Your experience with NVR vs PC (Blue Iris, etc.) using Dahua cameras?

[aristobrat]

Since it doesn't appear that Blue Iris supports Dahua IVS signalling (which is a bit of a shame since advanced IVS features add the extra cost borne by the higher end cameras), I'm also curious how the BI equivalent options compare to the Dahua in-camera IVS.

Regarding Blue Iris and Dahau IVS signaling, ... Blue Iris supports Hikivison's "Smart Event" signaling (which is essentially the same thing), so its not out of the question that the author would add it for Dahua, if someone provided him documentation that explained how Dahua does it. The BI author is great, new features and tweaks are added every few weeks. When I moved from my Dahua NVR to Blue Iris a few months ago, H.265 from Dahua Starlights didn't work properly. A few of us here emailed support and the author had it fixed within a week.

Regarding Blue Iris Motion Detection vs. Dahua's IVS:

My motion detection needs are simple. For all of my cameras, I have a rectangle area that I need to know when someone moves into, out of, or within.

Dahua IVS (Intrusion, with "Crosses" and "Appears" enabled) handled it so perfectly (99% no false positives) that knowing I'd lose this feature going to Blue Iris, I really really really really resisted moving to Blue Iris. Had there not have been a Dahua NVR firmware bug back then that forced my hand, it'd have never gone to BI.

With Blue Iris, I've got the same rectangle drawn for each camera. For the life of me, I can't tune out the false positives that I get on sunny days when the shadows from poofy white clouds roll across the cameras view. It's the kind of shadow that looks like the horizontal thick line that used to scroll down old TVs when they weren't tuned great.

Per @fendermans point, BI has so many more Motion Detection options where you can put several boxes on your screen and make rules that say "only alert when someone goes from this specific box to this specific box" (and it can get even more complex than that), but when you've got a shadow that rolls across everything that comes from the NE one day, and from the SW next week, and the complete opposite ways on other days, it's like WTF. What rule can you create for that scenario that doesn't also mask legitimate motion traveling those directions?

Blue Iris does allow you to change the contrast ratio, so it won't trigger when the shadow isn't very dark, but that's a balance ... lower the contrast setting too much and someone with dark clothes walking against your dark green grass won't trigger. Blue Iris also lets you set the "maximum size" of things (and not to trigger if something is too big) but when these shadows are only take up 10% of the camera at any one time, but they roll down the field of view, so that feature doesn't help out a lot either.

Even with all of that, I hands down love Blue Iris vs the Dahua NVR. BI's iOS app makes it so easy to check in anytime and see the clips of motion that were recorded. And they play back very quickly over LTE on my smartphone. With the Dahua iOS app, playback over LTE was iffy, at best. And heaven help you if you have scrub forward or backwards, it pretty much never did for me. Finding the clips on the Dahua app was a PITA. I always had to specify a time window (say today, from 1pm to 3pm), and then it'd take a literal minute to search for them, and all it would show me would be markers on a timeline. With Blue Iris, I login, select my camera view, an each camera has a notification in the top right that shows the number of new alerts. When I tap on that, it shows me a picture of each alert, in a chronological list. If I want to see the video, I tap, and it starts playing. Love it. Check in on my house a few times throughout the day. With Dahau, I'd get so frustrated using the iOS app from work that I'd have to come home and sit down at a computer to see what happened during the day.

 

[Merlin93]

Regarding Blue Iris and Dahau IVS signaling, ... Blue Iris supports Hikivison's "Smart Event" signaling (which is essentially the same thing), so its not out of the question that the author would add it for Dahua, if someone provided him documentation that explained how Dahua does it.

Yeah, I read about that earlier... it's one of the reasons I mentioned it in this thread. It's been repeatedly stated that BI has great analytics as well, but I'm sure a combination of both on camera and in software analysis would be best. Hopefully he'll get access to the proper documentation to make that happen.

The BI author is great, new features and tweaks are added every few weeks. When I moved from my Dahua NVR to Blue Iris a few months ago, H.265 from Dahua Starlights didn't work properly. A few of us here emailed support and the author had it fixed within a week.

I've read that as well. That is awesome!

Regarding Blue Iris Motion Detection vs. Dahua's IVS:

My motion detection needs are simple. For all of my cameras, I have a rectangle area that I need to know when someone moves into, out of, or within.

Dahua IVS (Intrusion, with "Crosses" and "Appears" enabled) handled it so perfectly (99% no false positives) that knowing I'd lose this feature going to Blue Iris, I really really really really resisted moving to Blue Iris. Had there not have been a Dahua NVR firmware bug back then that forced my hand, it'd have never gone to BI.

