bal62958 wrote:Neither have I. It has been 10 days since I placed the order.

One more gargleblaster, you can quote someone complaining they haven't gotten tracking info yet, but you can't read my first post at least 2, if not 3 pages back telling you to track on fed-ex's site using reference number and to use your woot order number as the reference number.

Fedex changed the delivery date on my back another day. Won't come in until tomorrow (28th) now. Was scheduled for the 27th as of Friday.

Braveit1 wrote:Fedex changed the delivery date on my back another day. Won't come in until tomorrow (28th) now. Was scheduled for the 27th as of Friday.

It was shipped Fed-Ex Home and they don't deliver Sunday or Monday, so not sure why it was ever scheduled for delivery today.

I'm loving the system, the DVR is great, the camera's could definitely be better.

Has anyone figured out how to make the motion detection work? Also, be careful withe the tightening screw on the camera mounts, very easy to strip the threads.

Mine showed. It's worth what i paid. As mentioned...the camera mounting tilt/arm brackets are by far the cheapest thing imo...careful there. Quality is about what i expected...wishing i had smaller/better cameras now. Overall...great bang for the buck..can tell if someone is at the front door...and much more if i wanna tweak.

In response to the motion question. It is not intuitive but when you are setting it up the squares you mark red are actually the ones it will detect motion in they are not the ones to be excluded. So go in and mark them all red and it should work. You will also have to set your sensitivity very low.

How are the colors on everyones cameras? Mine in no way represent real life and I have tried to adjust them with the onboard settings. My greens are a very white hue and all browns show up blue. This is in full day light. Actually the only thing that actually shows up with the proper coloration is if I aim the camera at the TV. I also have one camera that is DOA so it will be fun to try to get a replacement on that. I wasn't hoping for the stars but I was hoping if I aimed the camera at a tree during full daylight it would be green.

This next one will save some people hours of frustration as I have at least 5 hours of work into it. If after you are able to install the active x and you can login but not see video in the box it is a display driver problem. None of the drivers for my intel HD graphics on my Lenovo T410 laptop will display video from the camera software. My desktop works fine running an nvidia card and the same OS and IE version. This is only if you actually load the page and login but do not see video. After hours of work and searching forums I finally launched a VM of windows XP on m laptop that uses the VM display drivers and it works perfectly.

BanditBBS wrote:It was shipped Fed-Ex Home and they don't deliver Sunday or Monday, so not sure why it was ever scheduled for delivery today.

I'm loving the system, the DVR is great, the camera's could definitely be better.

I guess I need to call FedEx and tell them to come pick up the Zmodo Surveillance System that they delivered 1 hour ago. After all they don't deliver on Mondays :-)

I just got my woot email tracking number. Thanks woot!

LOL

Been tracking it for the last few days...Just got the woot order tracking bot email today.

I bought a Seagate HD for it. Their videos online show a seagate pipeline drive. What drives did everyone else buy or are thinking about buying.

Received a pair of these things--

These are right up there with the SDAT 5.1 channel audio gear.. Dirt cheap and full of carcinogens...

Just handling these, I can feel the skin developing on my hands from the cheap recycled plastic & aluminum, lead solder and inferior post-production cleaning products.

One of my 8 cameras was DOA. If I flex the cable a little, the picture goes from black to white, but still no picture.

I'm afraid to plug this thing into my network for fear of a Chinese government official spying on the parking lot of my building.

I'm also afraid to install any software on my PC or smartphone for similar fears...

I plugged this thing into an old 15" Sony CRT monitor at 1024x768 and it feels right at home.

I pointed the camera straight at a car that's only 20 feet away and I can't even tell what kind of car it is, let alone determine if it even has a license plate attached.

Nice $3 optical mini-mouse though.

[quote postid="4532516" user="z011104"]In response to the motion question. It is not intuitive but when you are setting it up the squares you mark red are actually the ones it will detect motion in they are not the ones to be excluded. So go in and mark them all red and it should work. You will also have to set your sensitivity very low.

