Hikvision NVR – Initial Setup / Add Cameras / Continuous Recording

Before we can do anything, we need to activate the device for first time use.  This is a security feature ensuring you have your own unique password and you’re not using a default one making your system vulnerable.  I’ll enter my password and confirm it here.

1. First off, you’re going to go crazy from the beeping. It’s beeping because the hard drive is not yet initialized.  I’ll turn down the volume so you don’t hear that in the video.
2. Set your Language
3. Set your NVR password XXXXXXXXX for accessing the NVR
4. Set your password for all cameras which need to be activated on the NVR system. This will be the password set on each camera: XXXXXXXX – do not select to export GUID.  This is for password recovery in the future
5. Set pattern 3, 6, 9, 8, 5 for NVR access
6. Enter your time zone and update the format and time and date as required.
7. Accept defaults for network for now. Basically, the IP address of the NVR on my network is 192.168.0.134 and internally on the NVR’s own private network, it’s know as 192.168.254.1.  It works like a router and that is the gateway IP address.  You will not be able to access the web user interface of your individual cameras connected to your NVR network from your computer.  If you open SADP from your PC, you cannot see each camera.  You can only see you’re the NVR’s IP address.  You can see your cameras’ feeds on your network by accessing the NVR’s IP address.
8. Click the box for the hard drive you want to initialize and press Int. Finally, the beeping will stop.  Once it’s formatted, move on to the next step.
9. On the camera setup screen here, it’s showing all the cameras on my network. In fact, I don’t see any of the cameras I have directly plugged into the NVR in this list.  If I unplug my LAN cable from the NVR, all the cameras disappear.  The reason is, this list shows cameras which can be added to your NVR’s viewing and recording.  The 2 new cameras have already been activated and assigned an IP address and the password we entered earlier for the cameras.  Therefore, they do not show in this list.  It makes life a lot easier, but I wish it was better communicated to me that this is what happened.
10. For the Platform Access, we are not setting up remote access now, that’s a big topic for another video.
11. Lastly on Change Password, we are going to leave that alone and exit the wizard.

1. Here we are brought to the Live View screen where we see the live feed from the cameras. The screen holds 16 cameras but we can change that to 4 by right clicking the mouse and going to the camera icon on top of the screen.  Select the grid icon and select 2 X 2. (wave to camera)  There is about a quarter to half second lag, which is awesome.  Very impressed.
2. To see your connected cameras, go to the Maintenance screen and select Camera.
3. Just below on the Record screen, you see the cameras are already recording continuously, which is just what I wanted. It also gives you the resolution of each camera which is active on the NVR.  It refreshing every second so it can show you the dynamic bitrate from each camera too.
4. So, let’s go and look at our footage. On the Playback screen, select the cameras you want to retrieve footage from.  Then click the play button on the bottom.  You can slide the timeline to pick the times you want to watch.  I don’t like how clunky this is.  It’s like I’m just seeing a screen capture in 10-minute intervals.  I wish it was smooth flowing as I moved the mouse.  I guess you can mouse over the events in the timeline to see images, but again, too clunky.
5. This is also a cool feature, on the Camera page under PoE Settings. It showing you the wattage being pulled by each camera, overall consumption and how many more watts of power are remaining before you hit the max limit.

My NVR is now setup and recording footage.  The process was ok, but the beeping was annoying and not knowing about the auto-activation of my cameras was confusing.  The NVR’s user interface is really good.  The playback seems a little limiting as I’m use to BlueIris’ experience for playback where you can scan all your footage at your own pace depending on your mouse speed.