How To Get My Sannce Camera System To Work On Pc
This blog is about the Cobra 63890 8 Channel Security DVR. Specifically to help those who want to make use of its features merely were not able to figure out how to set it upwardly - or get a particular feature to work. This is where owners can share their tips and tricks (and even hacks) to go the most out of this device! Delight mail service your tips and I'll update the blog accordingly. I don't intend for this to be a review - you tin can practise that more than effectively at the Harbor Freight spider web site.
I purchased this device in early 2018 from a Harbor Freight shop on sale for nigh $200. I chose it for the following features:
- HD cameras with night vision (4 included and inputs for a full of 8)
- Large capacity recording (1 TB hard bulldoze included)
- Motility detection with masking characteristic to reduce simulated detections
- Remote admission and notifications
The Transmission
I downloaded the manual and read it before purchasing the unit. At first read, it looks consummate, but when you start setting it up yous realize that there are a number of features that are unclear - and I suspect may non actually exist in the product.
I discovered another security camera / DVR company proper noun that has a about identical production. The hardware and user interface is so nearly identical that I suspect that they are built by the same company. The visitor proper name is ANNKE. This may explain why the manual mentions features you "may have". The manual was written to cover many similar products and wasn't completely cleaned up for Harbor Freight to remove irrelevant statements. Here's a link to a proficient instructional video on the ANNKE system.
I noticed that the transmission has a humorous contradiction: "To prevent electric shock, exercise not attempt to disassemble DVR". However it too states "Clean the internal dust regularly". Since the ability supply is external, the DVR only has 12V inside, and so getting shocked is not a business organization.
Terminology: When you see the term "Warning". They are referring to either motion detected on one of the cameras that has motion detection enabled or an external alarm sensor has been tripped. All the same this model does not have connectors to attach external sensors. PTZ refers to cameras that can be remotely controlled - Pan Tilt and Zoom. The term Capture or Snapshot refers to photos taken by the photographic camera (.JPG format) - not videos.
Phoning home: There's a lot of talk about "Net of Things" (IOT) devices that 'phone dwelling' and leave users wondering what's going on. Is my IOT device spying on me? I'm not an alarmist, but I go on my eye on devices and watch where they connect to, and then that was ane of the first things I checked. It does transport data out. Information technology sends UDP packets to
47.xc.204.196 owned past Zhuhai Raysharp Technology Co of Guangdong China. These packets are probably to help with remote access apps. It as well sends packets to devices WITHIN my network - that's a chip foreign to my thinking, but I can't actually say what it's doing. I just blocked this IP address in my router'due south firewall.
If you are nervous virtually this, you tin can unplug from the network and still brand use of the DVR without a network connection. You can view and control information technology from the user interface (monitor and mouse). You won't accept remote access or Email notifications.
The Hardware
DVR: This contains a standard SATA 1TB hard bulldoze, and it appears that you can simply swap it out with a new 1 if you lot ever need to. The back of the unit has eight analog photographic camera inputs with BNC blazon connectors. You can also plug in older NTSC cameras and the DVR automatically recognizes the lower resolution camera and handles information technology correctly. I suspect that PAL cameras are recognized besides. I don't take one to try so let me know if you've tried 1. There are several types of analog cameras interfaces I had not heard of AHD TVI CVI. According to the manual this supports them all. The supplied cameras are identified as TVI.
There are only 4 audio inputs which correspond to the first four camera inputs. There'southward very little mention of audio in the user transmission. The Record department of the user interface includes a checkbox for cameras i through 4 if you want to tape audio along with the recorded video.
There is a wire connector for the RS-485 PTZ control. I don't have a PTZ camera, but I plan to wait into what signaling is done on this interface.
Cameras: These cameras are touted as Hd (effective resolution 1920x1080) They use the word "effective" since the cameras are analog not digital. This is probably a cost savings and possibly a longer cable run is possible. I don't have the ways to test the bodily resolution, simply it is definitely a peachy improvement compared to a standard NTSC camera. The night vision is quite effective. The supplied cameras do non accept microphones and don't support PTZ.
