Two new interesting cams from dahua

nayr

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A long time friend of mine, works armed security consultant, came by yesterday and was trying to encourage me to take a gig to develop a 360 degree video system for large warehouse cannabis grows.

I am going to get a tour of a few facilities next week, and if I take the Gig I'll be using two of the multi-sensor starlight 180 degree cameras back to back to pull it off..

Colorado has seed to sale laws on video recording; right now they are using ~80 or more hikvisions w/Blueiris at each warehouse and have 45 day archival compliance.. as you can imagine the storage requirements are insane and they pay for remote monitoring, so the bandwidth requirements are also insane.. the goal is to watch the whole warehouse on something more manageable because what they are doing right now is not scaling very well.

Sounds like a fun moonlighting gig and they got cannabis money; so they can actually afford me.. if everything goes to plan, I'll be getting my hands on some panno cams soon, and I might just buy one for my own personal use and replace my black face ptz w/a starlight model cause the money is that good.
 

bp2008

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80 cams w/BlueIris. that must be at least 4 servers. And what, 50 TB of storage per server along with conservative bit rates?
 

nayr

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they have stacks of video recorders at each location yeah, he said one place had 8 hikvision 16ch NVR's and they apparently wont cluster like Dahua so its a huge PITA to manage em.

he logged me into the WebUI, it was your Better remote live view page @bp2008 heh, and everything was running at like 1-2fps.. and they had about 4-5 of those BlueIris servers at that location;.

No VPN use at all either, everything was wide open on the Web.. Eek.
 

j4co

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Hmm wide open, that sounds like inviting people to take a look what is covered by cameras before trying to do bad things there..

Storage is not that expensive anymore (running close to 200TB here in 3 freebsd severs with zfs raid-z2 for movies)
 

bp2008

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Hah. Lets be fair, I doubt "wide open on the Web" means the cameras were forwarded. Likely only the Blue Iris web server. Blue Iris likely isn't bombproof, but its web server isn't an instant hack-me invitation either.

200 TB of storage must have cost tens of thousands of dollars to set up. Maybe not unreasonable if you are a profitable business, but for the rest of us that is a new car, or a good sized chunk of a home. Heck just the cost of replacement hard drives and the time to replace them in a system of that size, would be more than most of us are willing to spend on file storage.
 

j4co

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It is an hobby since years. Norco 20 and 24 slot cases, 2x 10 disks in raid-z2 volumes. started with 3TB disks and moved to 4TB. Server is about 1500-2000€ and the hdd's i mostly buy around 25€ per TB. So every 2 years new server is doable with my income. Will not build more as i need more time to watch movies first :)

For video storage i saw wd purple 4 TB offered here for like 90$ Each (if you bought all 10)
So storage does not need to be expensive if you look around.

It is more how to make it reliable and manageble..
 

nayr

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they basically need 2 separate storage systems, one for personal security use where they can record high quality, full framerate.. only needs a few days of capacity..

then there is the compliance requirements, some dahua cameras will provide a 2nd substream @ 720p and thats the minimum resolution for compliance.. framerate and bitrates will be minimal but they require at least 45 days of video.

They are looking into 360 view setups to reduce the number of cameras and feeds; they showed me a camera they are looking at that has 3x 120 degree cameras on it and its fucking crap.. better than a Fisheye camera definitely not up to the job.. they had like 2k wide resolution for 360 degree, and with 2 dahua 180degree cameras paired together id be doing it with 8192 wide resolution and still have great low light capabilities.

they havent moved to h265 yet either; and given there storage requirements I think that should be done.. Will have to wait to scope out the environment but I think I can get 2 of these dahua 180's to replace at least 6-10 hik's and then with h265 the storage requirements might come down to a sane level..

They need to get creative thats for sure; they been hodge podging together systems and now maxed out all ability to expand.. just not scaling well.
 

bp2008

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Yeah, the more disks you have, the higher your chance of disk failure. You must have to replace several disks a year. I bet the rebuild times are horrific too on a 10x4TB Raid-Z2.

