Reolink POE Doorbell on my Hik DS-7608NI-I2 NVR?

[AndyoSurrey]

Happy new year folks,

I have recently added a Reolink POE doorbell to my NVR and I pretty impressed with the video quality that it gives - especially for the price of under £100. I'm still somewhat shocked about how little choice there is for doorbell cameras that are not subscription, POE and ONVIF - especially the POE capability is still quite rare. Those of us with our own NVRs really don't want any subscription charges and most people I would think have their broadband coming into the house somewhere near the front door - hence the router will be there and hence Ethernet is the best option for connectivity for constant power (with the POE adapter), speed and security.

The Reolink was very easy to add to the NVR once ONVIF was enabled in the camera and as I say the video resolution is very good - with night time very impressive as well. The audio is not brilliant but have successfully had a conversation over a parcel delivery using the native app that is very quick to alert with a doorbell press. The Wifi door chime also worked first time and is pretty good. The live and replay all work alongside my HIk cameras in the Hikconnect iPhone app so all pretty good.

Just one problem that I can't fathom. In the Playback screen on the NVR I cannot get any Smart functionality. For example I had a box being collected from my porch and I thought it would be simple to draw an area for intrusion detection and see when it was collected. Actually nothing at all works. I can draw a line or a box and click search and nothing comes up on the activity bar the way the red lines do for my Hik cameras.

I'm stumped by this as in my limited knowledge I would say this is an NVR function to scan the recorded images and if the image stores correctly - as it does - then it shouldn't matter what type of camera it came from. The Normal replay works fine.

I am on the latest firmware on the NVR and Reolink.

Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Andy

 

[Dan]

Hi @AndyoSurrey

Most Smart Events are brand-specific and do not share well when you mix brands, so the Hikvision NVR won't properly recognise a 3rd-party camera like the Reolink and thus won't be able to apply smart events like line crossing or intrusion to it.

It relates to ONVIF, ONVIF is the universal standard that IP CCTV brands use to allow cameras/NVRs from different brands to communicate but there are different levels of ONVIF. The most basic level will just allow for live stream, playback, and other basic functionality and advanced features like Smart Events are only supported by higher ONVIF tiers, most consumer brands like Reolink only configure their cameras to be compliant with the most basic level of ONVIF because it then means the only way you can get the full functionality of their cameras is to make it a fully Reolink system (e.g. Reolink NVR & cameras).

 

[AndyoSurrey]

Thanks for the reply Dan - much appreciated.

I am definitely confused here about settings on the camera for real time events versus storing the simple live image stream. I fully appreciate what you are saying about the different levels of integration so that I would not expect to be able to set up real time features on the Reolink camera from the NVR as that requires very tight integration.

However, and this is where my lack of knowledge is fully kicking in, I thought that once the simple image stream is stored on the NVR then I would have expected to NVR Smart search to simply look for activity within that stored image stream irrespective of where is came from as my thought was it was just looking frame by frame for changes in the stored data. The fact that it doesn't work suggests this is a wrong understanding.

Hope I've explained this properly and you can work out where I'm still lacking in my understanding of the search function in Playback!!

 

[AndyoSurrey]

OK updating this as I'm sure a lot of people will add the Reolink POE doorbell camera to their Hik NVR's as I have done and then try to get Smart playback to work as it does with Hik native IP cameras. After searching every possible config screen on the NVR I finally found what looks like the answer to why I can't get Smart playback on the Reolink footage. I don't understand the technology at all but using the browser Configuration console on the NVR to navigate to Video/Audio then Display Info on Screen there is a toggle button called Enable Dual-VCA. I can toggle this for the Hik cameras on my NVR what when I select the Reolink it comes up with an error window saying X Does not Support this Function.
I googled VCA and it is Video Content Analysis. In my limited knowledge I thought the NVR processed raw image data stored on disk but it seems that to support Smart playback the video stream from the camera must already have the movement signatures embedded.
I know Reolink NVRs support Smart playback but I guess that their ONVIF implementation does not include this function. Maybe in the future they will or perhaps not, who knows.

 

[Carphone]

Thanks for the update. I have a Reolink doorbell camera and have been meaning to add it to my Hik NVR. When i finally do, at least I know what functionality to expect lol