Spec me a CCTV System

Crimping is a bit fiddly, but get a load of cheap connectors, watch a few videos and practice - make sure you get a cable tester and you can check how you cable is doing. Its actually worth getting decent cable ends for when you do the install properly as the cheap ones can break/fail later down the line.

I've tried pulling made up cables before - the trick is to tie a guide line on it and then encase the connector in electrical tape before you try and get it through a cavity.
 
Siliconslave said:
Crimping is a bit fiddly, but get a load of cheap connectors, watch a few videos and practice - make sure you get a cable tester and you can check how you cable is doing. Its actually worth getting decent cable ends for when you do the install properly as the cheap ones can break/fail later down the line.

I've tried pulling made up cables before - the trick is to tie a guide line on it and then encase the connector in electrical tape before you try and get it through a cavity.
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I like Ugreen pass-through cable ends for internal runs - £11 for 50 on Amazon (you feed the pairs through, check in in the right order, snip the ends and pull back slightly before crimping - very quick & tidy).
I get metal shielded ends for external use (crimp more securely) - Leenue brand on Amazon £10 for box of 50.
I also bought a bulk pack of multi coloured cable boots & labels, so I can identify which cable is which - I use the same colour each end to help.
 
RedMogg said:
I like Ugreen pass-through cable ends for internal runs - £11 for 50 on Amazon (you feed the pairs through, check in in the right order, snip the ends and pull back slightly before crimping - very quick & tidy).
I get metal shielded ends for external use (crimp more securely) - Leenue brand on Amazon £10 for box of 50.
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I would never recommend pass through plugs - To do them properly you need the proper crimpers and stick to well known brands (e.g. Excel Fast Plugs), anything else can (although unlikely) cause issues.

There is also no benefit to metal shielded RJ45s - unless you are using shielded cable.


Better to stick to good known quality items such as from CableMonkey or even Kenable, rather than random amazon or ebay rubbish for the sake of a couple of quid

CCS Cat5e UTP RJ45 Plug | RJ45 Connectors

These Cat5e UTP RJ45 plugs are suitable for terminations on both Stranded Patch and Solid core Cat5e Cable. They are of single piece
www.cablemonkey.co.uk www.cablemonkey.co.uk
 
Armageus said:
I would never recommend pass through plugs - To do them properly you need the proper crimpers and stick to well known brands (e.g. Excel Fast Plugs), anything else can (although unlikely) cause issues.

There is also no benefit to metal shielded RJ45s - unless you are using shielded cable.


Better to stick to good known quality items such as from CableMonkey or even Kenable, rather than random amazon or ebay rubbish for the sake of a couple of quid

CCS Cat5e UTP RJ45 Plug | RJ45 Connectors

These Cat5e UTP RJ45 plugs are suitable for terminations on both Stranded Patch and Solid core Cat5e Cable. They are of single piece
www.cablemonkey.co.uk www.cablemonkey.co.uk
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I use the metal shielded RJ45s on shielded, outdoor rated Cat5e (as per previous post).
Agree with the rest of your post in principle - the Ugreen connectors I recommend are decent enough for home use (check reviews).

Running 3x8 port, 2x5 port and one 11 port POE gigabit switches, plus two routers & WiFi extenders - finding RJ45 connectors that are quick and easy to use saved a lot of hassle when terminating so many cables (anything that has a wired option and WiFi has a cable run to it).

Would certainly agree a decent crimping tool & cable tester is money well spent.
 
WJA96 said:
And then we have usefulness. Does it actually let you see what’s happening? On my NVR I can literally ask it to search for any instances of a man with a beard wearing glasses getting out of a car and it will search the data and pull that up. And that’s the free software that comes with the NVR, not the ‘pro’ version that allows additional AI search features.
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These are some of the features I am looking for. What setup do you have?
 
Siliconslave said:
I currently have a hikvision DS-7604NI-K1 NVR connected to one 2CD2385FWD and two 2CD2335FWD cameras. Hikvision don't seem to be releasing updates to the NVR anymore and i'm getting a little fed up of the woful line crossing detection etc.

Are there any decent NVRs i can look at that aren't massive, will support the Hikvision cameras and offer better alerting?
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I found my older DS-7608NI-K2 was a bit flaky at times, and when we had the electricians rewire a chunk of the house for a new extension, they kept turning the mains on/off, they'd warned me to unplug everything, which I did, except the NVR which is tucked out the way!, it blew the PSU..

I was going to go Dahua, but would then have wanted to swap out my Hikvision cameras which still worked well, so took to ebay and found a replacement DS-7608NI-K2 (£105 for a new item!). On powering it up, I realised it had a new UI and checked the firmware, which was May 2022 and realised I'd not updated my old one for 18 months, and was very surprised to see they've kept maintaining it.. The flaky playback/event detection is much better now and it's so much slicker.. a genuine surprise!
 
Demon said:
I was going to go Dahua, but would then have wanted to swap out my Hikvision cameras which still worked well, so took to ebay and found a replacement DS-7608NI-K2 (£105 for a new item!). On powering it up, I realised it had a new UI and checked the firmware, which was May 2022 and realised I'd not updated my old one for 18 months, and was very surprised to see they've kept maintaining it.. The flaky playback/event detection is much better now and it's so much slicker.. a genuine surprise!
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last time they updated the K1 was back in 2020 so theres not (modern) browser support still :(

Thought you could mix the camera & NVRs to some degree?
 