Cables:
Each cable is really a pair of conductors that are for power and video. If you want to use the PTZ characteristic, you lot'll demand to run another cable run, and of course a camera that supports PTZ.
Power Supplies:
Two identical 12VDC supplies included - i for the DVR and one for powering the iv cameras.
Remote:
A handheld remote is included and can be used instead of the mouse for convenience.
Exploring the Features
The user transmission gets you started, but there are a few things that are not specifically stated or are disruptive.
Motility Detection, masking areas and sensitivity:
The motion detection masking and sensitivity is configured in the Alarm section of the menus. Yous can record motion from the camera where motion was detected and you can besides select other cameras to start recording also. This might be useful if you want to record motility at your front door, only the camera picks upwards too much surrounding motility and triggers to often. And so install a second camera overhead pointing downwards on the expanse, and enable motion detection on that camera. Merely take it configured to cause recording from the showtime camera that is at a lower angle.
The poorly named option "Enabled" should be ready to "Enabled" (a flake disruptive). They should have called the choice "Movement Detection".
ALARM MENU
But y'all're not done nonetheless, yous have to go into the Record Schedule menu, select motion and highlight the area of the table that corresponds to the time and twenty-four hour period of week that you want the motion detection feature active. The aforementioned menu too allows you to select the time that you want continuous recordings made (called "Normal") .
Recording Schedule Menu
Example showing motility recording always enabled
The Capture and Capture Schedule menus are like, but refer to taking still pictures .
Electronic mail notifications:
This feature lets you receive electronic mail notification when a problem is detected: hard drive error or full, video betoken loss (mayhap due to tampering) or if motion is detected (alarm result). It volition send you lot an email with an fastened JPG file of the captured motion. Seems like a great idea, simply I am hesitant to use this characteristic since I may get a lot of email that contains photos of a tree that is waving in the wind or it's shadow. Even a lamp turning on or off tin trigger movement detection. Set your masking area and sensitivity carefully earlier using this feature. Fifty-fifty with these set up properly, you may still get spurious emails when the sun sets and the camera changes from twenty-four hours to night vision. So you may also want to also fix the email schedule feature appropriately to forestall your inbox from being overloaded or constantly causing your smartphone to beep incessantly.
Cloud storage:
This characteristic allows yous to have snapshots (still photos) that were taken due to motion detection or transmission capture and uploaded to a cloud storage provider. They only back up Dropbox. It does not mention if videos can exist uploaded in the aforementioned way. I don't take a Dropbox account, so I tin't test this.
Alarms:
There is a built in speaker that can exist configured to beep when move is detected, and it appears that some variant of the DVR comes with relay outputs to control external devices. I'thou thinking that the beeper could exist wired to an external jack and I could arrive control some external device.
FTP:
FTP is an old protocol for transferring files between computers. It is not a secure protocol unless you use the SFTP variant. I didn't detect and support for SFTP.
Co-ordinate to the manual (page 18), this feature allows "...load captured snapshots from DVR to your storage device over FTP." It shows the usual parameters needed for uploading, but that'southward it. There'south no mention of how to make apply of the feature! How practice y'all specify which channels you want to configure for uploading snapshots. I clicked on the TestFTP button, and it did create a directory on my FTP server, just I still tin can't become it to upload snapshots. Annotation that if yous press the TestFTP push again you may get a poorly worded mistake message error
"Creat File Folder Failed!". That's because the starting time time you clicked TestFTP it created a directory, and the 2d fourth dimension it tries to create information technology over again which the FTP server reports that the directory already exists. The DVR should not report this as an error. I'll call this a small problems. Only if FTP doesn't piece of work, it'due south a major bug.
