Time for a new surveillance system: Help needed

[Zak]

Time to upgrade my old surveillance system. Sold already the old one because my friend wanted a ready configured working system instead of setting a system from scratch. All are outdoor cameras.

I have not been keeping eye on present day offerings and I need some assistance in selecting the right setup.

Old system:
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1) 2pcs of Hik 2132F-IS cameras
2) 1pcs of Dahua 3200S
2) recording to NAS
3) 8port POE+ switch

An idea for the new system:
----------------
1) recording to NAS (already bought/Qnap/24Tb HDD)
2) 2pcs of Hik 2142FWD-IS cams.
3) 2pcs of Hik 2085FWD-I cams
4) 8port POE+ switch (already bought/zyxel)

Questions for you my surveillance brothers:

a) Hik or Dahua? Are there great differences in the quality of the picture between the manufacturer or are the differences just small details?

b) 4k 20fps/hik or 4k 15fps/dahua? With these 8mp cameras is the electronics inside good enough for 4k sharp recording or is there visible tailing, shatter and/or shadows in moving objects because of underpowered processing electronics?

c) I want the material to be viewable/editable by normal w10 applications (VLC,...). I do not like my present dahuas .dav format because of converting procedure and lack of support for other media players. I want to watch material from my media centers (kodi,...) Dahua cannot directly produce mpg/mp4?

d) Firmware in cameras must be sophisticated and easy to use because I do not use NVR or other surveillance softwares. Only CAM->NAS. According to my old experiences Hik has better GUI than dahua. Has there been serious progress in GUI lately?

e) I would prefer cameras with build in mic/speaker rather than just line-in/out. What do you recommend.

f) There are a lot of what manufacturers call as "smart" abitilies in cameras. Are big differences with the abilities of Hik and Dahua within the same price level cams? Ones much smarter than the others?

g) All cameras horizontal view angle must be about 85 degrees. What lens you recommend? I do not like the barrel effect. No need for motorized lens, zoom or ptz.

h) All cameras must have good picture in crepuscular light and good infrared lights because they are on 24/7 and up here in the north the days are short in the winter. IR distance of 30 meters is enough.

i) I have 3 Samsung smart TV's at home. 1x75" and 2x65". J and K series. How do I get the rtsp stream visible to those without any extra equipment. Presently my KODI can show the stream but is it possible to use only TVs. OS in samsung is Tizen (i think).

j) Price. I have a package offer of those 4 new hik cameras of total about 450 USD. International versions with upgradable softwares. The package price is in the limits what I am ready to spend to the system.

Thank you for reading this long story. A lot of questions for you to read/comment.

What do you recommend? Is this good combination or what do you suggest?

-Zak

 

[happycat]

Time to upgrade my old surveillance system.

Hi all, hi Zak,

sorry this is not an answer, I'm new on this forum and I was about to post a similar question, then I found this one.

Mainly, I'd like to just set up some cameras and a NAS and have them autonomously upload video to it on alarm. No NVR.

The NAS then could be running DLNA/samba/whatever and I could play the recordings (locally or remotely via vpn) from TV/PC or smartphone.

I don't understand why most cameras (all?) save the recordings as proprietary formats (.h264/.dav) you cannot directly play?

My previous experiences are limited, I tried some chinese camera which either didn't have the function or saved files with some obscure encoding no software was able to play.
I'm not technically savvy to know if it is so difficult to just save the recordings as mp4/avi/asf, maybe there's an hardware limit on what a camera cpu can do, especially when high compression is involved or maybe it's a licensing issue (they have to pay to encode to some formats?)
or maybe they want us to buy the NVRs?

So I'm with Zak.. opinions please?

 

[happycat]

Ok, so after much reading and searching here this is what I found, please someone correct me if I'm wrong:

Hickvision cameras can save recordings as mp4 files but those files cannot be read directly by a player because they're in a special format so you need to use the camera web interface to play them.

I found it's at least possible to convert the Dahua .dav files and that's not a transcoding, just some headers rearrangement so no quality loss and very fast process:

auto-save video as MKV or MP4 instead of DAV ?

The NAS' are usually Linux based so it's trivial to setup a cron or triggered event to convert new recordings, if this works we can do exactly what we wanted to, it just requires an additional step.

This also will be useful:

IPCam FTP Cleanup (*nix)

Or maybe we should buy Amcrest?

ftp format other than dav - Page 4 - Amcrest Forum

 

[Zak]

Nice founds Happycat. I definitely want to test out that auto-save auto-batch. Still mkvmerge is a tool I have used before for other purposes and it has decent GUI too if needed. Still a tiny doubt how it can read cams 264/265 files.

I have been thinking many times of buying cams and/or gadgets and/or electronics from OEM/3rd party/small-unknown brands. I have learned during the years that it is not a very good idea if I am not ready to really spend some time configuring rather than just use them. At the moment i consider only those two brands because:

1. I have been happy with the quality of Hiks and therefore it is at the top of my list. I have friends who owns security companies that install all from cables to working security system to big cities, airports, industrial estates and shopping malls. They use Dahuas because as they say "little better optics". But they say that Hik an excellent choice too. Those pros say to me that there is actually no real difference between those two. The quality and support are the issues for them.
2. Other OEM/3rd party or small brand manufacturers are not on my list because I have learned during the years with all kinds of computers/gadgets that the support of small manufacturers is poor and short.
3. Because user base of those products are limited numbers there is not much support from other users like in this forum. And because hik/dahua and some others are used by big companies too they cannot leave the customers empty-handed.
4. The price premium is not so big that it would justify purchasing of products only because of price.
5. I want now future proof setup and therefore I want to try out 8mp cams. Other brands still do not have good bargains for 4k, don't they?

rtsp works well with KODI (win10 / lubuntu, mint, libreelec). VLC can convert stream to any other format on the run but takes absolutely too much resources.

I have been happy with this simple CAM->NAS setup for years and tend to continue without NVR. The security of the security system has been taken care by network firewall. Sophos in my case. Actually I just installed Sophos firewall as VM to my Qnap and it works really well. No need for my Cisco hw fw anymore.

Were my previous questions too trivial for others to comment than happycat? I have not made up my mind yet and would like to have your opinions.