With Blue Iris, I've got the same rectangle drawn for each camera. For the life of me, I can't tune out the false positives that I get on sunny days when the shadows from poofy white clouds roll across the cameras view. It's the kind of shadow that looks like the horizontal thick line that used to scroll down old TVs when they weren't tuned great.

Per @fendermans point, BI has so many more Motion Detection options where you can put several boxes on your screen and make rules that say "only alert when someone goes from this specific box to this specific box" (and it can get even more complex than that), but when you've got a shadow that rolls across everything that comes from the NE one day, and from the SW next week, and the complete opposite ways on other days, it's like WTF. What rule can you create for that scenario that doesn't also mask legitimate motion traveling those directions?

Blue Iris does allow you to change the contrast ratio, so it won't trigger when the shadow isn't very dark, but that's a balance ... lower the contrast setting too much and someone with dark clothes walking against your dark green grass won't trigger. Blue Iris also lets you set the "maximum size" of things (and not to trigger if something is too big) but when these shadows are only take up 10% of the camera at any one time, but they roll down the field of view, so that feature doesn't help out a lot either.

That is all really helpful information and directly addresses some of the issues I've read about.

Even with all of that, I hands down love Blue Iris vs the Dahua NVR. BI's iOS app makes it so easy to check in anytime and see the clips of motion that were recorded. And they play back very quickly over LTE on my smartphone. With the Dahua iOS app, playback over LTE was iffy, at best. And heaven help you if you have scrub forward or backwards, it pretty much never did for me. Finding the clips on the Dahua app was a PITA. I always had to specify a time window (say today, from 1pm to 3pm), and then it'd take a literal minute to search for them, and all it would show me would be markers on a timeline. With Blue Iris, I login, select my camera view, an each camera has a notification in the top right that shows the number of new alerts. When I tap on that, it shows me a picture of each alert, in a chronological list. If I want to see the video, I tap, and it starts playing. Love it. Check in on my house a few times throughout the day. With Dahau, I'd get so frustrated using the iOS app from work that I'd have to come home and sit down at a computer to see what happened during the day.

Thanks for the feedback... it sounds like you're much happier with BI. I look forward to the opportunity to try it out.

 

[MacFun]

Since BI supports the Hikvision IVS or analytics... would that not be a preferred combination? I suspect that the Dahua cams hold some other advantages....

Thanks,

Robert

 

[Merlin93]

Since BI supports the Hikvision IVS or analytics... would that not be a preferred combination? I suspect that the Dahua cams hold some other advantages....

Thanks,

Robert

If you look at the stats of the comparable Hikvision cameras vs the Dahua cameras... particularly the Starlight vs Darkfighter cameras... you'll see that the Dahua cameras blow them away in terms of capabilities (and price in most cases.) I looked at both manufacturers and decided on Dahua. If money were no object I'd go with the Sony and Axis big imager cameras (35mm imager) since they're pretty amazing, particularly in low-light (less than 0.001 Lux), but they're also like 10x the price of the Dahua stuff for the same basic functions.

It sounds like BI will eventually support IVS from both, which would be great!

 

[MacFun]

I figured it was something like that.... BTW: I saw some footage from an Axis PTZ that actively framed the motion as if it were shot from a professional videographer.... I'm sure it was a $1,000 cam but it was impressive.

R

 

[MacFun]

If you look at the stats of the comparable Hikvision cameras vs the Dahua cameras... particularly the Starlight vs Darkfighter cameras... you'll see that the Dahua cameras blow them away in terms of capabilities (and price in most cases.) I looked at both manufacturers and decided on Dahua. If money were no object I'd go with the Sony and Axis big imager cameras (35mm imager) since they're pretty amazing, particularly in low-light (less than 0.001 Lux), but they're also like 10x the price of the Dahua stuff for the same basic functions.

It sounds like BI will eventually support IVS from both, which would be great!

I look forward to benefiting from your research! When might you pull the trigger on some of this...?

 

[fenderman]

If you look at the stats of the comparable Hikvision cameras vs the Dahua cameras... particularly the Starlight vs Darkfighter cameras... you'll see that the Dahua cameras blow them away in terms of capabilities (and price in most cases.) I looked at both manufacturers and decided on Dahua. If money were no object I'd go with the Sony and Axis big imager cameras (35mm imager) since they're pretty amazing, particularly in low-light (less than 0.001 Lux), but they're also like 10x the price of the Dahua stuff for the same basic functions.

It sounds like BI will eventually support IVS from both, which would be great!

Actually hikvision has a low light series, not darkfighter, that are compatible to the starlights in both 1080p and 3mp variants...there are entire threads discussing these cams.

