Thanks for the detailed reply about the double index pre allocated file system. This is not what we are used to seeing in dashcams, so it's no surprise that we are both curious and cautious about how it works.
The ability to download an original quality clip of variable length is a useful feature.
350K units a day.
Regarding the US government, they loose some they win some, for instance they have free unrestricted access to all Danish internet and Phone resources, why i have no idea the first thing they did with it was spy on us and other European leaders.
I would cut that fiber in a heartbeat, cuz with friends like that i would rather take my chance with the religious nutcase that was probably the reason for giving them access.
It is of course always nice to be the one doing the spying VS being the one spied on.
I just want the best cams I can get for my purposes. I don't care who else might see what they capture. If any government, foreign or domestic, doesn't already have any info my dashcam or home security cams might collect they would be poor spies, and we know they aren't. So I have no problems with Hikivision dashcams regardless of what my government may think of it. Besides, this thread is about a Canadian release and this is an International forum, so whatever I or my Government might think has no bearing here.
I know it's not easy for some members, but let's please try to not let politics enter this thread and make a mess of it It's about dashcams and that's all it needs to be about And any improvements or different approaches to dashcams is interesting to me regardless of anything else.
It's not just the US government. Any individual or government with more than 2 brain cells put together knows that Hikvision is essentially owned by the Chinese government.
However, this is a simple dash cam product and there are things that one can do to mitigate that risk.
It won't have access to internet if you don't allow it to, and if you're careful of not allowing certain permissions on the app that are not necessary for dash cam operation (or even installing the app in the first place) and resort to good old fashioned puling out the SD card, you should be good.
For Hikvision dashcams...I'm looking for video quality and reliability, and less so about the "smart" features/capabilities.
I would tend to agree with @Lothar. As long as a dash camera is not on the network full time and wifi access is restricted to intermittent use with careful attention to which permissions are enabled, the device should be pretty secure. While many Chinese companies are directly connected to the government, the fact is that they are also going business concerns and not all of their motives or products are necessarily sinister. I'm having trouble imagining what espionage value random consumer dash cam videos or statistics would be to the Chinese government. (although I guess nothing would surprise me)
The primary concern with Hikvison is with networked security cameras in large scale surveillance systems that are installed in corporate and governmental settings.
Of which none of these DashCams are marketed or supported on Hikvision's website. Only being sold through "3rd Party Vendors". So if Hikvision does indeed "officially" sell and support the F6 pro, it makes no mention of the product anywhere.
The dash cams provide a lightweight solution for on-board monitoring. The cameras can work standalone as a recorder or work with other mobile cameras as a central platform. Hikvision's dash cams are slim in design and powerful in features like real-time monitoring, vehicle tracking, driver...
www.hikvision.com
Unless you have a Jomise K7 in hand to "compare to a Hikvision", then making such a blanket statement that a similar item is indeed identical is without merit.
At the very best, if we even take that the F6 Pro is "on the market", @RickyC mentioned numerous products not yet sold or on the market.
I do have a Jomise K7 on hand, and I'll compare to the Hikvision once I get mine.
Back when I tested the Jomise, that seller had virtually no knowledge of the product they were selling or ability to support it, so the support was not available when I ran into issues. The miniplayer app did not work on my computer and at that time and handbrake was hit/miss. Handbrake would only work if a container file had been fully written from start to finish and not broken in the middle (ie car turned off, or incomplete file). In some cases I had to screen record to get video footage that my editor could work with. Always there was 1 - 3 seconds of corrupted video at the front of each clip, and it looked like an issue with the player decoding more than the camera itself. The seller at that time, did not offer all the background things to support a proprietary format, so I gave it a rather scathing review overall.
To me, of course, the reliability is #1, and losing 1 second per minute was quite a bad look because the conversion software did not work. And the app was definitely sketchy.
I'm super keen to see how things have changed, what has changed in the last 8 months since I tested that camera. Hopefully now that they've been into the market for a while, some of the bugs have been fixed.
If you want me to look out for anything in particular, I expect to receive a K7 in a few days, I'll keep my eyes out for it.
I think it would be pretty easy to spot on network traffic alone, if your ( Chinese brand ) CCTV camera suddenly started to send to China too.
But anyone should of course show due diligence, so you should probably not put up any brand camera in your war / situation room or if American the Oval office.
They are also removing a lot of Chinese brand cctv cameras here, out up as the government / municipal government have a tendency to go for the cheap option, Chinese brands have also been kicked to the curb here for the 5G networks going up,,,,,, which i think is also justified just on shear suspicion alone, cuz one can never be too careful.