Siliconslave said:
last time they updated the K1 was back in 2020 so theres not (modern) browser support still :(

Thought you could mix the camera & NVRs to some degree?
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You can - Hikvision support Dahua and Dahua support Hikvision through ONVIF plus in most cases now it’s the camera that is doing the alerting, not the NVR and the NVR does back-end processing as we were discussing above.
 
rG-tom said:
Hmm. It lists it on the model's spec page as being there, and it shows in the menu but says this:

kfwyeyv.png

NVR4208-8P-4KS2/L

NVR4208-8P-4KS2/L
www.dahuasecurity.com www.dahuasecurity.com

"AI by Camera: Face detection, perimeter protection, IVS, people counting, heat map, and SMD"

is it that my camera would need to be able to do it?
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Correct - you need to turn face detection on in the camera. It will show a box around the head when it picks up a face. But I thought you had a NVR5208-8P-4KS2/SE. If it’s a 4-series and /L that would explain why it was so cheap.

But even a 5208 /L won‘t do the AI stuff - you need to see a capital I in the model name. Have you flashed your /L with /SE firmware? From what I recall you bought your gear from a friend who worked for a distributor. That person should be able to make it work. The problem with a lot of this stuff is that it all comes from China and it all comes in brown boxes with a little 2” square sticker on telling you what’s in the box and it’s very easy to buy stuff with a letter or two different that doesn’t work. I sold a system to someone a bit over a year ago and when I went to set it up it didn’t do the alerting because the warehouse had shipped the wrong NVR. They looked identical but I had to go back the following day to get it working. And because I’d unboxed it I couldn’t return it. Nasty!
 
WizMind and WizSense are like two levels of features - WizMind is basically the top tier of hardware and all the AI features run while WizSense is better than the average bear’s camera and NVR but not top of the range.

BlueIris was about a decade behind WizMind the last time I checked. WizMind is what the Chinese police are deploying to detect undesirables in crowds. On one hand you have to admire the software and in the other it’s genuinely unsettling what these systems are capable of. It’s no shock to anyone that the Chinese government are acting towards the Uighurs in China like the Nazis did to the Jews in Germany and the DSS Pro software has detection filters for Caucasian, Chinese, Black African, Asian and Uighur. So they’ve tuned the software to detect Uighurs. And you can then set up crowd gathering so two or more Uighurs are a crowd and they’re probably not going to give them a prize when they snatch them off the streets.

IPVM are running a series of articles regarding Hikvision and torture in Chinese prisons and it’s not good. Search for Tiger Chair IPVM. And do be aware that you need a REALLY good reason to deploy this software. I’m running it for training purposes with an ICO risk assessment and authorisation in place and we don’t keep the images or processed data for longer than the duration of a training session. That said, the same software can analyse any images I have (and I keep my home images for 3 months).
 
WJA96 said:
WizMind and WizSense are like two levels of features - WizMind is basically the top tier of hardware and all the AI features run while WizSense is better than the average bear’s camera and NVR but not top of the range.

BlueIris was about a decade behind WizMind the last time I checked. WizMind is what the Chinese police are deploying to detect undesirables in crowds. On one hand you have to admire the software and in the other it’s genuinely unsettling what these systems are capable of. It’s no shock to anyone that the Chinese government are acting towards the Uighurs in China like the Nazis did to the Jews in Germany and the DSS Pro software has detection filters for Caucasian, Chinese, Black African, Asian and Uighur. So they’ve tuned the software to detect Uighurs. And you can then set up crowd gathering so two or more Uighurs are a crowd and they’re probably not going to give them a prize when they snatch them off the streets.

IPVM are running a series of articles regarding Hikvision and torture in Chinese prisons and it’s not good. Search for Tiger Chair IPVM. And do be aware that you need a REALLY good reason to deploy this software. I’m running it for training purposes with an ICO risk assessment and authorisation in place and we don’t keep the images or processed data for longer than the duration of a training session. That said, the same software can analyse any images I have (and I keep my home images for 3 months).
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Thanks for that and sorry if I missed it but do WizMind and DSS Pro run on the NVR itself?

I already have some basic cameras and DVR so I'm just researching my options.
 
Wizmind is a range of equipment that is Dahua’s top tier currently.

DSS is the software that runs on Dahua’s NVRs but they do a free version that runs on Linux or Windows, like Blue Iris. Abd then beyond that they have DSS Pro which is a paid software subscription and it runs on PC or Linux. They sell a range of DSS Pro servers that are like massive NAS boxes with advanced AI processing capability. 1984 in a brown cardboard box.
 
ivandrago said:
Any thoughts on BlueIris?
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I've been running various CCTV software on VMs/dedicated PCs rather than NVRs for some years as I always seemed to find limitations or bugs that I could not work around with NVR software. I am currently using BlueIris with a dozen cameras (almost all 8MP) along with DeepStack AI and ANPR and it works very well and I love the flexibility.

It's not as simple to set up as most NVR software and given the addition of third party components there's more maintenance and tweaking over time. However the extreme configurability for devices, input/output, actions, storage, main stream/sub stream optimisation etc appeals to users like me and the developer is very active with adding features and fixing issues.

It's improved a lot over the last couple of years but it won't ever be as polished as NVR software or other big company stand alone software and I wouldn't recommend it as a first product, but for me it offered features I needed for domestic use and couldn't find elsewhere in one package without huge cost.
 
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