Z - thanks for the response and the other good info. I had already caught the red issue, that is counter intuitive. I still can't get motion working, and anything I plug into camera one is recording all the time. Noe of the other cameras start recording on motion, I'm still trying to figure it out. I did notice that colors are good under florescent lighting, I think color balance is optimized for indoor commercial aps.

bdonson76 wrote:So what do we do when we lose the remote (and thus the use of a mouse)?

Well there are a couple of options... First of all, I think what happens is that the device can only run a GUI on one device at at time. That is, the GUI is either on the composite ports or the VGA ports. When you right-click and choose "GUI TO VID" then you lose control from an LCD screen. If you're using a composite monitor and choose GUI TO LCD then you lose control from the composite monitor.

The fix, therefore, is to plug in the opposite type of monitor.

What if you don't have a composite monitor handy? A hack to get it back is to plug a cable from one of your camera channels to the video out ports. That should give you enough video swap it back, though the display is hella confusing while you're doing the loopback.

Or, at least, that's how I did it. I didn't know about the '0' key fix. (Thanks!)

Another option is to dig through your remote control collection for a remote from Hauppauge. The ones for the early MediaGX and WinTV cards look very similar.



Some notes: The downloads from Zmodo are kind of broken. Their webserver is AFU and doesn't know how to deliver non-HTML files. A workaround for this is the right-click on the file you want and save it to disk. Then, once it is saved, rename it from .htm to .pdf or .rar and things should work.


I haven't tried the web browser plugin or the Android plugin. The directions on them are both sooooo sketchy that nobody in their right mind should follow them. However, you may be able to find ASEE in the Android Market from at least three different places. There's also a generic IP Cam tool (lite and $5) that claims to work well. I hope someone will come back with responses.

This device is sketchy across the board... but it seems to pretty much work.

mdwyerfoo wrote:
I haven't tried the web browser plugin or the Android plugin. The directions on them are both sooooo sketchy that nobody in their right mind should follow them. However, you may be able to find ASEE in the Android Market from at least three different places. There's also a generic IP Cam tool (lite and $5) that claims to work well. I hope someone will come back with responses.

I put the following up a couple of days ago...

For anyone that will be using an Android phone to watch your cams online, let me save you some time... I had set mine up according to Zmodo's website instructions a few days ago and had set it up to look at Zmodo's 9000 series DVR that they have up and it had been working great but... When I got the new DVR all set up and entered the same settings into my IP Cam Viewer Lite (substituting my IP adress and password etc) it would connect but never render an image. I spent several hours checking and double checking all of the settings and still no luck. When I started getting a little desperate I decided to try some different settings in the phone app. Logic kept telling me if I could see THEIR DVR but not MINE, then something must be set wrong on MY DVR. This turned out to not be the case. As it turned out, I was using the setting for "Zmodo DVR w/ Mobile port" per their instructions online (which again works with their online demo DVR). When I tried the different settings and chose "Zmodo H9106 w/Media Port" it all started working beautifully... PS; The instructions all say that the port is supposed to be set to 9001 but my DVR was set to port 9000 instead. I left it there and set up the phone (HTC EVO) to 9000...

The PC software seems to function well enough, and the web client works as soon as you remove all security settings in IE9 to allow the AcitiveX controls to install. Can't get anything to come up in Chrome browser or on the tablet. The "Asee" app never connects and the other free IPcam viewers are not seeing the device... it has been a long afternoon...

Here is my take on this system...

The DVR
(I already had 4 Astak cameras set up so that's what I am basing this part on)


The instructions in the manual and the online pdf file leave a lot to be desired.

The DVR actually works very well once you add a hard drive, network it properly, and figure out the cryptic instructions...

It is easier to setup the DVR by using the the web interface than using the mouse on the unit itself.

A strange side effect of setting up a password for the web interface is that it also then requires a password when using the mouse on the unit and entering it is very tedious using just the mouse. (If anyone knows a way around this please let me know!)