But a camera filming the sidewalk outside a library, i dont fear so much if it was Chinese and could maybe be misused by people it was not intended for. ( assuming someone at least have a basic eye on said camera and the network it is connected to )
Here there are also talks now of ditching the otherwise lucrative taxes on cars,,,, only to replace that with a tax for every driven KM, and they probably want to register that by putting a tracker in each car, and put up even more ANPG cameras,,,,,,,, something i am not too happy about just on shear feeling my personal freedom violated.
That's true. For example, I have a reverse firewall on my computer. Every time any piece of software, including the system tries to phone home or connect to some server somewhere, I get an alert and it will not allow the connection until I give it permission or don't give permission either temporarily or create permanent rules for each connection. You can allow or deny permissions permanently, until quit, until restart, for a set period of minutes, hours or days or restrict connections to specific IP address. It can also geo-locate the server connections and do other stuff. It wouldn't be too hard to have this capability in a surveillance system instead of a PC.
It is important to mention the elephant in the room and get the views of members.
As @SawMaster said I’m not interested in getting into political views but did want to give @RickyC the opportunity to clarify.
Hikvision dash cams may not be a concern as some members have indicated.
Don’t underestimate what can be done in the cyber space. Look up Stuxnet at what can be done with various bits of apparent none related information. The USA and Israel was said to have created the software.
I had to mention the elephant in the room, which I have and will leave that direction and return to general chat.
Even if i designed and build my own CCTV camera, and i was a top shelf geek and engineer would i put a camera like that up inside my house / apartment.
TBH if i got to where i could buy / build a little house i would like to have have 2 systems, the main one on a not connected network, and a connected one that would have a few cameras aimed at the places any visitors would come from.
So that i would get notifications if i was not at home and anyone is lurking in the shadows, as these kinds of systems have alarm in and outputs i have ( lying in bed for many hours trying to sleep ) contemplated using said outputs to trigger severe but probably not lethal countermeasures / deterrents when i am not home.
There is no doubt nations and also individual can be a major concern on the internet, and what we have seen even with some people spilling the beans lately, well i am sure the surface have barely been scratched.
I think it would be pretty easy to spot on network traffic alone, if your ( Chinese brand ) CCTV camera suddenly started to send to China too.
But anyone should of course show due diligence, so you should probably not put up any brand camera in your war / situation room or if American the Oval office.
They are also removing a lot of Chinese brand cctv cameras here, out up as the government / municipal government have a tendency to go for the cheap option, Chinese brands have also been kicked to the curb here for the 5G networks going up,,,,,, which i think is also justified just on shear suspicion alone, cuz one can never be too careful.
But a camera filming the sidewalk outside a library, i dont fear so much if it was Chinese and could maybe be misused by people it was not intended for. ( assuming someone at least have a basic eye on said camera and the network it is connected to )
Here there are also talks now of ditching the otherwise lucrative taxes on cars,,,, only to replace that with a tax for every driven KM, and they probably want to register that by putting a tracker in each car, and put up even more ANPG cameras,,,,,,,, something i am not too happy about just on shear feeling my personal freedom violated.
In NZ they had road use charges, for petrol vehicles it was rolled into the price of gas (in theory cars that take more gas damage the roads more) but for diesel I think it was charged based on per 1,000km driven and just paid in advance by odometer at rego renewal or at yearly inspection
I take your point @LateralNW and am tempted to respond but I fear this subject could totally derail this thread. It is such a juicy subject that we might want to start a dedicated thread in the Off Topic sub-forum where we could talk about cybersecurity, spyware, malware, espionage, etc.
Just the other day I read a fascinating and rather terrifying essay by a famous journalist who described what it was like and the lengths he eventually had to go through with his devices and computers and phones being the target of multiple state intelligence agencies as a result of his reporting. In one instance, he describes opening his iPad in a moving taxi just in time to see in real time that someone had gained root access to the iPad via command line and was issuing commands and downloading his files before the screen went black. Blew my mind that something like that could happen remotely on a random street in a big city in a moving vehicle. If he hadn't decided to open his iPad when he did he would not have known anything happened. Anyway, like I said, this would be a good topic to take elswhere.
I received an F6S for testing and I'm happy to report that set-up was reasonably fluid and straightforward. Note these are initial impressions and subject to change.
