Newbie question - storage setup for 2 camera's

[houseofdreams]

Hi I've just bought and installed 2 new Hikvision smaller PTZ camera's, posistioned at the front/rear of our house. (DS-2DE2A404IW-DE3)

Now i'm reading trough the user manual, lots of things to read trough, but I can't seem to find the answer to my question (or I'm doing something wrong allready)

I have a NAS, at IP 10.10.10.53, shared as "surveillance". When I installed & configured the first camera, I've added the details in Configuration>Storage>Storage management>Net HDD (SMB/CIFS) The drive needed to be formatted again, don't know why the existing format wasn't good enough. But, drive is working, I can see the correct details in HDD management.

Now when I installed the second camera, I've done the exact same thing. Configured the same HDD,the same credentials, also getting the correct info in HDD management.

But now when I'm trying to get the Playback of both these camera's, something goes wrong. in iVMS 4200, I select the "front" camera, drag it into the first of four windows, but I see the video-playback of the "back" camera?

Do i need to select seperate folders on a HDD for each camera? Is there some kind of how-to here that I can follow?

Also, where can you set the max time that recordings should be kept on the HDD?

Thanks for the help!

 

[Phil]

What is the make and model of your NAS please?

 

[houseofdreams]

Just a simple ubuntu server with a drive attached to it & shared. Nothing fancy.

Now that my 2 camera's are both installed, I started again from scratch, formatted the storage again. It seems to be working now, but it's early days As I have 2 identical camera's, I first had the idea, as I set the recording location for both of them to the same location, one would be overwriting the other one's data. As I view this storage location, all I can see is a bunch of "datadir" folders, with a number behind it, so nothing specific like 'camera 1', 'camera2'

I've tried searching for a specific point in time and pressed "play", I now see both streams... Maybe it went wrong that one of both camera's actually didn't have any footage yet of the earlier requested time frame. (like mentioned in the subject, I'm a noob )

Regarding the second question, I did not find an answer yet, how to limit the number of days, that recorded footage should be kept, as this is required by law, that when you declare a street-facing camera, you also have to tell how long this footage is stored. (in case there is some break in in the neighbourhood, they now they can request footage)

 

[Phil]

My hunch would be that in your case you need to cap/limit the storage space that you allow each camera to use.
If you search around on the topic I'm sure we have included perhaps a whitepaper on similar setups before - search here for related terms used in threads eg SMB, CIFS, Mount, synology, qnap, netgear ...

 

[houseofdreams]

Still got strange errors, so I now made 2 seperate folders on the HD, shared them seperately within the ubnt server, and gave each camera it's own shared folder, formatted again.

So again, starting from scratch

Hopefully this time it works, as I also found another topic, where the user said that he also had to use seperate logins for each camera... Oh well, growing pains I guess? first time ever that I have Hikvision camera / software, first time ever I have more than 1 camera

If it still doesn't work, I'll keep posting back here, so others can learn from my mistakes

 

[houseofdreams]

It's not getting any better yet... Worse even. Now after creating those two seperate shares and configuring both camera's again with their own seperate shared folder (and formatting it in the web config) I can't even get a single frame to show up

The camera's are actually doing some recording, as I can see some folders getting filled with larger files

As I try to view these mp4 files in VLC, I see recorded footage, but also here strange stuff is happening. The files are indicated to be 37:33 minutes long, but in reality they only last about 6 (?) minutes

It's really getting stranger by the minute... Also, why does the software start filling up datadir8 first, instead of datadir1?

The ivms / camera user manuals aren't any help here, as they don't really cover a 'how to' to configure multiple camera's onto a shared drive / HDD

Getting a bit frustrated, this should be much more straightforward in 2020... Feels more like 1820

 

[houseofdreams]

Update again... Looks a bit more promising now. Both camera's storage management are status "normal" after formatting each seperately.

It's been a bit of trial & error. Change a setting, test it, change another, test again... It should not be so difficult, but hey, if it was easy & straigthforward, company's couldn't charge that much for setting up your NVR software

Status now: I'm getting live images and can search trough playback again.

See above setting in iVMS, what isn't that straightforward. You can choose 3 things here:
- Storage server and device
- Storage server
- Device

My thoughs were, that "device" was the camera itself, with an internal memory card and that "Storage server" meant all other types of storage, like NAS devices and so on. Clearly that's not the case. Storage server is only the actual software based Hikvision server, device is all other types.

