CMS Software, DVR’s, Networking

We do installations for many businesses that have multiple locations and have the need to be able to view all of them at once.  We also get a lot of questions about how to do off-site recording.  CMS or Central Monitoring Software comes with our 4, 8 and 16 channel H.264 DVR’s.  We currently have all of our locations networked in order to give our customers a better understanding of what they will see.  The software is pretty simple and you can actually turn a remote PC into your very own off-site recorder.

The software also works independently from the DVR itself.  You can configure settings remotely but they only affect the computer that’s being used to view and record the video and not the DVR itself.  We found this to be very handy and a really nice way of not accidentally changing settings in the DVR.

During our testing of the CMS we also liked the quick record from a live view mode.  Just a simple button of start and stop and you can record a bit of what you see live.   The address book was easy enough to populate with IP addresses and you can log into 2 different locations as once.  They are separated by tabs and all you have to do is tab from one to the next.

Now of course the one thing that is most important to anyone in this business is .. “will it convert to an AVi file?” .. and yes, yes it will.  In the software in one of the video playback menu’s there is a convert to AVI function.  Very handy.

B. Eaton