A great home CCTV solution but with some serious shortcomings. This is a list of little gems discovered the hard way!
How to Set Up Motion
There are different options when it comes to detecting motion: You can simply enable SMD to notify when any motion is detected, or more granularly using a feature called IVS to detect in specific zones only a set type of interesting object – human or vehicle.
SMD
This is a feature you want to enable only when there is a quiet and clear view to the camera. This is not meant for your camera facing the main road or a budy pavement. I enabled it on my camera facing the road and got flooded with notifications within seconds!!!
If you decide to enable this, you need to go to AI -> Parameters -> SMD and tick the Enable box
Additionally, go to ALARM -> Video Detection -> Motion Detection and ensure the Enable box is ticked. Then, proceed to the “Region Setting” box on the top-right to identify the region that it should detect movement in – if I understand correctly how it works!
IVS
This is a smarter way to set up your CCTV system. First the feature needs to be enabled on a per camera basis from AI -> Parameters -> Smart Plan by enabling the lightbulb icon for each camera (hitting apply after each camera being enabled!)
Once enabled, go to AI -> Parameters -> IVS and start applying different settings depending on the coverage area, if you want to apply a tripwire or simply if you want to know if there’s any movement in and out of a specific area.
The settings are pretty granular, even allowing tripwires to work in both directions. Do play around with the settings, there’s a lot of settings that require a lot of playing around with to get right!
Playback in Fast Forward
The phone app is brilliant to manage video and notification options on the go, but I find it to be pretty slow and ineffective when it comes to playback of stored videos. Even on my PC I found it lagging massively when using Chrome or Firefox. The cure? Good ol’ Internet Explorer!
Fire up Internet Explorer (not Microsoft Edge) and you’ll quickly be presented with a request to download a plug in. Sounds like an early-00’s solution? Oh yes! Does it cure the problem? Oh yes!
Once the plugin is installed, miraculously extra buttons apprear: on the left-hand side now there’s fast forward up to 16x and even a button to gradually slow back down, by a factor of x2 or /2 depending which way you’re heading.
Extracting a video clip
All is well and good when a user decides to save a clip on their phone depending on a notification – DaHua’s phone app chops videos off at the movement/intrusion detection point. But what happens when you want a bespoke video length? What if you want to download it in mp4 format to show it to your insurers or the police? Again, good ol’ Internet Explorer and that lovely plug in we mentioned further up is your solution!
Once the plugin is installed, on the right-hand side a pair of scissors and some funky buttons appear that help you cut and crop videos depending on the requirement and save as mp4 or DaHua’s favourite extension of .dat (mp4 is preferrable for compatibility reasons).