So I set it again to Device and now I can view recorded files again. I will now stop playing around with it for a while (day or so?) and test it at regular intervals, if I can see the recordings of both camera's...

Fingers crossed

 

[houseofdreams]

Tried a couple of days now. Keeps very unstable when trying to view remote playback... I haven't yet had to get to view a stable playback. I keep getting errors like this...

So it records from 1 device (I can see the blue line in the timeline) but not from the second device

It seems like it records sometimes, then doesn't... I can't get to get it stable :/ both camera's are recording to the same HD, could that maybe be the problem? Are the recorded files too big to get it all written? I assume that couldn't be a problem, as the basic hikvision NVR's also come with only 1 HD and can record up to 4 streams.

 

[houseofdreams]

It seems not a lot of people read/visit this topic

So I need to keep searching for a solution. What I did found, looks strange to me... Follow these steps:

In Device Management I select the first camera -> advanced function

There I go to Files and select a timeframe (1 full day, that is supposed to contain a full day of recordings) I press search

But in this list, I only see recordings for this day from 9:55? When I then select the same view from the second camera I do get a full day of recordings, starting from 00:00 to 23:59

Another strange thing (maybe nothing wrong) is that both camera's are called Camera01 ?

There are only 2 remaining steps I can take I think? First is seperating the storage for each camera to a single HD, second thing is to install a server with the Hikvision Storage Server software...

But I still find it strange that it takes this amount of work to get this working. Still have to find out, what happens if the drives are full, but that's a story for later

 

[houseofdreams]

Couple of days later....

For info, at the moment, I have 2 DS-2DE2A404IW-DE3-W camera's. I was looking trough the spec sheet, and I saw that these camera's didn't have a gigabit connection, just 100Mbit.

So I was thinking... (untill it started to hurt a bit)... If I let the recordings be generated (and reviewed) by these camera's themselves, I allways have to view playback trough this 100Mbit connection, so this would be rather slow for 2 4MP streams.

So I now installed a windows server machine, with a spare HDD. I then installed the Hikvison Storage Server software and configured iVMS to use this storage server directly, instead of configuring a storage schedule on each camera itself.

Also in iVMS, under Maintenance & management -> System configuration -> Live view & Playback, I now selected

I let the system record for a while and when I then tried Remote playback and clicked around the timeline, panned, ... All went butter-smooth now... No errors anymore!

So I think I'm correct in assuming that this now all goes trough my networks gigabit connection directly and not trough the 100Mbit camera's anymore... (but I still can be wrong, still learning a lot)

Couple things I still need to try, because since now iVMS is managing the recording schedule, I assume iVMS is going to need to be on, 24/7 ? Before this change in settings, it didn't need to be, because the camera's did the scheduling themselves...

Anyway, I'm getting there, step by step....

 

[macman]

100Mbps out of the camera is the norm - and more than enough to deliver 4MP video at 25fps. It's good that your problem is cured but I suspect the cause lay elsewhere. You lost me when you said you were viewing two 4MP streams over 100Mbps. That suggests that your switch or some other hub was also running at 100Mbps and that could have been the problem. A gigabit switch is needed to handle multiple 100Mbps cameras.

 

[houseofdreams]

100Mbps out of the camera is the norm - and more than enough to deliver 4MP video at 25fps. It's good that your problem is cured but I suspect the cause lay elsewhere. You lost me when you said you were viewing two 4MP streams over 100Mbps. That suggests that your switch or some other hub was also running at 100Mbps and that could have been the problem. A gigabit switch is needed to handle multiple 100Mbps cameras.

I assume 100mbit should (in theory) be more than enough for 2 camera's, as I've set it to variable bitrate and a max bitrate of 4096. Some calculation get's me at less than 2MB/sec for the 2 camera's combined, so more than enough. (again, in theory)

But I haven't changed a thing to the physical network since my first test, I have a gigabit POE switch, so I really have no idea what was wrong when I had all setup trough the camera's themselves. I only know that with the storage server setup, it all seams to work like it should...

If only I could guess what was wrong in my first setup... When I tried to view remote playback, and clicked the timeline 5 times, 4 out of 5 would give some sort of "no data from camera" error, this is now completely gone, I can click as fast as I want, no errors anymore. So in the end, that's all I have to care about It works...