I had the motion control enabled for one of my 4 cameras and that one only recorded when there was motion on that screen (It actually records 1 minute before the motion and a few seconds after). For that one camera I had lots of little files. I ended up changing that one back to record always so I am currently recording continuously all 4 cameras.

I originally thought it would be nice to set up the packets to 1hr as it would give fewer files to search through to find a particular event but have decided to change it to 15 minutes as searching through the video in those files remotely from the laptop or PC can take a long time.

If you have an Android phone, the instructions that they provide on the Zmodo site aren't quite correct for the IP Camera Viewer Lite. I wrote a prior blurb about this but the main thing is that they tell you to select "Zmodo DVR w/ Mobile port" and it wouldn't work until I selected "Zmodo H9106 w/Media Port". Also the port was listed as 9001 in the instructions but it turned out to be 9000 on my DVR.

With all 4 cameras recording continuously in the best mode that I could set it too my DVR reports 330 hours (13.75 days) available on a WD 500gig hard drive that I installed. I have it set to overwrite when the drive is filled up.

If you have the 2x2 screen up (all 4 cameras showing at one time) you can double click one of the 4 smaller screens and it will go full screen on that camera. Double click again and it goes back to the 2x2 screen again.

The cameras I use have sound. If you have all 4 screens up, the one that you have clicked on last will be the source for the sound. Single click on the camera that you wish to hear the sound from and it will source it the sound from that one. Again this is only if you have cameras with microphones in them.


Now, the included cameras...

With the Astak cameras that I already had, I sometimes found myself wanting a wider angle camera. In fact I had actually modified one of my 4 cameras to add a wide angle to it because when I aimed it at the front door it was easy to miss someone who was standing there slightly off center because of the narrow field of vision. Well with the Zmodo cameras that does not seem to be the case. I took one of the Zmodo cameras outside to see how it compared with the Astaks and it was a huge difference. The angle was very wide and I would probably say almost too wide. I will actually use one of these though to pick up an area of my yard that I cannot currently see with the narrower cameras. What would be nice is if they would provide 1 wide and 3 narrow field cameras but these all seem to be the same.

There is no sound on these cameras.

I picked up some video interference on the one that I hooked up. Kind of a scrolling pattern in the bacground. Someone referenced earlier that a ferrite filter ring may help this and I think that it very well may (I haven't tried it yet though).

Looking at the cameras they actually look very nice. I have the black ones. I agree with the ealier post that says the mount is very easy to strip however as the one I played with seem almost like it was stripped out from the factory. I was able to back the screw out a tad and tightened the lock ring and it felt a lot better. I am not sure how these will hold up over the long haul...

Since these are infrared cameras (as are my Astaks) the color isn't very accurate. Colors sometimes will look white or blue-greenish white. Some clothes will look to be a totally diferent color.

The focus seemd ok but I think will look better if I can get rid of the interference pattern that is present.

I have not tried these cameras at night yet so I cannot say how the night vision is.


Overall...

I bought this for the DVR. I had been using a standalone DVR that would record for hours but when it filled up I would have to delete files and start it over again. This one will take care of itself in that respect. My standalone was not capable of streaming video to the web. I could have used a Slingbox maybe, but I would probably have spent more on that than I did on this whole system. Since I bought it for the DVR then the included cameras are a plus (no matter how cheap they are lol)...

If the instructions were quite a bit better I would give the DVR itself a 5 star rating. Since the setup ends up being way more complicated without a good set of instructions, I would knock that down to a 4. The value of the DVR hardware for what it does for the price makes it an excellent value (for me). If I didn't already have better (not great, but better) cameras then I would be looking to spend a couple of hundred more on some decent ones. If I were basing my rating on the included cameras I would probably rate it at a 2 to 3 out of 5.


I guess that's about all I can think of for now. Maybe if this item is wooted again in the future then this will help someone decide if it is right for them or not...

genii69 wrote:Here is my take on this system...

