X-vision Xp16sw100e

[xviz]

There are a few pro dvrs that can do raid. Raid 5 'can' be used and i have done various benchmarks with it. As im sure you know raid 5 has relativly poor write speed and this is worse with small files. As a rule cctv is lots of sequential small writes. This doesnt scale. It will work on a small machine (ie number of cams) but sustaining the write speed of raid 1 for example is impossible on a raid 5 array. Hardware raid will help here but really costs.

We have used dm machines in a raid 1 config, but again as you say it isnt cheap.

Id say the problem you are having with lag is probably to do with your remote viewing using either ms media player, or the same lib, maybe you are using ie.

As i said before i have never used a 'card' as its not as you rightly say the pro way as we would have to support the machine it was fitted into etc. Also windows non server versions are not an ideal IMHO platform for CCTV uses. Just an opinion.

What have tech support said?

We're not talking about a huge system here. It's only a 16 camera system, and at the moment has 9 cameras running. Planning on installing some speeddomes in some of the rest of the slots, but we're reluctant to fork out extra money till we have a reliable remote monitoring system in place to view and control them (more important for speeddomes than fixed cameras). Our current setup is simply two hard drives mirrored with RAID 1 - plenty fast enough for 16 camera recording. This gives us about a week and a half or recording, with the safety of a backup drive if there are any failures. I come from an IT background, so I know my way round Windows fairly well. Got a Win XP Pro install (still not sure about vista for reliability yet!) and provided you are careful when doing the initial setup, it's pretty bomb proof. Ran for 3.5 years in a secure but ventilated safe with not a single glitch, freeze up or any other problems.

I thought it might have been the take up of generating from the nearest key frame or whatever, so I tried MJPEGs, but this didn't seem to make much difference. The idea being it might not have to run from a key frame with MJPEGs, but this didn't seem to make a great deal of difference. Similarly, lowering the quality that it puts out for network viewing had the effect of reducing picture quality and increasing frame rate, but made no difference to the actual time to bring up the streams. The client software requires directx 9 so I'm guessing you're right that this will be a microsoft compression library being used.

Tech support guy was very friendly (on an 0871 number - ouch) but his words were pretty much "To be quite honest, never come across it. Can't understand it etc. etc."

Bit of a mystery...

Oh, and thanks for taking what I said about pros as it was intended! It's one thing for me to be struggling in our own company premises to fix a problem....a whole different issue if you're doing it in front of the watchful eyes of a paying customer!

[james.wilson]

Oh, and thanks for taking what I said about pros as it was intended! It's one thing for me to be struggling in our own company premises to fix a problem....a whole different issue if you're doing it in front of the watchful eyes of a paying customer!

lol agreed, long term stability is key to me, also being on control of the machine... There can be saivings and i hope yours work out, but i hear so many horror stories, and if it isnt working when you needed it, will have to wait for the next time.

IMO if using a pc and windows is essential, then the only way i would go is axis and use ip cams, their mutli cam software is excellent or you could upgrade the sofware to milestone. We dont use these as we only use linux in the field due to security and stabilty and if we do need a windows box, we always use a server edition. i think win2k3 is very stable.

while i see your point on 'keyframes' or interframes this shouldnt be relevant and certainly not on mjpeg as this doesnt use them. I would suggest looking at an alternative viewer as id bet all your issues are ms media plater lib based. If your box is public ill see if i can work something out for you. As long as its a quick fix, mr freebee customer lol. I would say your issue with lag is due to the media player lib cacheing locally . This lib was designed to watch films and trailers etc online, where latency and lag is totaaly irrelivant. This is why the likes of DM, axis etc spend time and money developing an media lobrary THAT IS DESIGNED FOR CCTV. You can drop yoir buffers etc with a bit of messing with the registry, but i pesoanlly wouldnt bother as it will only help a little bit. Only way would be to restart the stream. (ie restart the connection and flush the current cache)

RAID 1 IMO is perfect for cctv, and you wont have any speed issues with it. You could even use software raid 1 as the overhead is very low.

[Gopher]

Yeah was just thinking just that I'll bet it a library / codec issue having never used the card myself - I'm thinking the latency is due to the system having to encode it all for transmission and if the codec settings are off then this is where the delay will happening. As has been said all the dedicated DVR's even ones built on windows have dedicated software to view them remotely

I would carefully check all the settings as it maybe your trying to transmit the data too fast / at too high a bitrate depends on what settings you've got really.

[xviz]

lol agreed, long term stability is key to me, also being on control of the machine... There can be saivings and i hope yours work out, but i hear so many horror stories, and if it isnt working when you needed it, will have to wait for the next time.

IMO if using a pc and windows is essential, then the only way i would go is axis and use ip cams, their mutli cam software is excellent or you could upgrade the sofware to milestone. We dont use these as we only use linux in the field due to security and stabilty and if we do need a windows box, we always use a server edition. i think win2k3 is very stable.

while i see your point on 'keyframes' or interframes this shouldnt be relevant and certainly not on mjpeg as this doesnt use them. I would suggest looking at an alternative viewer as id bet all your issues are ms media plater lib based. If your box is public ill see if i can work something out for you. As long as its a quick fix, mr freebee customer lol. I would say your issue with lag is due to the media player lib cacheing locally . This lib was designed to watch films and trailers etc online, where latency and lag is totaaly irrelivant. This is why the likes of DM, axis etc spend time and money developing an media lobrary THAT IS DESIGNED FOR CCTV. You can drop yoir buffers etc with a bit of messing with the registry, but i pesoanlly wouldnt bother as it will only help a little bit. Only way would be to restart the stream. (ie restart the connection and flush the current cache)

RAID 1 IMO is perfect for cctv, and you wont have any speed issues with it. You could even use software raid 1 as the overhead is very low.

