MacOS What is the best Mac Solutions for accessing and viewing cameras?

[Ben@Elec-Inn]

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone can answer me this question.

What is the best Mac Solution for accessing and viewing cameras?

The more I look into it the more I think the answer is buy a windows machine for Hikvision use!

In the office I have a Mac mini M1 chip.

At home I have 2017 intel iMac.

Safari and chrome Browser config works fine. But no live view or playback.

Hik Pro Connect in browser won’t add devices. Or view cameras.

iVMS is horrible on Mac and seems to work depending on device firmware.

Should I be looking at Parallels?

I don’t want to get into this only to find the windows parallels still has issues.

Thanks in advance!

 

[codlord]

I have no experience of HikVision software on Mac and it's not clear what you mean when you say "iVMS is horrible on Mac..." but I can just say that in my experience HikVision software is pretty horrible on Windows too...

It should be possible to do everything in one place (or do anything in any place) - e.g. JUST use the NVR to configure everything or JUST use iVMS to configure everything or JUST use web interfaces to configure everything. But even today with the newest HikVision cameras/firmware and software it seems this just is not possible. I need to do some things on the NVR itself, some things on web interfaces and some things on iVMS. All these interfaces are completely different and offer different layouts/options. Having live view working on browsers seems to be so hit-and-miss I have given up even trying or expecting it to work and have to do anything that requires live view on either the NVR or iVMS.

My personal view is HikVision hardware is great and very reliable, but HikVision software/firmware is awful.

 

[daveb]

Should I be looking at Parallels?

I've been using Parallels with Windows 10 and iVMS for a few months now. It's not perfect. One one of my Macs it's slow and on the other it is acceptable. It's a lot better than iVMS directly on a Mac though. If you can give it a try with a Parallels trial it's worth a go just to see how it works out for you.

I think the comments by @codlord are about right with regards to the hardware and software Hikvision produce.

 

[Dan]

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone can answer me this question.

What is the best Mac Solution for accessing and viewing cameras?

Parallels is one option for accessing/managing Hikvision devices from a Mac, but also you may want to look at SecuritySpy which is a software that was specifically built for CCTV users with Macs.

My colleague is also testing the Windows Edge browser on Mac as I post this and will share his thoughts shortly on whether the "run in Internet Explorer" mode in Edge also works on Mac.

 

[daveb]

you may want to look at SecuritySpy

I've had a look at that but as far as I can tell you can't manage the cameras with it and it's really intended to take the video feeds from the cameras and do it's own video content analysis. It's very nice for what it does and I've considered it for doing things the NVR can't (like integration with Apple Home and therefore Hive).

 

[David]

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone can answer me this question.

What is the best Mac Solution for accessing and viewing cameras?

The more I look into it the more I think the answer is buy a windows machine for Hikvision use!

In the office I have a Mac mini M1 chip.

At home I have 2017 intel iMac.

Safari and chrome Browser config works fine. But no live view or playback.

Hik Pro Connect in browser won’t add devices. Or view cameras.

iVMS is horrible on Mac and seems to work depending on device firmware.

Should I be looking at Parallels?

I don’t want to get into this only to find the windows parallels still has issues.

Thanks in advance!

On my MacBook I’ve used VMware fusion for many years now and find it to be very stable, along with ivms4200 for windows. Hikvision support for Mac is woeful.

 

[Kyle]

My colleague is also testing the Windows Edge browser on Mac as I post this and will share his thoughts shortly on whether the "run in Internet Explorer" mode in Edge also works on Mac.

I've checked and there's no "run in IE mode" option on the macOS version of Edge

Microsoft confirms that it isn't supported on page 6 here, too.

 

[Thor]

I have no experience of HikVision software on Mac and it's not clear what you mean when you say "iVMS is horrible on Mac..." but I can just say that in my experience HikVision software is pretty horrible on Windows too...

I have both windows and mac and this is true, hikvision software is terrible.
We are looking at SecuritySpy at the moment, just unsure how it will work with the access control part.