 

[tigerwillow1]

Just a fly-on-the-wall comment here. With the latest firmware, the Dahua NVR is doing what I need it too and I don't find it all that difficult to operate. So for the foreseeable future I'm sticking with what I've got. However, if I were starting from scratch, these reports make BI sound like a slam-dunk choice. Having used a few of both, I also believe that the Dahua cameras easily beat the similar price level Hikvision cameras for image quality and features.

 

[Merlin93]

Actually hikvision has a low light series, not darkfighter, that are compatible to the starlights in both 1080p and 3mp variants...there are entire threads discussing these cams.

I probably lumped them all together since I was using the Hikvision product selector to find comparable cameras and then comparing stats side by side. In any case, Hikvision has cameras that are in the same Lux ranges as the Dahua gear (probably even use the same imagers) but compared 1:1 Dahua usually won out.

Not to mention, it looks like Hikvision is taking steps to make it much more difficult for consumers to buy their gear now without going through official channels, so I'd rather not have to deal with that.

 

[Merlin93]

Just a fly-on-the-wall comment here. With the latest firmware, the Dahua NVR is doing what I need it too and I don't find it all that difficult to operate. So for the foreseeable future I'm sticking with what I've got. However, if I were starting from scratch, these reports make BI sound like a slam-dunk choice. Having used a few of both, I also believe that the Dahua cameras easily beat the similar price level Hikvision cameras for image quality and features.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I'm starting to get that impression myself.

 

[fenderman]

I probably lumped them all together since I was using the Hikvision product selector to find comparable cameras and then comparing stats side by side. In any case, Hikvision has cameras that are in the same Lux ranges as the Dahua gear (probably even use the same imagers) but compared 1:1 Dahua usually won out.

Not to mention, it looks like Hikvision is taking steps to make it much more difficult for consumers to buy their gear now without going through official channels, so I'd rather not have to deal with that.

That is simply not accurate...the hikvision low light perform virtually the same as the dahua starlights..in fact, I think it might be the same sensor...
There a no steps being taken by hikvision that dahau does not take as well and that hikvision has not done in the past...the cameras will be available to anyone who wants them..this is what I mean when I said you read threads too literally...all that thread was about was hikvision not allowing a seller to sell hikvision branded cameras direct to the public...they have been doing that for years...

 

[Merlin93]

I look forward to benefiting from your research! When might you pull the trigger on some of this...?

I'm awaiting some feedback from @EMPIRETECANDY on some questions on the box camera, but I've already pulled the trigger on some of the stuff (cabling, network gear, panels, etc.) I still need to run by home depot to grab conduit before I can start pulling cable, but I will be doing all that first so when the cameras arrive I'll just need to terminate the cables, mount the cameras, and plug things in to start testing.

Assuming I go with Blue Iris (which I'm pretty sure about at this point) I'll probably run it on my gaming box to start until I build or buy a dedicated VMS box to run the software.

 

[Merlin93]

That is simply not accurate... There a no steps being taken by hikvision that dahau does not take as well and that hikvision has not done in the past...the cameras will be available to anyone who wants them..this is what I mean when I said you read threads too literally...all that thread was about was hikvision not allowing a seller to sell hikvision branded cameras direct to the public...they have been doing that for years...

I saw that announcement on several forums and read through some of the discussions, but not deeply since I don't really have any interest in the Hik cameras. My takaway was that they were tired of consumers buying deeply discounted cameras direct from grey market resellers and bypassing official channels, which is hurting their sales overseas and that they would be taking steps to make that more difficult moving forward. Some of the other commenters suggested that might include such steps as locking down firmware and such.

While I'm sure both Hikvision and Dahua struggle with that issue, I got the impression that Hikvision was starting to be more aggressive in stopping it, and they have started restricting sales as a first step. I don't make assumptions about what I read, I tend to take announcements like that at face value since I don't have enough inside information to make a different opinion. All I can say is how I interpreted that announcement, others may choose to interpret it differently. As I said it doesn't matter to me, I'm not here to tell people what to think, just share my own observations and opinions. People should read those threads if they are interested.

 

[fenderman]

I saw that announcement on several forums and read through some of the discussions, but not deeply since I don't really have any interest in the Hik cameras. My takaway was that they were tired of consumers buying deeply discounted cameras direct from grey market resellers and bypassing official channels, which is hurting their sales overseas and that they would be taking steps to make that more difficult moving forward. Some of the other commenters suggested that might include such steps as locking down firmware and such.

While I'm sure both Hikvision and Dahua struggle with that issue, I got the impression that Hikvision was starting to be more aggressive in stopping it, and they have started restricting sales as a first step. I don't make assumptions about what I read, I tend to take announcements like that at face value since I don't have enough inside information to make a different opinion. All I can say is how I interpreted that announcement, others may choose to interpret it differently. As I said it doesn't matter to me, I'm not here to tell people what to think, just share my own observations and opinions. People should read those threads if they are interested.

