 So I have Kyle and a Synology NVR-1218 here, and this is a solution we're putting together for a client with a variety of cameras, and it's one of the reasons we like the Synology surveillance station software and the Synology distation system itself. Now the NVR version of this is different than the other distations. It has an HDMI out, and we're going to actually switch back and forth between it. So this is the actual output of it, where you get and able to watch the cameras and we're going to move the mouse over here and open up the live view. And you are seeing actually what we see in real time. Yeah. That's a close up. That's a close up. And so it's one of the cool features about it. So I kind of want to talk about this system and why there's another NVR, because you're probably going, what's this down here? Well that's what we want to talk about is the whole project as a solution. So the Synology NVR-1218 still has the full DSM, which is, we're looking at my laptop right here, and you can see some CPU usage and the standard Synology DSM interface that you can load other applications on here. But before you get too excited, we have noted doing all of our testing with this. This solution is going to be deployed to a bar that's not using it as a Synology DSM and all the fanciness. And they are going to be using it for connecting their old BNC cameras and adding a few new ones. Now ideally we'd love to rip and replace all those BNC cameras out, but that's not reasonable. The other reason I mentioned it, we're not going to be using it as a Synology distation in terms of using it as a file server is, please note the CPU usage just hanging out here is at 50%. Me and Kyle have noted that when you have a few users logged into this, the CPU usage goes up quite a bit. And that does include, and we're going to switch to it again, when you're logged in here. So if we actually close the applications here, where we close it right here, there we go. And by the way, I only have a mouse plugged in, and it comes with an on-screen keyboard to do things, but as long as this is logged in and doing something, it will increase the CPU usage versus when we go over here, you'll actually watch it drop down after a few seconds just by closing that application there. So even the users directly logged into it do tax the system a little bit. But we're going to talk about the good and the bad here. Now the good, it works amazing with these 4K cameras that we have with this Amcrest. Yeah, this is a 4K Amcrest. We also really like the 2K real links. So any like on-vif cameras that we've tried with it seem to work quite well. The Synology supports a lot of the on-vif cameras, and you just add it by brand, you add it by IP address pretty much, and it auto-negotiates all the on-vif stuff. Yeah, and I'm going to do some separate reviews of the cameras individually. We will tell you when they work to the picture quality is pretty good with these. Like I said, separate videos so I can really just spend time comparing these in depth. We're going to put them on a rig all together outside, so we're not just pointing them randomly at the studio, but I will say, let's open up that 4K one because it's pretty dark in the studio except for the lights on the products or us. Let's go and open up the live view, and we'll give you a little bit of an idea here. Yep, and let's pick this one. This is the 4K one, and you guys can see what we're seeing. Whoops, and even in the dark here, I mean, there's the bathroom, the back of the shop. The lights are all off except for the studio lights, and even with the blaring studio lights, I love the infinity thing. We're able to easily read what's on here. You can see my bad handwriting that goes on the whiteboard, the case that I stare at behind here. So this is that Amcrest camera, and it's a pretty good job. Here's the Reolink camera, which is kind of, it's a dome one, so it's mounted to point up, and whoops, there we go. Spin that around and give you an idea how these look. Like I said, these aren't any meant to be in depth on this, but kind of gives you the idea that the camera's got pretty good quality. Yeah, and the other one is the Amcrest PTZ, which is another 2K camera, I believe. Yeah, this is another 2K camera. We'll leave links to where you can get all these on there, but this one's cool because it's the Synology even supports sending the, yeah, the pan and tilt function. So this one doesn't have optical zoom, but you can still zoom in digitally, and then it fully supports. You can do patrols, yeah, just as the pan and tilt doesn't have the zoom, so it's just a PT camera, but if you get the more advanced ones, these are all supported. But the other thing that we have in here is the BNC system by Dahua. This is where that solution comes in for the bar. Yeah, BNC connectors here. Yeah, so we bought a really cheap BNC camera, but we're actually shocked at how good the quality is on it. It's actually quite good. It's a 1080p BNC. Yeah, and so we're the cameras at the bar. So it's going to be fed by some BNC cameras and 1080p, but this is the big but for this solution. You may have noticed when you're looking at the live view that, what, we'll go live view over here. There's a camera missing, and if you mouse over it, it will give you that error message. The video format or resolution is not supported by your local display. Kyle spent a lot of time trying to solve this problem. If we use something that's supported by the browser, it gets what, artifacting? Yeah, so the problem is this, specifically this Dahua box, because this is a Dahua NVR down here, which is what's actually giving us the IP stream for the BNC camera. It supports H.264 encoding and H.265. That being said, Chrome and as far as I know Firefox, they don't support H.265. So it will record just fine. You can download the videos just fine. You can't view them in a Chrome based browser. And as far as I know Firefox, I haven't tested that one personally. Right. There is a desktop application you can use, sees it just fine. It uses its own encoding. Yeah, so if you download a Solid Surveillance Station desktop app, not what you see running on here, it works perfectly fine. Also, and I'll show you this, even on my Linux computer, if we're over here and we open up the, let's go to the Surveillance Station here. And then we open this up and then we're going to go ahead and download a video from the file. I can play back that video perfectly fine. So that's the good is we're getting a little, at least in a short term, keep all the cameras this person has at the bar for the existing BNCs, but they're going to have to not live view them except for on a desktop, which they have a Windows computer there. So he'll be able to watch it on his Windows computer, no problem. And you can set up the software to work remotely and still view it on a Windows computer from home. And of course, when we go to the recordings here. And another