- App is still required for first time set-up (the camera will tell you "Please register with app" non stop until you do so with a QR code on the screen)
Some things about the set up:
- It prompts you to change wi-fi password on the camera during set up; most other cams I forget about this honestly, and it could potentially be a security issue if you leave the password as 1234567890
- Camera defaults to 1440p25FPS, make sure to change it to 30FPS
Within the app (iOS):
- There is a sliding timeline of the day, in which it shows where video is recorded and you can go through it to pull out 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 min, 3 min, etc. versus showing individual clips
- Not commenting on the app permissions yet because I have already said my part on it and from the sounds of things this concern is being worked on
- App does require access to wifi/mobile data in order to register the camera. My phone I tested it on doesn't have a sim in it and it still allowed set up even without mobile data
On the computer:
- I'm on mac at the moment so I have not tested Miniplayer; will do so in the coming days
- VLC Mac has no trouble playing video clips. Quicktime won't do it
- Handbrake will re-encode it for editing on standard software. However it does the "glitch for first second" that I saw when I was previously testing this cam. This appears to be only an issue with Handbrake and this specific H265 codec at the moment because VLC plays it with no issue right from the start of the clip.
- The SD card is pre-loaded with many empty video files
Video quality:
- Will need further testing to comment more on overall performance, initial impressions for detail/resolution are quite positive
- Variable bit rate with average approx 15,000 kb/s when taken directly off of SD card (file naming format is HIV00000.MP4) (I am also "averaging" based on what I see in VLC, as Media Info won't give me a bitrate) // H265
- Video taken from the app is around the same bitrate (maybe 13,000 average) but substantially more compression noise, it acts like "normal" video footage would act and is playable in all softwares // H264
- Video colour saturation may be too high for my preferences
- Some white balance issues when going between shade and sun
Initial Comments:
- I would recommend changing the file naming structure. HIV is the name of a bad disease, maybe I am being immature but it does not sound very good. An example, HKV, would be better. Thankfully when exported from the app there is not this file name.
- I would recommend changing the default video format to 30FPS instead of 25FPS
I have included some screen shots below. I'm curious what you like about them. And if you have specific questions you want answered about this camera I'll do my best!
I do have to say that I had the same reaction to the notion of using "HIV" as a file name pre-fix due to the unavoidable association with the disease. I assume "HIV"is meant to imply "Hikvision" in some form but perhaps it should have been (or still could be) something like "HVIS" or something similar.
Aside from that the screen shots are impressive, especially the overall control of dynamic range compared to the Viofo A139.
Question: Is the file name HIV used throughout the Hikvision product range, including CCTV cameras? Or is it just confined to the dash cams?
Impressive!!
I was looking at the pictures very well looking at different points of detail before revealing the spoiler to see which one was which, and to my surprise the one that I found the best to my liking is the Hickvision.
I also find interesting the use of HIV as a file name pre-fix since it has almost universal meaning for a nasty disease.
I received an F6S for testing and I'm happy to report that set-up was reasonably fluid and straightforward. Note these are initial impressions and subject to change.
- App is still required for first time set-up (the camera will tell you "Please register with app" non stop until you do so with a QR code on the screen)
Some things about the set up:
- It prompts you to change wi-fi password on the camera during set up; most other cams I forget about this honestly, and it could potentially be a security issue if you leave the password as 1234567890
- Camera defaults to 1440p25FPS, make sure to change it to 30FPS
Within the app (iOS):
- There is a sliding timeline of the day, in which it shows where video is recorded and you can go through it to pull out 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 min, 3 min, etc. versus showing individual clips
- Not commenting on the app permissions yet because I have already said my part on it and from the sounds of things this concern is being worked on
- App does require access to wifi/mobile data in order to register the camera. My phone I tested it on doesn't have a sim in it and it still allowed set up even without mobile data
On the computer:
- I'm on mac at the moment so I have not tested Miniplayer; will do so in the coming days
- VLC Mac has no trouble playing video clips. Quicktime won't do it
- Handbrake will re-encode it for editing on standard software. However it does the "glitch for first second" that I saw when I was previously testing this cam. This appears to be only an issue with Handbrake and this specific H265 codec at the moment because VLC plays it with no issue right from the start of the clip.
- The SD card is pre-loaded with many empty video files
Video quality:
- Will need further testing to comment more on overall performance, initial impressions for detail/resolution are quite positive
- Variable bit rate with average approx 15,000 kb/s when taken directly off of SD card (file naming format is HIV00000.MP4) (I am also "averaging" based on what I see in VLC, as Media Info won't give me a bitrate) // H265
- Video taken from the app is around the same bitrate (maybe 13,000 average) but substantially more compression noise, it acts like "normal" video footage would act and is playable in all softwares // H264
- Video colour saturation may be too high for my preferences
- Some white balance issues when going between shade and sun
Initial Comments:
- I would recommend changing the file naming structure. HIV is the name of a bad disease, maybe I am being immature but it does not sound very good. An example, HKV, would be better. Thankfully when exported from the app there is not this file name.
- I would recommend changing the default video format to 30FPS instead of 25FPS
I have included some screen shots below. I'm curious what you like about them. And if you have specific questions you want answered about this camera I'll do my best!