The DVR
(I already had 4 Astak cameras set up so that's what I am basing this part on)


The instructions in the manual and the online pdf file leave a lot to be desired...

THAT IS A QUALITY POST!!!

Thanks for the info!

Just got my system today and already hit a very annoying problem. I thought I'd share to help others if they encounter the same issue.

I couldn't get the menu to come up on the display. The cameras came up, but none of the buttons on the console or the remote did anything. As it turns out, the menu system only works on one output source at a time, and it defaults to the BNC connection. So, if you're like me and hooked up a computer monitor, you're gonna have to move it to the 15-pin connection.

1. Connect a display to the BNC connection. They make BNC->RCA adapters for just such an occasion.
2. Right-click anywhere on the screen.
3. On the pop-up menu, select "GUI to LCD."

Can someone post a video of the video quality? I'm yet to set mine up and a short clip would be much appreciated

potestasx wrote:Just got my system today and already hit a very annoying problem. I thought I'd share to help others if they encounter the same issue.

I couldn't get the menu to come up on the display. The cameras came up, but none of the buttons on the console or the remote did anything. As it turns out, the menu system only works on one output source at a time, and it defaults to the BNC connection. So, if you're like me and hooked up a computer monitor, you're gonna have to move it to the 15-pin connection.

1. Connect a display to the BNC connection. They make BNC->RCA adapters for just such an occasion.
2. Right-click anywhere on the screen.
3. On the pop-up menu, select "GUI to LCD."

From the zmodo support site, it apparently can be done directly on the unit:

If your DVR's mouse and buttons do not work...

The video output need to be switched from BNC to VGA.

With your mouse plugged in, unplug the power to the unit for 30 sec, then plug it back in. Wait for the DVR to fully initialize, the cameras to come up, & the grid to appear (1 min).

For 4 or 8 CH DVR's, press and hold "REW" on the front panel until the DVR beeps.
For 16 CH DVR's, press "0" (zero) on your remote; the DVR will beep.

Press Menu once. You should now have functionality.

Go to the Main Menu (where you will see 6 icons).

Go to System -> A/V (or Video) set up. Next to OSD DEVICE or INIT. DEV, select your output (VGA or VOUT [for BNC or RCA]), and press Apply.

Then Exit, back to the cameras.

I received tracking info yesterday. Found the very obvious box on my porch when I got home.

Install went well, network setup was quite easy (but I do this stuff all the time)

ONE thing: With Windows 7 and Internet Explorer the Active X plugin wont install unless you allow it with this guide, just put the IP of your DVR (static IP otherwise you may end up doing this each time it renews)
http://www.technipages.com/internet-explorer-windows-has-blocked-this-software-because-it-cant-verify-the-publisher-error.html

Once I did that, the plugin installed fine. Using the web interface to configure the DVR is MUCH easier than directly on the device.

I will be finding some ferrite cores as the noise on some of them is a bit much, but overall its not bad. I bumped up recording quality and resolution.

Seems like a decent system for the price. With a 500GB drive in it, it shall record plenty of stuff for me

PubUltraStar wrote:Ok, I had the same problem, and was ready to literally smash the thing into the ground after troubleshooting for what seemed like an hour. By sheer luck, and pressing buttons on the remote like a mad mad, I hit the "0" button, and heard a beep. The mouse appeared. I guess it's a way to lock the DVR, and you hit "0" again to unlock. Hopefully, this helps someone with their DVR rage...

Words cannot describe the intensity of gratitude I have for you. Conversely, I have nearly the same intensity of anger for the vacuous absence of this information in the manual. Zero - my hero. Oh, how wonderful you are. The box went from trash to treasure in one, tiny stroke. Thanks again.

zenvalue wrote:Words cannot describe the intensity of gratitude I have for you. Conversely, I have nearly the same intensity of anger for the vacuous absence of this information in the manual. Zero - my hero. Oh, how wonderful you are. The box went from trash to treasure in one, tiny stroke. Thanks again.

