petere10
Young grasshopper
Hi All,
I thought that I would detail my adventure into moving from a closed proprietary NVR system to BI.
The System
It's detailed here. The brand is Concord and the cameras are all 4K. Beautiful images etc. The sleuths on the forum quickly pointed me in the right direction and I discovered that it was manufactured by RaySharp
The Problem.
I found that it was a difficult task to search clips and that exported files had the extension ".rs" or something similar. Although I found a viewer for the files, for such an expensive system, I felt disappointed.
The idea
I wanted to use the cameras in Blue Iris and if possible use the old (brand new actually) NVR as a backup for the BI system.
Purchases
1. an 8 port POE switch with 2 extra GBit uplink ports
2. a 6 core i7 with lots of hard disk space.
OK here goes...
Firstly, I had to determine whether the cameras could be used outside the closed NVR. I found some ONVIF software and I could see from the NVR setup page that the cameras were assigned an IP range of 10.10.25.x.
OK, that's easy enough, and sure enough, when I plugged a spare camera into my computer through the POE adapter/switch and set the NIC to 10.10.25.10 - the onvif software displayed the camera details. Unfortunately, but not fatal, one of the bits of information told me that the firmware on the camera was not updateable. No great problem, because the picture quality is great and the camera offers 3 streams. I'm sure that will bite me later.
So i had proved the camera was discoverable, so I opened BI, added a new camera with the correct IP and BINGO the feed was live. I added all the other cameras and had a fully functional BI system with my proprietary cameras.
Remember that the POE switch had 2 uplink ports? Well, I plugged a spare ethernet cable into that and the other end into the CAMERA 1 port of the NVR. BINGO again! Setup had automatically discovered the 1st camera and populated all the fields with the correct information to display CAMERA 1. Up came the first camera live feed. BUT... how to get the other 7 cameras with only a single ethernet cable??
All the info must be there of course, and I'm sitting there looking at the setup page of the NVR.
I clicked on the CAMERA 2 settings and noticed that the setup was set to AUTOMATICALLY detect a camera plugged into the port.
There was an option to set the camera up manually. When I changed the setting to manual, I had the ability to enter ALL the details of my second camera - IP address, port etc.
SAVE, and the second camera came up. Repeat, repeat etc and finally I had all cameras working on BOTH BI and the NVR. What a bonus!
Summary.
I actually have two independent surveillance systems running off a single set of cameras. I can set recording parameters on BOTH systems independent of each other.
BTW, BI is running at about 25% CPU recording direct to disk
I thought that I would detail my adventure into moving from a closed proprietary NVR system to BI.
The System
It's detailed here. The brand is Concord and the cameras are all 4K. Beautiful images etc. The sleuths on the forum quickly pointed me in the right direction and I discovered that it was manufactured by RaySharp
The Problem.
I found that it was a difficult task to search clips and that exported files had the extension ".rs" or something similar. Although I found a viewer for the files, for such an expensive system, I felt disappointed.
The idea
I wanted to use the cameras in Blue Iris and if possible use the old (brand new actually) NVR as a backup for the BI system.
Purchases
1. an 8 port POE switch with 2 extra GBit uplink ports
2. a 6 core i7 with lots of hard disk space.
OK here goes...
Firstly, I had to determine whether the cameras could be used outside the closed NVR. I found some ONVIF software and I could see from the NVR setup page that the cameras were assigned an IP range of 10.10.25.x.
OK, that's easy enough, and sure enough, when I plugged a spare camera into my computer through the POE adapter/switch and set the NIC to 10.10.25.10 - the onvif software displayed the camera details. Unfortunately, but not fatal, one of the bits of information told me that the firmware on the camera was not updateable. No great problem, because the picture quality is great and the camera offers 3 streams. I'm sure that will bite me later.
So i had proved the camera was discoverable, so I opened BI, added a new camera with the correct IP and BINGO the feed was live. I added all the other cameras and had a fully functional BI system with my proprietary cameras.
Remember that the POE switch had 2 uplink ports? Well, I plugged a spare ethernet cable into that and the other end into the CAMERA 1 port of the NVR. BINGO again! Setup had automatically discovered the 1st camera and populated all the fields with the correct information to display CAMERA 1. Up came the first camera live feed. BUT... how to get the other 7 cameras with only a single ethernet cable??
All the info must be there of course, and I'm sitting there looking at the setup page of the NVR.
I clicked on the CAMERA 2 settings and noticed that the setup was set to AUTOMATICALLY detect a camera plugged into the port.
There was an option to set the camera up manually. When I changed the setting to manual, I had the ability to enter ALL the details of my second camera - IP address, port etc.
SAVE, and the second camera came up. Repeat, repeat etc and finally I had all cameras working on BOTH BI and the NVR. What a bonus!
Summary.
I actually have two independent surveillance systems running off a single set of cameras. I can set recording parameters on BOTH systems independent of each other.
BTW, BI is running at about 25% CPU recording direct to disk