Reolink Duo (PoE)

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RonRN18
Posts: 52
Joined: Tue Aug 13, 2019 1:00 am

Reolink Duo (PoE)

Post by RonRN18 »

On the front of my house, I currently have an Anpiz dome-style camera with a 2.8 mm lens, providing about a 110° field of view. I would like to have a larger field of view and saw the Reolink Duo is essentially two cameras in one housing that together, provides 150° of vision. After doing some research, I decided to purchase one from Amazon.

The camera arrived yesterday but I didn't get a chance to look at it until today. In my current setup, with the dome camera, I drilled a hole through the face of the front of my house above my driveway into the attic. The PoE cable that came with that camera was passed through this hole and then is connected to a network cable in the attic space; no wires are seen from the outside. This Reolink Duo, which kind of looks like it could be used as a robot's head, stands out proud using a mounting arm. I could see in pictures that it has a hole in the base that I figured was for feeding the PoE cable and the superfluous DC barrel-jack-socket connector through. I call the DC connector superfluous as I am using the camera the way it was designed... Power-over-Ethernet. The diameter of the PoE connector is 19 mm. The diameter of the Ethernet wire and the DC barrel-connector together is less than that. The hole in the mounting arm... 18.5 mm. What the freak?!?!?!?! The mounting arm attaches to a metal plate that you directly mount to a solid surface with two screws. The metal plate has a piece that hooks the mounting arm at the top and then the mounting arm is secured on the bottom with a single screw into the metal plate. The hole in the metal plate is I believe 22-23 mm, so the PoE connector could easily pass through it. Another frustration, even if I were to ream the hole in the mounting arm by 0.5 mm, is the fact that the camera is designed to mount ABOVE the mounting arm, but the cable comes out of the camera from near the top side of the camera and if I could fit the wire through, it is on the underside of the mounting arm. Physically, the mounting arm was designed with a few major flaws. I wish that I knew how to design my own mounting arm and make a new one with a 3D printer, but alas, I don't have the knowledge set nor the equipment to do that.

From a technology side, for the most part, I am happy with the camera. I set it up from the built-in web interface. To start off with, the default login is with the username of "admin" and the password is left blank. You then have a choice to choose "Clear", "Fluent" or "Balanced." I selected "Clear", which is the higher quality video feed. I set a fairly complicated admin password and thankfully, it has a user config section that allows you to create additional users. I created a user that I called "ZoneMinder" and gave another complicated password; this user ONLY has the ability to view feeds but not to make any changes. As to the camera functionality, I disabled all video overlays and disabled recording on the camera, as this will be the role of ZoneMinder. When it comes to video, there are three resolution options for the high-quality main feed: 2560x1440, 2304x1296, and 1920x1080. For framerate, the default is 22 fps but is capable of 25 fps. On Max Bit Rate, you have several options, with the highest being 5120 Kbps. On my network, bandwidth is not a real factor; all of my gigabit switches have 10 Gbps fiber interconnects. As to the lower-quality, sub-feed, or as Reolink calls it, "Fluent", there is no choice in resolution, it is always 640x360. You have a choice between 10 and 15 fps and the max bit rate is capped at 384 Kbps or the low end is capped at 64 Kbps. There is just one screen for making these settings and the same settings are used for camera 1 and camera 2. If you make a change in the resolution, the camera will have to reboot and many other settings will be reset to defaults other than the resolution change you just made.

Now, for connecting the cameras to ZoneMinder, I am using RTSP.

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High Resolution Main Feeds
Left: rtsp://username:password@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:554/h264Preview_01_main
Right: rtsp://username:password@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:554/h264Preview_02_main

Low Resolution Sub Feeds
Left: rtsp://username:password@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:554/h264Preview_01_sub
Right: rtsp://username:password@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:554/h264Preview_02_sub
As if it isn't obvious, you would type in your own username and password instead of those words and you would replace the xxx's with the camera's IP address.

It has been raining all day and I've been playing with this camera in my "office". My office is a climate-controlled, detached garage. Please excuse the messiness of my "office" space as I just have the camera sitting on a desk in my "office" at the moment. I included a cropped screenshot of the montage of the two feeds. Yes, this is two cameras in one house, not one super-widescreen camera; this means a little less distortion for such a wide view.
OfficeDuo.jpg
OfficeDuo.jpg (404.17 KiB) Viewed 1873 times
My only gripe on the technology side is I occasionally get some shots where the lower half of one of the high-resolution streams temporarily gets all messed up... a ton of vertical/colorful lines filling up the bottom half of the image. I have changed the resolution down to 1080p and changed the fps from 25 to the default 22 fps but I still get this distortion popping up a few times every few minutes.

I would be curious if anyone else has any other thoughts about this camera.
RonRN18
Posts: 52
Joined: Tue Aug 13, 2019 1:00 am

Re: Reolink Duo (PoE)

Post by RonRN18 »

I have been having quite a bit of artifact with the Reolink Duo on their RTSP video stream. I knew I wasn't having network problems, but there was a near constant issue with digital artifact on the screen. Then I was looking in the built-in web interface and noticed that it never had any of the same digital artifact. I then right-clicked on the web-interlace video preview and saw I could bring up media info. In that info was an "HTTP" url. I plugged that URL into ZoneMinder and it works. It works, but there is a problem; it uses a token that is likely to change semi-frequently. I wrote to Reolink's tech support and they acknowledged that they are having issues with their RTSP streaming and hoping to fix it with a firmware update at some point; there have been no firmware updates since the camera has come to market. They advised me that I could change from the token to a username and password. The HTTP URL is in the following format:

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http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/flv?port=1935&app=bcs&stream=channel0_main.bcs&user=[USERNAME]&password=[PASSWORD]
The variable for channel is either a "0" for left or "1" for right. I believe that I could substitute the "main" for "sub" to get the lower quality feed, but the lower quality feed has been working well with RTSP, it is only the higher quality feed that has issues. In the example I show above, it is selecting the left camera's main feed.
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