The axis stuff is great, although I can't say I have a single bit of experience with IP cameras. At this particular site, we've got cameras running out to around 200metres, so I'm not sure how stable network information would be at that distance. They're quite expensive too, for what they are, especially when you can get pretty top notch 1/3" cameras for

[james.wilson]

It wont help mate, if its the codec cacheing the only way is to reset the cashe and restsrt the stream or use a different libary.

You wont get an ip cam to run at 200m in 1 run without a switch, but you caould use extended ethernet.

oh and can i just alter something slightly

you can get pretty top notch 1/3" cameras for

[Gopher]

I have to say, that's pretty much what I thought could be happening, which is the reason we upgraded the computer to give it a bit more horsepower. Particularly memory, which I thought it might be starved of. Quite upsettingly, there's no perceivable difference in performance after the upgrade.

Interestingly, the manual for the software provided with the card speaks about a dvr machine, rather than our dvr card, so I'm guessing it's just a windows computer in the dvr machine, but forced to run in dvr mode rather than software in a fullscreen window type mode.

There's nothing too technical in the software. It pretty much just automatically runs as fast as the network allows. The only setting is the "quality" - low to high in 6 stages - of video transferred. Not sure what bit rates this equates to, but the low setting is pretty poor quality and still no faster as far as latency (presumably just as big an amount of processing to compress it). The client software is undoubtedly better than the web browser access, but still pretty painful.

You've just given me an idea though...perhaps putting the quality up might reduce latency....my thinking going that it might not need to recompress the stream from the original stream recorded on disc? I'll try it and see if it works....you'll hear the celebrations if if does....that said, it'll probably slow down frame rate. Nothing easy!

Yeah that's how the generally work in full screen mode rather than windowed which is always inherently slower, More memory will help but a better video card will help also as I'm pretty sure it can use the memory on that as a buffer.

If your using onboard video then this will cause delay as it uses basically the same internal data / memory bus as the processor and it's thus trying to do two things at once which will slow it down where as if it's handed off to a separate video card it's able to path it differently increasing speed and main memory (as it shares uses the installed system memory as a display space).

[xviz]

It wont help mate, if its the codec cacheing the only way is to reset the cashe and restsrt the stream or use a different libary.

You wont get an ip cam to run at 200m in 1 run without a switch, but you caould use extended ethernet.

oh and can i just alter something slightly

can i suggest

Try a frame transfer panasonic if staying with PAL etc. But IP and megapixel is the future for me.

I know you can run ordinary ethernet to about 100m in one shot. That would take us slightly over half-way, which would be a fair distance outdoors. Would mean wiring up power to there, and a secure dry box to run a switch in, but that could be a bit of a target if vandals were about. I'll need to look into extended ethernet. Can't say it's something I've ever worked with or tried. I'm assuming it'll not offer as high transfer speeds, but whether or not that'd affect video needs I don't know. I'm assuming it'd be fine for bandwidth, giving you suggest it. Megapixel cameras would definately be of interest for better quality, but if I understand correctly, that would require a complete upgrade of everything even down to cabling? I'm assuming they're also still pretty expensive like IP cameras too. If I can wait till the newness comes off equipment, it then comes into price range. We've installed a 9 camera system so far for just under

[james.wilson]

Extended ethernet is similar to dsl. So it depends on range but you can easily get 10 megs over a couple of km's, and when i say megapixel its megapixel over ip.

The issue is one of types of equipement, a proper DVR to me costs around

[eoghanfla]

I personally come from a backround in IT, so for the last year Ive been installing these dreaded boxes you speak of. In all my years in IT I have seen many computers. I would never ever ever upgrade one to become a DVR. Firstly you will prob be the first person to do it on the particular model you are trying and hence you will get zero tech support. Secondly The people supplying the card, X-vision in this case can not really give great support as they dont know your PC. Remember that you can have a great chipset, a huge 7200 RPM drive, GB's of Ram and then have a //.B.W.F.// mother board and the whole thing falls flat on its face.

The reason we use Boxed or embeded DVR's or pre built PC DVR's is because some other company spent a lot of time and money researching all the possible flaws and conflicts and then (if you buy the right brand) offer you a reliable product.

I can supply Pre built Military grade Servers with up to 5TB inclosed and another 15TB in a SAN which will accept both Analogue and Priority 16MP cameras. No its not cheap but you get all the things you want, reliable, bullet proof, 3 yr 24/7 tech support, very little compression and highest quality footage available.

You get what you pay for in life. Try and do a DIY job with no experience and you will have issues. Best of luck with the issue.

Also if it is an X-Vision Card look for Peter R I think he goes by, he is the X-vision rep on here.

Regards,

[Guest anguscanplay]

I personally come from a backround in IT, so for the last year Ive been installing these dreaded boxes you speak of. In all my years in IT I have seen many computers.

Also if it is an X-Vision Card look for Peter R I think he goes by, he is the X-vision rep on here.

Regards,

Listen to this man he knows what he`s saying, seems the moral of the story is if you have a critical site and cannot afford to loose images then you gotta do it the expensive way

Angus.