thing that I wanted to point out is actually the BNC cameras currently recording at 720, because 1080 just seemed to not be a stable connection. You'd get a lot of artifacting you'd get any time there was motion on the screen, you would get ghosting and everything. So it in terms of a surveillance camera, it was pretty bad. And we tried changing the bit rates and everything. It wasn't until we turn the resolution down and turn the bit rate down. Even though we've got other cameras on here that are much higher bit rates. The BNC one seems to have a problem with the higher bit rates, unfortunately. Yeah. And that's it. But here's what the recording looks like. We should probably have motioned it around a little bit. Did you motion here maybe? Probably not. Oh yeah, here we go. Here's where you're playing with a little bit. So you can see that the camera doesn't have a horrible quality. No, we may add it to our review list when we're testing all these out. Maybe because it's still recording at 720. The cameras don't look bad. Like I said, it's a 1080p camera, but it still looks great in 720. Yeah, it's enough to get the job done. That's kind of our point to it is it's a workable solution. The more ideal situation is hey, by all new 4k cameras, by all new, even these real links that are only 2k, but these are good too, that would be a better solution. But you know, if you have a bunch of cameras and I think he's got like nine cameras, he didn't want to spend the expense on that. And this is a pretty affordable box. This box is what it was $200. I think it was like $2,250, something like that. That's for the discless model. Yeah, for the discless, then you add a couple drives to it and it comes with four camera licenses because yes, I know it's something that does have a license, but save you the Google search. Yes, the licenses are reasonably priced roughly $50 or cheaper when you buy them in bulk. I think individually, they're $60. But if you buy the bulk packages, they get a bit cheaper per license. Yeah, you can buy like up to eight licenses and save a $500. And they're a one time purchase. They're not something you have to renew every year. Right. You pretty much just have to buy the licenses for as many cameras as you want once when you set up the NVR. And then that's it. You can keep putting and you can take the cameras off and you can put new ones on. You have that many camera slots on that NVR. So if the camera dies, you can just remove it from the NVR, put the new one on and it uses that same license slot. So yeah, and they're transferable. That is something we got confirmation from Synology because we weren't real clear. We figured they were, but I wanted I didn't see it or at least didn't immediately see it. Maybe they updated their websites. I suggested that they do that. But if you decide that this 1218 and it does have kind of a limit how many cameras you could put on it. If you wanted something bigger, you weren't out all that license money, you buy the bigger model and then copy and move all the licenses, the config. As a matter of fact, you can import an expert, your config, your setup and everything over to another Synology that's bigger. So that's actually a really nice feature of it because this is what they can afford today. Maybe they want something bigger tomorrow. Kind of the way that they decide to add too many more cameras. Like if they want another four cameras, this one will handle that. But if they said they want another six cameras, we're going to start getting into, you should get a bigger box. Yeah, because if you have a bunch of high-res cameras on here, it's just going to choke this machine. But overall, we like it. It's still a good solution. It's kind of a one-off. I mean, like I said, if you're in a pension, that's kind of how this particular project is. He does not want to get rid of it. But we, you know, he knows all the pitfalls we've talked to the client about how the solution is going to work and how it's going to be deployed. And I wanted to share that, though, and put this video together, that a lot of different options here with Synology. Maybe we'll do an on-site video at the bar. That might be kind of fun to show in the end. I think he'd be okay with it. He'd probably be okay. He's pretty cool customer. We love him. Yeah, I know everyone loves the on-site videos, but one of the things is always getting permission for our medical and legal clients or any compliance industry clients. They don't want us on site with cameras. But the bar, he likes being, you know, hey, come to my bar. By the way, I'm watching you. So he probably, he probably think of it as an advertising thing and share it out. So maybe we'll do a video when we go on-site and do it. But I'll leave links to all the different cameras and look for the upcoming camera review. We're gonna, so we're gonna build a rig that mounts all the cameras so we can get a more subjective view of what they all look like. And we're gonna actually take it outside. We'll do a couple inside with them. But I can see a lot of people want to know, what does it look like outside? What does it look like at night? What does it look like during the day? And I have some ideas. We're gonna draw some stuff in the back and alley or something. Yeah. This is what 10 feet looks like. This is what 20 feet looks like. This is, can you read the license plate? Yeah, that's exactly it. The same customer actually wanted to get a couple for home too, to see if he can read license plates going down a street. So, you know, we'll test whether or not these cameras can do that. Yeah. And we'll give you exact feet measurements. Like I said, I can't really do a good strong camera review in this setting. In the studio here. Yeah. But I'm shocked at how well these cameras look based on the fact that, you know, we got these lights glaring at it. Especially this real thing. This thing has got a glass dome on it. And it's not flaring. It's not glaring that much despite, I mean, these are really bright lights looking at us here. Yeah. I have to say, out of the two so far that I've tested the most, the 4K M-Cross looks really nice. But this real link looks pretty nice too. Yeah. We, we, I have another video coming up about all the real links we installed a few months ago for a client. I collected a lot of video with it. And it's, they're all outdoor. They have now survived several disastrous storms we just had passed through. Another one last night. That way my review is yes, there's no water in it after two absolutely crazy downpours and these are left directly exposed to the elements. There's not an overhang. They're mounted to the side of a brick building. Oh, that's another video coming up. All right. And thanks. And like I said, links below to everything. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon. If you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. 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