Success with new Swan SWNHD-820CAM
When I initially bought my cameras, I chose the Q-See QCN7001B from Costco. These cameras are re-branded Dahua IPC-HFW2100. The camera's worked well and setup in SecuritySpy was easy. I just selected "Dahua" as the camera type.
Unfortunately, these cameras have a narrow focal angle and I was never happy with the coverage. These cameras are better suited for alleys, side yards, or something like that.
The next camera's I tried were the Swan SWNHD-820CAM, also purchased from Costco. These worked well and have the coverage I was hoping for. I'm going to keep these. There isn't a device option for these cameras, however the configuration is simple:
Set the device type to manual
Enter the hostname or IP address
Enter the camera username and password
Change the format to RTSP
Click Ok.
Easy.
You can read details about the cameras here:
http://www.networkcameracritic.com/?p=882
http://www.networkcameracritic.com/?p=1444
Unfortunately, these cameras have a narrow focal angle and I was never happy with the coverage. These cameras are better suited for alleys, side yards, or something like that.
The next camera's I tried were the Swan SWNHD-820CAM, also purchased from Costco. These worked well and have the coverage I was hoping for. I'm going to keep these. There isn't a device option for these cameras, however the configuration is simple:
Set the device type to manual
Enter the hostname or IP address
Enter the camera username and password
Change the format to RTSP
Click Ok.
Easy.
You can read details about the cameras here:
http://www.networkcameracritic.com/?p=882
http://www.networkcameracritic.com/?p=1444
Comments
1. The camera defaults to a static IP address of 192.0.0.64. You need change your IP so that you can login and change the IP or set to DHCP (I use DHCP and setup DHCP reservations).
2. You CAN almost completely configure the camera with a non IE browser.
What doesn't work:
* Basic Configuration > Video/Audio
* Advanced Configuration > Video/Audio
All other configuration pages work fine with Firefox 22 on OS X 10.8.4.
The problem with these two pages (which are exactly the same), are that the drop down boxes are missing both the text labels and the text contents.
When you view the camera's setup page with IE on Windows, you are prompted to install webcomponents.exe. After doing this, you can see the contents of the Video/Audio configuration page.
For completeness sake, those fields (and their defaults) are:
* Stream Type: Main Stream (Normal)
* Video Type: Video Stream
* Resolution: 1920*1080P
* Bitrate Type: Constant
* Video Quality: (greyed out)
* Frame Rate: 30
* Max Bitrate: 4096
* Video Encoding: H.264
* I Frame Interval: 100
The only one I needed to change was the Frame Rate. I changed it from 30 to 10.
I wasn't thrilled with this, but I have a Windows VM, and I only needed to do this one time, so I'm ok with it. If you have no access to Windows, you are stuck with the defaults above, which may not be so bad.
It's often very useful to reduce the frame rate, this avoids using unnecessary network bandwidth and computer CPU. Also, the default I-Frame interval appears to be set quite high (this makes the video more difficult for SecuritySpy to deal with). Also, generally you will want to use a variable bitrate so that the rate of the video stream can adjust according to what's actually in the video image, resulting in a lower bit rate overall.
In addition, a high I-frame interval is bad because if there is a lost/corrupt frame at any point, all subsequent frames until the next I-frame will be corrupt, which in the above case could lead to 3 seconds of corrupt video.
So I would suggest using an I-frame interval not more than around a second of video (30 in this case), but not less than 10 or so (to maintain a nice low data rate).