Review on Evtevision 16CH 5MP Network Video Recorder: Easy Remote View, HD Output, Motion Detection (Hard Disk Not Included) by Brian Page

Fine. Actually a pretty good value at $67. My background. I've been using PoE cameras for 10 years, mostly with Blue Iris software. I have multiple PoE cameras. hikvision, hikvision clones, SV3C, Reolink, Anpviz, ONWOTE, Dahua… Now I have 8 cameras. I have several 8 megapixel cameras that this device doesn't even try to transfer. I had to go into the camera settings and change the main stream to 5MP then this NVR was happy to use it. I've been running Blue Iris in a virtual machine on old hardware and am hitting CPU limits when adding cameras and upscaling the resolution. I wanted to try a hardware implementation that should use less power. I don't trust these Chinese manufacturers, that's why I always block internet access in my firewall... I did the same for this NVR. all my cameras. I just had to enter a username and password for each. I plugged in an old 250GB hard drive and it turned on with no problems. Interface: Pretty clunky and frustrating at times, with lots of poorly translated menu items, but you'll get the hang of it. If you want to change the order of the cameras you can just drag and drop them, but instead of just reordering it also wants to change the channel number instead of inheriting all your settings. Some mouse buttons make no sense. , the mouse wheel switches between the cameras. To enlarge you need to left click and drag the box and then left click to enlarge. Double click to zoom out. I wish the playback had a better interface. You can only view one video stream at a time. In fact, you also need to view each stream, you can't just see a thumbnail of all your motion capture events. However, it's pretty easy to view any motion event by filtering it by motion and just keep clicking "next file". The next file will be played quickly. I've been playing around with email notifications and FTP uploads. For emails, it just sends an email with "Start moving" and "End moving" without screenshot/thumbnail. You will always receive two e-mails for each movement event. I had some trouble getting email to work, I had to go into dovecot settings and add "login" to "auth_mechanisms" in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf. FTP kept giving me an error when using the test button, but the video uploads without any problems. In general, the interface is quite nimble, there are no noticeable lags with 8 cameras, you can quickly switch cameras, you can quickly skip files during playback, everything works fine there. in a Logitech wireless mouse and using it was no problem, but the keyboard didn't work. It looks like you always have to use the mouse. Problems: I'm having problems with the preview stream on my two Dahua cameras. Usually they don't show up. I have to double click to maximize, high res is shown, and then when I go back to the main screen it only shows the preview stream. And I can only get one preview thread working at a time. I cannot set the motion detection area on my SV3C camera. Just write "Failed to get the configuration". So I can't get the motion detection to work on this camera. I have seen that the device is completely stuck and requires a power cycle to clear. The mouse and menu functions worked, but neither streaming nor recording worked. It must have some kind of internal watchdog to restart if that ever happens. If you're not careful, you can go days without recording! I wasn't able to get snapshots for motion detection. I created a snapshot partition and enabled snapshots on move, but I never get files written to that partition. There are many face recognition menu items, but when you click them, it just says "NoConfig". I think there should be a USB port on the front of the device so you can easily add or remove a USB stick when you want to transfer files. At the moment it is difficult to access the back of the device. Enabling Daylight Saving Time seems to cause problems. When I turn it on it might take a minute but then it takes 90? minutes late... I will have to live with a one-hour time difference for half a year. How could they be so wrong. Conclusion: Completely satisfied with the device for only 67 euros. I think I'm happy to replace Blue Iris with this one. I would recommend that you block internet access for this device. FYI: My version information at the time of writing this review: V4.03.R11.C6380202.12201.140000 Creation Date 04/09/2019 19:26:01