I believe it is switching control back and forth between BNC output and VGA. If you look you will see a post above that lists that as the method of switching outputs for the 16 channel DVR but says that the 4 channel uses the rewind button. In the manual at the bottom of page 21 at the heading of OSD Device, it also says to use the rewind button. I think a lot of the information in the manual is outdated and hasn't been updated whenever a change was made to the equipment... I believe that the 4 channel DVR now uses the zero... That's my guess anyway...

jhartz123 wrote:Has anyone figured out how to make the motion detection work? Also, be careful withe the tightening screw on the camera mounts, very easy to strip the threads.

Something cool about the motion detection that I just realized is that you can set areas for each camera to detect and leave other areas not detected. I have cameras that have my front yard in them but also a little of the street and we have lots of traffic. I can actually define the area of the channel so it ignores the street traffic and still will record (or send me an email, or sound an alarm, or all of the above) when someone walks up our sidewalk to our house. How cool is that!!!

The place where you set it up (I use the web interface) is Device then Motion. In there you select the channel that you want to set up. You enable the channel, set sensitivity, and define the area. When you define the area you click on the blocks to turn them red in the area you want to be monitored for motion. If you click a block and drag the cursor while still holding the mouse button down you can turn whole rows or sections red so you don't have to click each block individually...

After you have done all of that you should see a red "M" appear on the live screen anytime that it detects motion. There is another section under alarm that allows you to define how much post recording you want to have happen after the event. I set mine down to 30 seconds. In that screen you can choose to have it sound an alarm or email etc. Of course for the email to work you have to enable that and set it up...

So many features for such a low priced box.

z011104 wrote:

How are the colors on everyones cameras? Mine in no way represent real life and I have tried to adjust them with the onboard settings. My greens are a very white hue and all browns show up blue. This is in full day light. Actually the only thing that actually shows up with the proper coloration is if I aim the camera at the TV.

After plating with the camera indoors and out, it is clear to me that the color balance issues for outside are due to sunlight being a mix of infrared and visible light. If you look at an IR picture of a tree in daylight, the leaves are white... The sane affect is occurring with the camera since there is not an IR filter on the lens - a necessity for the 'night vision' to work.

mine dose not have the mounting hardware or brackets what ever you call em We, the Hitchhikers

genii69 wrote:

If you have an Android phone, the instructions that they provide on the Zmodo site aren't quite correct for the IP Camera Viewer Lite. I wrote a prior blurb about this but the main thing is that they tell you to select "Zmodo DVR w/ Mobile port" and it wouldn't work until I selected "Zmodo H9106 w/Media Port". Also the port was listed as 9001 in the instructions but it turned out to be 9000 on my DVR.

Thank you genii69, I am at work now and just used those settings on my Galaxy Tab 10.1 and everything came up just fine.

Now to get a new HD...

I got mine Monday.
I also got the woot email with the tracking number Monday.

My 1.5TB hard disk does not quite fit. I can only use one screw and the drive is mounted at a slight angle, but it works.

The video has noise. I will look for a ferrite core.

I have mine set up to detect motion "M" on the screen indicates. However, when no "M" I get a "R" which indicates recording. I can't get it to stop recording. Any ideas?

Has anyone been able you use an app on there iPhone to view there cameras? Everything I have tried has failed! Any help would be awesome!

Now I know what to do with the ferrite core's I got from the Woot! Big o' Cosmos in May of 2010. They've been sitting in my desk all this time waiting. As if Woot! would know I would someday need them...

Does anyone know how to access the video on the media port programmatically? That is, if I wanted to write my own client- how do I get the video.

Also, I see telnet is listening on port 23 of the DVR. But the users from the DVR application are not the system users. Does anyone know what the user/pass is to login via telnet? Or how to bypass on start up?