Lol, they have been doing EXACTLY this for YEARS....literally nothing new. Again, NOTHING more aggressive...there was no announcement by hikvision....You may not be trying to tell people what to think, but you are providing misleading information.

 

[Merlin93]

Lol, they have been doing EXACTLY this for YEARS....literally nothing new. Again, NOTHING more aggressive...there was no announcement by hikvision....You may not be trying to tell people what to think, but you are providing misleading information.

I'm providing nothing different than what is already posted on this forum, on reddit, and on other forums. In fact, if anything, I'm just parroting what is out there and not adding anything of my own to it since I don't know enough about their ecosystem to make my own opinions. Plus I really don't care so it doesn't matter to me.

 

[fenderman]

I'm providing nothing different than what is already posted on this forum, on reddit, and on other forums. In fact, if anything, I'm just parroting what is out there and not adding anything of my own to it since I don't know enough about their ecosystem to make my own opinions. Plus I really don't care so it doesn't matter to me.

Anyone saying that hikvision is doing anything different today than 2-3 years ago is misinformed...that is fact..I dont care what some idiot on reddit (oh god) said...that is NOT the case. It is important not to post misleading and false information.

 

[Merlin93]

Anyone saying that hikvision is doing anything different today than 2-3 years ago is misinformed...that is fact..I dont care what some idiot on reddit (oh god) said...that is NOT the case. It is important not to post misleading and false information.

I really don't feel like beating the dead horse on this, but technically unless you have inside information from within the upper management of Hikvision telling you this, you're just making assumptions as well and cannot back up any of this as fact. I believe you since you obviously have been in this field for a long time and know more about this than I.

I have no idea who posted the original threads but that same line of information was posted in multiple places, not just on IP Cam Talk. I apologize if its just spreading rumors and heresay, but that happens on forums since we're not all experts, we're just enthusiasts trying to learn more and be helpful by sharing with others. Unless I'm talking to official representatives, I always assume all public forums are populated by other enthuasists and maybe 25% of what they say can be relied upon as fact. If it turns out to be more than that, I'm ahead of the game.

You or I can remove my post if you feel strongly about it, but I would recommend you remove the other threads as well in that case.

 

[fenderman]

I really don't feel like beating the dead horse on this, but technically unless you have inside information from within the upper management of Hikvision telling you this, you're just making assumptions as well and cannot back up any of this as fact. I believe you since you obviously have been in this field for a long time and know more about this than I.

I have no idea who posted the original threads but that same line of information was posted in multiple places, not just on IP Cam Talk. I apologize if its just spreading rumors and heresay, but that happens on forums since we're not all experts, we're just enthusiasts trying to learn more and be helpful by sharing with others. Unless I'm talking to official representatives, I always assume all public forums are populated by other enthuasists and maybe 25% of what they say can be relied upon as fact. If it turns out to be more than that, I'm ahead of the game.

You or I can remove my post if you feel strongly about it, but I would recommend you remove the other threads as well in that case.

You must be a special kind of stupid. You began your foray into ip cameras last week. Hikvision has ALWAYS had this policy..it is fact. Dont come here posting misinformation...your misinformation is particularly troublesome because even if hikvision did not have this policy and just enacted it last week, it would not matter. Most users here do not buy from authorized distributors...they buy from international models that are 100 percent upgradable direct from china at a savings of at least 30-40 percent. Dont post false information on the forum. It helps no one. It is a pet peeve of mine...

 

[Merlin93]

You must be a special kind of stupid. You began your foray into ip cameras last week. Hikvision has ALWAYS had this policy..it is fact. Dont come here posting misinformation...your misinformation is particularly troublesome because even if hikvision did not have this policy and just enacted it last week, it would not matter. Most users here do not buy from authorized distributors...they buy from international models that are 100 percent upgradable direct from china at a savings of at least 30-40 percent. Dont post false information on the forum. It helps no one. It is a pet peeve of mine...

I've been reading these forums and others for months, but didn't sign up until I was getting ready to make a purchase. Either way, its clear that you're much more passionate about this subject then I since you're now stooping to personal insults because I am quoting what others have posted on this same forum. I'm just trying to be helpful. Either way, I'm bowing out of this conversation.

 

[fenderman]

I've been reading these forums and others for months, but didn't sign up until I was getting ready to make a purchase. Either way, its clear that you're much more passionate about this subject then I since you're now stooping to personal insults because I am quoting what others have posted on this same forum. I'm just trying to be helpful. Either way, I'm bowing out of this conversation.

You are not being helpful by posting FALSE information. Simple as that. Sometimes, when you dont know, its better to shut up so you dont mislead others.