200 TB would be 4000 dual layer blu ray disks. I don't think I have watched a quarter that many movies in my entire life.
 

j4co

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Rebuilt time is about the time to go through the filled part of the disk(s) so that is 8 hours or so for a 4TB.
Scrub runs at about 890 MB/sec. Copy speed with zfs send and receive is 880MB/sec over 10GE network.

But they are 99% down, only copy movie to a qnap silent nas with SSD disk for playback, or put movies on the last one.
 

jazzy1

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Hi guys. I'm thinking of getting a couple turret IPC-HDW5231R-Z as my first IP Cams. One would be mounted looking down at front porch to see who's coming to the door and another looking out on the driveway and mounted at the peak of a garage. Do you think this cam is a good choice? The garage mounted one looks out onto mailboxes which have been busted into multiple times so I want visibility on that. Or would you recommend something else? Can these turrets be mounted vertically or horizontally or doesn't matter?

Thanks!
 

nayr

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dont mount it at the peak of a garage; absolutely horrible location.. 8ft high tops; you cant legally identify someone by a bald spot or ballcap and no face.

the turrets can be mounted in any orientation and even on unlevel surfaces.

overall this is the best camera for anyone right now IMHO; the variable lens takes all the guess work out for noobies and the performance at this cost is astounding.
 

bp2008

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the variable lens takes all the guess work out for noobies
Yeah, they can zoom it out all the way, and then months later when their video is insufficient to identify the guy that stole an ipad out of the wife's unlocked car, they can zoom it in :)
 

jazzy1

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dont mount it at the peak of a garage; absolutely horrible location.. 8ft high tops; you cant legally identify someone by a bald spot or ballcap and no face.

the turrets can be mounted in any orientation and even on unlevel surfaces.

overall this is the best camera for anyone right now IMHO; the variable lens takes all the guess work out for noobies and the performance at this cost is astounding.
Here I've circled the mounting locations I think may work best! Opinions?

So people are happy with buying from Andy on Aliexpress? These are firmware upgradeable right? The PAL spec doesn't pose any problem for USA users right?
 

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j4co

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I bought one dahua mini ptz and a mount from Andy and found the communication great. Very fast response, and good English. Only negative thing was that the mount was not on stock and he waited long before he offered to split the order and send out the camera before the mount (understandable as is costs 2 times shipment)
 

bp2008

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Here I've circled the mounting locations I think may work best! Opinions?
Lower is better for recognizing faces, but I think just above your garage doors is fine. That is kind of where all my driveway cams are.
upload_2016-11-11_13-57-9.png

Also, you need to think about where the infrared LEDs are going to cast their light, and try to keep any obstructions out of this area because even something outside the field of view of the camera can reflect infrared strongly back into the camera and hurt night vision ability a lot. So don't mount it super close to a light fixture for example. Mine are about as close as they can get without causing problems for night vision.

The PAL spec doesn't pose any problem for USA users right?
Nope, PAL spec on IP cameras basically just means "you get a 25 FPS limit instead of 30 FPS, or 50 FPS instead of 60 FPS".
 

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jazzy1

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Thanks for the info....how do you find the 8mp Dahua?
I'm expecting a big jump in quality from the Foscam I have pointing out from inside behind glass...


Lower is better for recognizing faces, but I think just above your garage doors is fine. That is kind of where all my driveway cams are.
View attachment 12364

Also, you need to think about where the infrared LEDs are going to cast their light, and try to keep any obstructions out of this area because even something outside the field of view of the camera can reflect infrared strongly back into the camera and hurt night vision ability a lot. So don't mount it super close to a light fixture for example. Mine are about as close as they can get without causing problems for night vision.



Nope, PAL spec on IP cameras basically just means "you get a 25 FPS limit instead of 30 FPS, or 50 FPS instead of 60 FPS".
 
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