Today:
Eagle Eye
Setup and familiarizing, plus an hour on the phone for a walkthrough and some prelim questions. Actually going to disagree with most of what Derek says up there...I'm not even sure where some of this came from.
- Only supports a handle of listed manufacturers. -- Actually "a handful" is inaccurate. That's just what they list in the manual: http://www.eagleeyenetworks.com/support/camera-compatibility/ -- 24 listed, but they said this isn't up to date. They only allow you to use cameras which they have tested, for the most part. It is not ONVIF conformant. It does use the ONVIF discovery process to find the cameras' stream locations, but then just uses RTSP.
Their justification for their supported camera list was that they are testing and guaranteeing performance of all these cameras, including streaming settings. They say some manufacturers (Axis) are more predictable than others, but still they want to test them. There are some manufacturers which may work fine without testing, but others they simply don't allow because of too many differences in firmware. It's a logical argument, but I'm not completely sold on it.
I will give them credit because I submitted the FLIR TCX as a driver request, and it's done already. Granted, it was a Dahua camera so they just had to tweak it, but they seem very responsive. I think honestly they are connecting to things, finding their RTSP streams, and then tweaking them to work. So it's not like building a full-blown direct driver. I submitted an unsupported Hik model so we'll see how long that takes.
- Cameras are found automatically, with no way to manually add cameras. -- True. And this seems a silly omission. But their justification is that really the bridge is supposed to feed IP addresses to camera, which it will then automatically discover. The camera LAN port runs a DHCP server, similar to the Dahua/Q-See NVRs we've tested. For a turnkey plug and play system, I don't think it's a horrible choice, but people accustomed to larger systems aren't used to it.
- Uses RTSP streams to connect cameras, and ONVIF needs to be enabled for cameras to connect (can be an issue with certain cameras, a la Axis, where ONVIF is not automatically set to "ON") -- Kind of true. Axis cameras actually do have ONVIF on by default, until you set a root password. They pointed this out to me. I actually didn't know it. I can't think of another manufacturer that does this, so it's a moot point, especially considering Eagle Eye tells you up front they support only what they support.
- Features seem buried under non-intuitive menus. For example, playback is not featured in it's own main tab. -- It's not on its own tab, but I don't think it's a dealbreaker. It's on an overlay button in each camera, and there is no multi-camera playback, so what would be the purpose of putting it on its own tab? Also what other features do you think are buried under non-intuitive menus? Why?
FLIR TCX
Performance varied here. We set it up to learn the scene against an Avigilon bullet connected ot the Rialto. At first, it detected nothing. Then we went back out after my call with Eagle Eye and it detected Derek walking out from the camera to about 200', about a 90' HFOV. Walking in, it was ~130' ultimately, which is about a 60' FOV, and what they claim.
But then we changed things slightly (moved it inches to the left) and it barely detected at all. In fact video was demonstrably worse. I'm wondering if the sensor wasn't heating up from being out in the sun and losing contrast. We will try it again tomorrow. Indoors, it was working fine when I had it set up by my desk before we started formally testing. I'm thinking the sun had to have something to do with it.
Also I am going to test its internal motion detection in parallel with the Rialto. Maybe it's triggering when the Rialto isn't. Testing something with contrast this low on a sunny day is hard, and it was difficult to see Derek walking around out there at times.
Other
- Tatung installation tool comes tomorrow.
- Got answers back from Genetec on GTAC health monitoring and free cloud, but haven't done anything with them yet.
- RMA's our Q1615. Axis hasn't seen the issues we're having. Sent us an advance replacement already, which should arrive in a day or two.
- Matt, I'll take a look at that wifi question and let you know in the morning. I may be slightly confused, too.