigger linkage overrides the audio on/off. So, unsetting the linkage allows humanoid snaps and video to be taken quietly and these are getting ftp'd to my designated ftp server on an RPI. Might have to go to a more powerful RPI. Still working out how to play the h264 on the RPI. What is great is that once transferred via ftp the files are viewable/playable while trying to drag/drop files from the cameras' sd cards only gets a link to the files which can't be played in a slide show but ftp'd files are fine.

soyrunner
 
Well, the first of the three cameras from SV3C is apparently a bad buy. Regardless that SV3C use HiSilicon chips with documented backdoors, the SV-B06POE-4MP-A seems useless except to stream. It has no ftp capability according to their tech support on this series A camera, tho their series HX cameras do. It's as if the SV-B06POE-4MP-A is suppose to be a USB camera not a stand alone camera. So, I haven't been able to save anything from it, e.g. alarms, snapshots, videos, not on winxp, nor win7 nor win10. I asked if their cameras use the hi3520d chipset, recently exposed and relayed on hackernews to have multiple backdoors that allow a hacker to own your system, and their reply was that some of their cameras use the HI3516EV200. But who can trust anything from HUAWEI. Otherwise the HX series cameras seem okay for slowing garden tools going missing although it's a bear to get the 264 videos to play. After ftp'ing the videos in a zipped file from the RPI where the HX series cameras ftp data, I convert to avi with ' for %%A IN (.264) DO ffmpeg -i "%%A" -vcodec rawvideo -y "%%A.avi" ' - this is likely needed because the HiSilicon video chips are know to be very buggy on h264. One problem that one sees is that this stage can eat up hard drive space on a scale of 500GB. then I must convert to .264 with ' for %%A IN (.avi) DO ffmpeg -i "%%A.mp4" ' then I concatenate the mp4 files with ' ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i text.txt -codec copy Output.mp4 ' but one must first generate the list with ' for %%i in (*.mp4) do @echo file %%i) > text.txt. I do wish batch files command effects were identical between all the Windows versions but that isn't the case. This wouldn't be necessary if the HiSilicon video chips weren't buggy I suspect. I'm hoping that just using these cameras connected via CAT5 and disabling the cameras' wireless is sufficient to keep the back doors from getting used. I'd appreciate suggestions as to what video chipsets aren't buggy and infected with backdoors hardwired into their silicon. And, which manufacturers use the better chipsets. Tech support tells me that I must use Internet Explorer with admin privileges but that doesn't work nor does repeatedly installing WebConfig.exe with admin privileges, this on the series A camera. One has to wonder why such high privileges are needed. Just waiting for them to request my bank login credentials to get the camera to save snapshots.

soyrunner
 
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djernie said:
Here are a few videos to help you with your next purchase, take your time look through the forums and get as much information as you can.

Which Style/Type of Security Camera Should I Buy?

Good information on type of cameras.
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com

Which Security Camera Lens Size Should I Buy?

Good video for newbies.
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
Click to expand...
Nice but these don't address the question of video chip manufacturer. We're taking about security cameras. Security. When HiSilicon chips have as many backdoors as recently revealed, one can only imagine a local hacker grabbing the login credentials and getting into one's system. I see that soon after the reveal of those backdoors, the DOD gave a security advisory regarding its servers. Perhaps worried that users might connect a Huawei smartphone to one of its systems and allow access. So, choosing an IP camera known to be secure, e.g no backdoors, is an important security issue. It would be a great selling point. IP camera and smartphone manufacturers could list using the better chips in their sales pitch.
 
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Wondering if the antenna connector is a standard SMA and if installing 50 ohm terminations instead of antennae is a good idea.
 
soyrunner said:
So, choosing an IP camera known to be secure, e.g no backdoors, is an important security issue
Click to expand...
There is no such animal. The only way to protect from that is to physically isolate cams from the internet and your LAN.
 
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Don't now need that kind of security. Years ago with early bitcoin mining, thumbdrives, a Jalepeno, a Merc, then Bitmain miners, I had upwards of almost 50 btc on hard drive wallets and with online accounts. A Caribbean exchange got hacked and MtGox started lauding its security. I moved my btc from local hard drives and another account to MtGox and Coinbase. MtGox lost 11.82627776 of my btc of which I've been offered about $5k and later more recently $10k. But of course that's (11.82627776 x $10,489 at present for $124,045.82742464. Now I only have some long retired Bitmain miners that if someone would steal they'd lose money. My remaining btc dwindled down when I threw good money after bad mining at a loss when btc value was about a couple of hundred. My working life in electronics, I was drawn to bitcoin mining but miners soon stopped paying for themselves given the high cost of energy in the US and this area is fairly cheap relatively speaking. No, my concern now is some recent yard thefts and at least one item is missing from my home. So, humanoid alarm capture is what I'm counting on to secure my home.
 
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Maybe one of those backdoors could allow me ssh access to the SV-B06POE-4MP-A , I could add some repositories and get ftp working on a schedule. But then it has no sdcard and isn't saving to any machine, linux or windows.
 
Years ago I used port forwarding of my routers to access my machines from elsewhere but not for years now. I save no camera data to the cloud. I don't access my camera feeds from outside my home, not by smartphone or anything else. I isolate my Roku TV wireless on a subnet not accessible to or from my other systems. As a matter of fact that the Roku TV has no RJ45 connection worries me and I hope to buy a Samsung, retiring the Roku, harvesting its screen to use for camera display.
 
Have finally gotten the Series A camera displaying its output in its software. Until yesterday it would always say download plugin but that never work. I found on the web how to fix that when it occurred in foscam and the fix worked. Had to do with IE compatibility settings and adding to trusted sites under security. Now I can hit record an it will record to my specified hard drive directory. But, the Alarms Snapshots nor the Alarms Record function work. The Alarms are registering with a list of snapshots and recordings but these aren't getting to the Win7 directory. I have the directory shared with full permissions. Also I have the display working with Chrome by adding the IE Tabs extension.
 
This Series A camera has no sd card capability. This failure to record alarms seems like it needs to first save the alarm to an sd card or USB storage device or network storage device and then copy it to the specified hard drive folder. If I disable Configuration ->Storage->General Config->Storage Config Local Settings Memory Card & USB checkbox, if I uncheck that, as I might as there is no USB storage nor memory card, then the next selection under Storage, Storage->Schedule Record, the Enable checkbox becomes unchecked. If I recheck the Enable on Schedule Record and go back to General Config, the Memory Card & USB storage is back to checked. So, there is no scheduled record of alarms unless Memory Card and USB Storage are checked but checked or not they don't exist. It would explain why alarms do not get recorded. The alarms get sent to the bit bucket and cannot then be copied to the hard drive destination described in Local Setup Storage Path.
 
The camera write up on Amazon states: " If there are no NVR, just opening Cloud Service to store videos and pictures(Free for the first 30 days)". Doesn't say it can store to hard drive. Although manually clicking the record function does save a recording to the hard drive. Wonder if I open it up if there are pads for an sd card to which I can hard wire with wire wrap 28 ga single strand wire a micro sd card adapter. Then pop in a micro sd card and see if it gets recognized.
 
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