Try all the different drivers out. The Android App doesnt work with the driver the instructions say to use but work with another one. If all else fails, email the author of the iPhone App.

jasonkindrix wrote:Has anyone been able you use an app on there iPhone to view there cameras? Everything I have tried has failed! Any help would be awesome!

Just wanted to add that the android app works on a Barnes and Noble Color Nook as well. If it is rooted and you can install programs that is. Now to see if I should contact the manufacturer or woot about my one camera that was DOA. I really don't want to package this thing back up for one camera.

Oh and the threaded hole in the bottom of the camera is the same size as a standard Tripod bolt. FYI

leibniz wrote:

Thanks for the find! Good to know if I ever have to do it again.

Though it's kinda sad when directions for something like this are more elaborate and unintuitive than directions for programming key fobs for a car. :P

QuantumSingular wrote:The video on mine was getting some really bad interference. Probably from my old house wiring. The camera's power supply doesn't seem to have a noise filter on it so I made a few loops in a ferrite core and this completely solved the picture quality. It's likely many others will have this same issue. A few loops through this will solve your problems: http://www.amazon.com/Ferrite-Core-Cord-Noise-Suppressor/dp/B0002MQGEA/ref=pd_cp_e_2 So what cable or cables exactly are you looping through this? I'm confused.

If you've got an old computer power supply you can usually find a few ferrite cores in it to salvage. That's what I used. This is what they look like:

jtal04 wrote:Does anyone know how to access the video on the media port programmatically? That is, if I wanted to write my own client- how do I get the video.

Also, I see telnet is listening on port 23 of the DVR. But the users from the DVR application are not the system users. Does anyone know what the user/pass is to login via telnet? Or how to bypass on start up?

I'm wondering the same. I'd like to write an app, or use a generic viewer for this

Airkat wrote:I'm wondering the same. I'd like to write an app, or use a generic viewer for this

are there any generic viewers // anyone using a mac to view this. Why would it work on and iPhone and not the mac?

PubUltraStar wrote:Ok, I had the same problem, and was ready to literally smash the thing into the ground after troubleshooting for what seemed like an hour. By sheer luck, and pressing buttons on the remote like a mad mad, I hit the "0" button, and heard a beep. The mouse appeared. I guess it's a way to lock the DVR, and you hit "0" again to unlock. Hopefully, this helps someone with their DVR rage...

Dude! I owe you big time!. I spent a *lot* more than an hour debugging this, until I found your post. Reps!

bigsike wrote:

Take the camera power cable and loop it through the ferrite core. After 3 loops almost all the interference should be gone, but I went ahead and looped it a few more.

It's better to have the ferrite towards the end of the power cable near the camera (four ferrite cores for four cameras), but it still helps quite a bit if all you can manage is one ferrite at the power supply before the splitter.

Placing the ferrite before the splitter removes the large scrolling interference, but the image might still have some sharp lines. That is the interference the cord is receiving after the ferrite. Having the ferrite right before the cameras will reduce almost all the interference.

The video cables seems to be fairly well shielded. The ferrite would only have a little effect on these.

QuantumSingular wrote:Take the camera power cable and loop it through the ferrite core. After 3 loops almost all the interference should be gone, but I went ahead and looped it a few more.

It's better to have the ferrite towards the end of the power cable near the camera (four ferrite cores for four cameras), but it still helps quite a bit if all you can manage is one ferrite at the power supply before the splitter.

Placing the ferrite before the splitter removes the large scrolling interference, but the image might still have some sharp lines. That is the interference the cord is receiving after the ferrite. Having the ferrite right before the cameras will reduce almost all the interference.

The video cables seems to be fairly well shielded. The ferrite would only have a little effect on these.

Ok great Thanks!!

jtal04 wrote:Try all the different drivers out. The Android App doesnt work with the driver the instructions say to use but work with another one. If all else fails, email the author of the iPhone App.

I got ASee+ to work on my iphone using the default port of 18004 in the Mobile setup (not the web port).
I did port forward 18004 and the web and media ports (80 & 9000) and I now see my cams from anywhere..