I’ve been asked about what’s a good reasonably priced NVR that supports a wide range of cameras. I thought about it and most that come from surveillance cameras companies work mostly with their brand although some support a few brands, it’s not wide enough to cover all. So I had a chance to install Synology’s latest operating system, DSM 4.2, mostly for my previous review on Hikvision’s ability to write to NFS, but then curiosity got the better of me and purchased 3 Synology Surveillance Station license (first one if free) and put it through it’s paces over the past few weeks.

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First you have to understand what Synology is. It’s dubbed as a “smart” NAS as you are able to install apps on the NAS in a similar way people add apps to their smart phones. It displays an icon list of apps and you click on the icon and it installs the app.

Surveillance Station is one such app and you get to use it for free for 1 camera. Additional cameras cost $49.99 from Synology but other resellers may offer it for less. When you first log on to the NAS via a web browser, it displays a screen like this Clicking on the 4 square icon at the very top left lists the installed apps and clicking on Suveillance Station opens a new window.

Important to note that while the NAS devices have weak processors, the CPU utilization with 4 cameras, 2 with camera based motion detection and two generic camera via ONVIF with NAS based detection, CPU use never really got above 10-20%. You can monitor NAS performance from this main screen. This is the first screen in Surveillance Station. Why they chose to enter on the Management tab is a mystery as most NVR solutions enter on the Live View screen. You can see there’s basically 3 tabs for Live View, Timeline and Management. So I’ll start with the simplest by clicking on Live View.

As you can see, I have a simple layout of 4 cameras, but you can chose from several layouts. Logistic Regression Program Removal. Double-clicking on one camera image displays only that one camera, double-click again to return to the standard layout. You can create multiple layouts by selecting it from the drop down with the word “default” on the left. Clicking the the icon to the right of that allows you to edit and create new layouts.

The active image has a yellow boarder, you can use the zoom slider or a mouse wheel to zoom in/out of an image (applies to playback too) and you can use the mouse to drag the image around, pretty intuitive. Advocare. You can see from the picture below I zoom in to each camera’s image. Cameras don’t automatically get added to the layouts, you have to add this manually in this screen by dragging available cameras to the square. You can’t add the same camera twice so you have to drag it out of the box to add a new on in it’s place. To view recordings, you click on the Timeline tab on top. There’s a slider on the right that you move to find recorded video (green bars).

This is in Sync mode where it shows all cameras synced together. You can unsync them by clicking the icon that is currently blue in the lower left. This creates a line for each camera that you can work independently of each other The other icons are the camera for snapshots, the down arrow for downloading video, the eye for a smart search, and the clock for time seek (search by time). The timeline on the right with the green lines represents recordings made. When zoomed out by default, it represents a 24 hour period but you can move the slider below it to zoom in to get finer detail of recording times. You can see there’s a calendar where you can chose different dates to search. You can also use play/pause to control playback as well as click on the double arrows next to the play button to control speed like 1x,2x, 4x, 8x as well as slow motion, 1/2x, 1/4x, 1/8x.

Mitsubishi Owners Manual Wd 65734. Clicking the eye icon for Smart Search puts you in this screen. From here you can select from a wide variety of search types as shown below. Then draw the area to be searched and click search. It goes from recording to recording looking for events that match your search criteria. It’s slow as it has to analyze each recording but faster than doing it by hand one at a time. When it finds a match, it shows a blue square where motion was detected and puts it on the list on the right as a video found. After all the videos are found, you can double-click on each one to view it in the playback box.