To NVR or not to NVR that is the question

L

laughingman

n3wb
Jun 16, 2017
21
2
Southwestern Ontario
Does anyone know if there is any benefit to using a NVR (like this one DS-7600NI-I2) at 12mp recording and stream -vs- iVMS 4200 software on a PC? How do I determine what MP my PC is is streaming/recording /camera?
The PC is not the most powerful but it did handle 8 analog cameras back in the day.
Intel i5 @3.40 ghz with 8 gb of ram running win7 64 bit
intel HD graphics 4000
my network is gigabyte certified
I am running 3 - 12MP fisheye cameras and will add one more regular 2-4MP camera.
 
Well, the nice thing is that you already have the PC, and the software is free, so you can give it a shot and see if it works for you. In terms of your I5 processor, it looks like your cameras combined push about 40 MP total. That might be a bit much for an older i5, but again, I'd give it a shot and see how it performs.

I've totally flip-flopped on my views of recording on a NVR vs. a PC:

I started with a NVR (Dahua) because I wanted something physically smaller than a PC (that used less electricity than a PC) that I could just put in a closet somewhere and forget about (i.e. not have to stay on top of Windows Updates, etc).

I flipped to a PC after having issues with how Dahua breaks up recordings on the NVR. Turns out Dahua's version of iVMS-4200 had the same issues, so I'm currently running Blue Iris on a PC as my NVR. Besides recording in a manner that works better for me, Blue Iris has some extra functionality I haven't seen in NVRs (or their free PC-versions, like iVMS-4200), and it's a ton more responsive when viewing "live" (or recordings) over LTE on my phone. BI also gets regular updates (seems like monthly), where as Hikvision and Dahua seem to only update their NVR software rarely.
 
I went with an NVR to have a standalone system. It didn't take long to work out that I still need to keep hooking up a laptop to set a lot of functions on the cameras- the NVR doesn't give access to a lot of basic camera settings (which is annoying!)
 
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