The big brown box just arrived. After inspection of the box and its contents you are assured everything you have ordered is accounted for. Great, now you can start running cable and hanging cameras. You can figure it will take anywhere from one or two hours to run the cable and hang the camera. If you have to roll out the lift truck it will probably take a little longer. Of course this estimate is considering that you have some prior knowledge of cameras. Crawling through attics and swinging on ladders is not for everybody.
After you get all your cameras installed you go to the DVR itself. You connect all your cameras to the DVR and hook up power. POWER ON! Now it is time to wrap up the install and use the new system. You cannot wait any longer finally dessert is served. Once the DVR comes on you see on the monitor that there is a configuration wizard and a grid view of the channels on the dvr, but you do not see any video…
Before you pick up the phone and call tech support take a look at the back of the DVR and make sure that you have the BNC connectors hooked up to the video IN. There are several BNC connections on the back of the DVR that are not for video in. Some are for audio in or out and some are video out. As you reconnect the cameras to the correct BNC ports the video feeds come up and you feel that victory inside. YES I DID IT, but what is with this wizard that will not go away…
The startup wizard is to help you setup the initial configuration. There are three options; a startup check box, next step and cancel. Check the startup box. This will stop the wizard from coming on every time the DVR boots up. Then click the Next button. Now you will have to login to the DVR.
The first window that opens upon clicking next is the general settings. Having the correct time is very important. Not having the correct time can create intermittent network issues, and searching for previous recordings a headache as now you don’t know when to search. I prefer a 24 hour time format but you can change it to the 12 hour format if you like. You can adjust how the date and time lay out. You can have the year, month, or day first. The language option is here as well. The hard drive is set to overwrite by default you can change it to stop recording when full. Pack duration is how long the video clips will be before being cut. The device number refers to the remote control. That number can be up to three digits. Then take the remote point it at the DVR and push the add button. A window will open up and there is where you input the device number you already choose. You are telling the remote what address to use. The video standard cannot be changed. In North America DVRs use the NTSC standard. The auto logout is how long before a user is logged out from inactivity. The Device ID is if you would like to rename the DVR. It is a nice feature if you have multiple DVRs.
Clicking on the next step takes you to the TV adjustment. This feature only affects the monitor connected directly to the DVR. You can move the image a little and increase or decrease the brightness. The default settings are good for most environments. Click next step once finished.
Encode section is used to adjust the resolution and through put of video feeds. You have two columns. The left is for main stream the right is for the extra stream. The main stream is what you see at the DVR. The extra stream is generally used for remote viewing on a cell phone or other mobile device. At the top you have an option for a channel. In the drop down menu you can pick one or all channels. As I am describing an Ultimate series DVR you can pick all to speed up the process. If this was an Elite series you should not do that as not all channels can have the same settings. In the type option leave it at regular. The compression is not adjustable. Resolution should be set to D1. The frame rate should be turned down. Typically I set it to twenty frames a second. It saves drive space and the human eye can only see about 28 frames a second. For bit rate type set that to CBR which stands for constant bit rate. VBR is variable bit rate. You can use either in my testing using CBR provides a more consistent feed. Then for Bit rate you can leave it at the default setting. The Bit rate affects how much data the dvr will try to push out over network per stream. Depending on what you have for network appliances is how high or low the bit rate needs to be. For the extra stream setup Resolution should be set to QCIF and frame rate of 7. Bit rate of 160. These settings can be turned up or down for the environment. The mobile apps use the extra stream, and depending on your internet service is how high or low these settings need to be. Watching the cameras remotely will help determine what needs to be changed.
Under the main stream there is one check box Audio/Video, and under extra stream there two boxes. For the main this enables the audio per channel if you have a microphone installed. For the Extra stream the two boxes enable audio and video respectively. The overlay sets up the monitor time and channel display, while the snapshot configures what you can receive for snapshot capture. Now click the next button.
Schedule controls how the dvr records for each channel. The first option to choose from is the channel. You can pick 1 or all. Pre-record is the when the recoding starts if you configure to record motion. Snapshot enables the snapshot feature for email. This feature does require extra configuration. Weekday is if you want to specify a type of recording per the day. For 90% of the people I help I set the option to all. Record Type has several options regular for 24/7 recording, MD for motion detection, alarm for an alarm input, and MD&Alarm together. Most people choose motion recording. You only record when there is a motion event there by saving space on the hard drive. Alarm works in conjunction with a circuit to activate recording on a camera. For example a car runs over a sensor to trigger the camera to capture the license plate. Period is if you want certain times of the day to record differently than the rest of the day. You start 00:00 or 1 am then go to 24:00 or midnight. Once you close the loop you do not have to configure the next period. For example refer to picture
You can see that the last 2 periods are not used as the loop is closed, so you do not have to setup all periods. You could just use the first period if you do not have the need.
Last but very important are the network settings. The IP address needs to be within the range of addresses the router or modem is set to. The gateway needs to be set to the router/modems ip address. For example most Comcast modems hand out IP address from 10.0.0.2 – 10.0.0.254. The modem itself takes the ip 10.0.0.1 Our DVRs come with 192.168.1.108 meaning the default IP on DVR has to be changed to 10.0.0.2- 254. Make sure the IP address you choose is not being used by another device on the network. You can do that by going into the DHCP client list on your modem/router. The port setup is fine default. I recommend you change the HTTP port from 80 to 88.
The reason being some providers block it, or another service is using that port. The rest of the options in the network settings should be left default. If you need advanced setup then changes will be needed. Don’t forget to save your settings. The DVR should restart because that is the only way for it to apply the changes to the network settings. It is always a good idea after restart to make sure your settings have saved.
You have now have completed your setup. Victory is now yours. The basics are now out of the way. Sleep soundly tonight knowing you are secure with your new fully functional security camera system. Advanced configuration will be detailed in further articles for the Ultimate series DVR.