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The issues that I've heard about Reolink have more to do with the equipment just not working well, as opposed to being involved in Uighur suppression. I don't k

The issues that I've heard about Reolink have more to do with the equipment just not working well, as opposed to being involved in Uighur suppression. I don't know if Reolink does ONVIF or not, however. And I'm not sure about many other brands. After checking to see if they are a brand owned by HikVision or Dahua, I would check the hardware compatibility lists of software like SecuritySpy (on the Mac) or Blue Iris (on Windows) to see what they say about the camera(s) in question, and also what they recommend.

eternityforest 5y ago
There seems to be vauge rumors about them being bad for some reason, but the reviews all seem good. Maybe they're heavy users of fake reviews. It looks like Huawei has some of the same issues too, but one exec resigned, so maybe things will improve. Xiaomi seems to have slave labor problems too.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  I've seen mixed reviews. Some say Reolink is good in certain situations, but others say otherwise. I have yet to find what I would consider to be a definitive review of them. I may have to try some out myself to find out.
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/homedefense/comments/8lkzw5/reolink_forcing_their_nvr_even_though_its_onvif/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share https://www.reddit.com/r/homedefense/comments/8lkzw5/reolink... Looks like they do have some degree of ONVIF support. But it seems like some of them use dynamic keyframe intervals and don't send often for my keyframes-only detection trick to work(Unless the motion lasts long enough to have at least 1 keyframe), and people say it also messes up sync with sub-streams, but I've never used substreams and am not sure what the issue is. I assume things like blue iris watch the substream and discard the main stream till they see motion, and they lose all the content in between detection and the next keyframe?
    - bradknowles 5y ago
      As I understand it, the typical technique is to capture both streams at once. The high-res stream is just cached locally for a short period of time, unless there is some reason to keep any part of it. The low-res stream is the one that is actively monitored for those things you do want to record. So, you'd need to keep the two streams in sync, and you'd want frequent key frames so that you don't miss anything when you start or stop recording of the high-res stream. That would also make it a lot easier to stitch the 24x7 low-res background stream into the sections of high-res that were also captured.
      - eternityforest 5y ago
        Seems a bit complicated and bandwidth heavy. I wonder if it really performs significantly better than just processing only the keyframes of the full HD stream? Most activities people want to monitor last longer than a keyframe interval, and object detection is pretty good these days. Plus, if you do your brief local cache with HLS segments, the HLS multiplexer makes sure that every segment is a valid independent block starting with a keyframe, so you can always reliably catch the activity that happens even a few seconds before the actual trigger event. But I suppose the 2 stream model makes sense if you want to record 24/7 no matter what, or if you need to catch brief faraway events that might not be clear enough to trip the motion/object detector.
        bradknowles 5y ago
        I think the key value of doing all tracking and monitoring based on the low-res stream is that it takes a lot less CPU power to do that, and therefore if you're monitoring 20-30 cameras as once, you don't have to buy a whole stack of NVIDIA Jetson devices to do all the processing.

eternityforest 5y ago

There seems to be vauge rumors about them being bad for some reason, but the reviews all seem good. Maybe they're heavy users of fake reviews. It looks like Huawei has some of the same issues too, but one exec resigned, so maybe things will improve. Xiaomi seems to have slave labor problems too.

bradknowles 5y ago
I've seen mixed reviews. Some say Reolink is good in certain situations, but others say otherwise. I have yet to find what I would consider to be a definitive review of them. I may have to try some out myself to find out.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/homedefense/comments/8lkzw5/reolink_forcing_their_nvr_even_though_its_onvif/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share https://www.reddit.com/r/homedefense/comments/8lkzw5/reolink... Looks like they do have some degree of ONVIF support. But it seems like some of them use dynamic keyframe intervals and don't send often for my keyframes-only detection trick to work(Unless the motion lasts long enough to have at least 1 keyframe), and people say it also messes up sync with sub-streams, but I've never used substreams and am not sure what the issue is. I assume things like blue iris watch the substream and discard the main stream till they see motion, and they lose all the content in between detection and the next keyframe?
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    As I understand it, the typical technique is to capture both streams at once. The high-res stream is just cached locally for a short period of time, unless there is some reason to keep any part of it. The low-res stream is the one that is actively monitored for those things you do want to record. So, you'd need to keep the two streams in sync, and you'd want frequent key frames so that you don't miss anything when you start or stop recording of the high-res stream. That would also make it a lot easier to stitch the 24x7 low-res background stream into the sections of high-res that were also captured.
    - eternityforest 5y ago
      Seems a bit complicated and bandwidth heavy. I wonder if it really performs significantly better than just processing only the keyframes of the full HD stream? Most activities people want to monitor last longer than a keyframe interval, and object detection is pretty good these days. Plus, if you do your brief local cache with HLS segments, the HLS multiplexer makes sure that every segment is a valid independent block starting with a keyframe, so you can always reliably catch the activity that happens even a few seconds before the actual trigger event. But I suppose the 2 stream model makes sense if you want to record 24/7 no matter what, or if you need to catch brief faraway events that might not be clear enough to trip the motion/object detector.
      - bradknowles 5y ago
        I think the key value of doing all tracking and monitoring based on the low-res stream is that it takes a lot less CPU power to do that, and therefore if you're monitoring 20-30 cameras as once, you don't have to buy a whole stack of NVIDIA Jetson devices to do all the processing.