Saving files to USB:
I was able to select an "event" in the Record Search / Events tab. It gives you several formatting options for saving files. You can select H.264, AVI or MP4 format. I similar the flexibility of supporting several file formats. Your USB thumb drive plugs into a port conveniently located on the front of the device. One note about these formats is that these are really format containers. The video is encoded as H.264 in all 3 file types. You lot'll note that the file size is near identical regardless of the format you choose.
Audio In
The DVR has four audio input jacks, merely there are eight camera inputs, and so audio input 1 gets recorded with video input ane etc. Video inputs five - eight don't have respective audio inputs. The supplied cameras don't have microphones, so I tried using another camera that has audio and I enabled audio for the photographic camera in the ' Parameter-> Mainstream ' menus and I got sound in my recordings - and in the streamed output. The volume was very low, so a preamplifier would be helpful. I copied the recorded video files to my PC, I tried all 3 formats H.264, .AVI and .MP4. When I played them on my PC, but the .AVI and .MP4 had audio. The H.264 file would not play at all with the VLC player. Information technology did play in Media Player Archetype, but it had no audio. The .AVI and .MP4 have audio recorded as "aLaw 8000Hz mono 64kbps" so don't expect it to be high quality. Media Player Classic recognized that the .MP4 file had an audio rail, but it didn't recognize the aLaw codec used.
Audio Out
There is a RCA jack on the dorsum of the COBRA DVR, and one time I enabled audio in the
Parameter-> Mainstream menu for cameras one through iv, I found that I could monitor audio when viewing a camera live or in playback mode. The output level is low, and so it must be connected to an amplifier.
Streaming
Y'all tin monitor a camera remotely if y'all use a programme like the highly recommended VLC software on your remote PC. If your remote PC is outside your dwelling house network you'll need to set up your router to practice "port forwarding" to pass traffic through port 554 to your DVR. But there's an fault in the user manual that will foreclose y'all from remote streaming. The manual shows a screenshot of the VLC window. The URL for monitoring camera 1'south mainstream (full resolution video) should expect something like this:
rtsp://192.168.1.120:554/ch01/0 (note the ch01 not ch1) This works!
The lower resolution stream (referred to as the sub-stream) should be
rtsp://192.168.1.120:554/ch01/1 (just it doesn't work for me - VLC reports "input tin't be opened")
Of course you will need to use your DVR'southward IP accost instead of the in a higher place example.
A notation about VLC. I was able to view (and hear) the stream while on a recent trip using VLC version three.0.two . But I found an annoying bug in that version of VLC which causes the stream to stop after about ii minutes. I found that installing an older version of VLC did not have this bug. The version that I found that worked was two.two.half-dozen. You can become that older version and others from VLC's site
There is a style to use a web browser to connect to the DVR, merely information technology requires a plugin that needs to be installed first. I was a bit concerned about the app, and then I didn't bother exploring this feature.
Tips and tricks
- Your username and password cannot be longer than 8 characters. (This tip comes from several people who posted on the Harbor Freight production review folio.)
- The DVR has a VGA and an HDMI output. You tin can use both simultaneously if y'all need to "mirror" the output to another monitor. (As well bad you lot can't brandish four cameras on one monitor and 4 cameras on the other monitor. That would be swell)
- Use ch01 not ch1 in the RTSP URL when connecting with VLC or other streaming awarding on your PC or smartphone.
Questions I accept - please post your answers:
- Problems reports - things that definitely don't piece of work correct.
- Is there a firmware update? What is the latest? Mine is V7.one.0.20170523. That looks similar a date lawmaking of May 23, 2017,
- Has anyone got the FTP feature to work? How?
- External Warning Device. What is this about? Does this DVR support information technology? Hack?
- PTZ port - does it actually work if yous accept appropriate photographic camera? Can this port exist used for other purposes (alarm out?)
- Sensor inputs - is in that location some other model with this feature.
- Has anyone had better experience with the audio input? What did you use?
Source: https://cobradvr.blogspot.com/2018/02/cobra-63890-8-channel-security-dvr.html
Posted by: browncatill.blogspot.com
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