The police have asked me to secure some video evidence from the cctv system owned and managed by a tenant of ours. When I found out that it was a Vivotek recorder, I thought that this would be simple due to it being a well known company. But the usb storage I have connected, does not seem to work with the ND8322P recorder. I have tried a 2TB usb disk, and a 16GB usb stick. I have formatted them to both exfat and fat32. I have tried different usb ports on the recorder. The manual mention usb sticks with fat file system. But nothing about fat version or size constraints. It is running linux, and should be able to use most file systems, so I do not see why this thing need to be so darn restricted. Have anybody any experience with these recorders, and know how I need to set up the usb stick? Connecting trough network is not possible at this time, but will be something I will try if everything else fails.
I have run into a fair amount of different cctv recording systems over the years. And a lot of them have had really bad user interfaces. But this thing from Vivotek, the ND8322P nvr, is one of the worst. The usual thing with these things, is that they do a fairly good job at connecting ut to cameras and running live video on default settings. Probably because those things need to work before the installer gets his money. But the export, and often the playback and search functions are often implemented badly.
In the case of the ND8322P, there are several bad solutions. You only seem to be able to export from one camera at a time, and the max clip length is 10 minutes. If I need 2 hours from all cameras, I have to spend the day next to the machine. Playback speed is badly implemented. If you play beyond the cached part of the stream, the thing start to skip, and even stop updating the image. This is at the first level above "live" playback, showing only a single camera. To change camera I have to pick a camera, pick a date, and then look for the correct time on the timeline. It does not start up from the time I viewed on the previous camera. And if you just change the camera, the UI say that there is no video recorded, which would scare even a seasoned investigator. To make the recorder check for video, you have to at least pick a date. Then I will show the images from the start of that day, and fill in the timeline. But there is no hint about this being necessary on the screen.
I thought I had seen the worst when I saw the horrible hikvision nvr's, that crash and reboot just because you select too many cameras or ask for too long clips. But that is just because it is badly programmed. The nd8322p is worse. Not by accident, but rather due to some executive or committee decision.
