Strange Networking Issue NV4108E-HS

[mluchterhand]

I am having a strange issue with the NV4108E-HS and hoping someone may have something for me to try. I have 8 POE 4K cameras - if I plug all 8 in all 8 video streams show on the connected monitor and everything is recording fine. However, the NVR network card acts up. If I continuously ping the local address of the network card over 50% of the packets are lost. Because of this packet loss, I can not view the cameras anywhere except on the NVR monitor itself. It is a high priority that we get this system up and running so my first assumption was that I received a faulty NVR so I ordered a second one (same exact model). When I connected all the cameras with this NVR I got the same exact results.

Eventually I got around to booting up the system with no cameras connected. I started a continuous ping to the NVR and started plugging cameras in one at a time to see if a particular camera could be causing the issue. All the pings are fine until I connected the 6th camera and then the packet loss began. I thought I had found the culprit and then rebooted and started plugging in cameras one at a time again (this time leaving out the original camera 6). However, the same exact thing happened when I got to the new 6th camera. To me it seems like the NVR is overloading when it gets to 6 cameras. It clearly says on the product description that it supports 8 4K cameras so I can not figure out why two different NVRs are having the exact same issue. I have tried all of the following and nothing has helped:

New NVR (as mentioned above)
New cable from router to NVR
Different port on router (gigabit ports)
Static and DHCP address assignment of NVR
Updated to latest firmware version
Lowering resolution of cameras from 4K to 1080P
Several reboots of both the NVR and router

I would appreciate any recommendations. I talked to Amcrest support twice today. The first tech told me to unplug the NVR for 10 minutes and try again (didn't work). The second tech seemed more willing to help but his Teamviewer software was not working and to try calling again later. Thanks in advance.

[plusfour]

If you read between the lines in some of the Amcrest docs, it looks like there can be bandwidth and/or CPU issues with many cameras and high resolutions and frame rates. I would look further around dropping bandwidth/CPU requirements, e.g. lower frame rates, change the encoding type to a less CPU-intensive one, and similar.

[jack7]

The NVR sounds overloaded. You could try adjusting any or all of the camera settings resolution, fps, and bit rate.
Changing resolution will help but it will likely reduce field of view. With 4K resolution, you could try 15 fps and 4-8K bit rate, and re-adjust all settings thereafter if needed for better results. Also you could reduce the substream settings or disable it if not needed for phones, etc.
Another option, a POE switch may(?) help to reduce the NVR load. Cameras would need to be removed from NVR and added back to NVR after the switch was installed. With the POE switch, you could access the cameras directly from the Web UI which is better for changing settings, and display the cameras directly from Web UI or Surveillance Pro if needed.
In any case, you may still have a problem with displaying all of the 4K cameras simultaneously on your PC because of your CPU speed, even with the reduced data stream achieved after settings changes if changes aren't enough.

[plusfour]

The NVR sounds overloaded. You could try adjusting any or all of the camera settings resolution, fps, and bit rate. Changing resolution will help but it will likely reduce field of view.

It could require fiddling with a range of different parameters depending on where the bottleneck is. For example the newer cameras use something like Ambarella H1 or H2s which have hardware support for H.265 encoding, but then the NVR will be doing further processing in software, or at least with less hardware support for the video processing than the cameras producing the video stream have, and a PC being used to display the video will probably be doing a lot of the work in software. The OP mentioned that changing the resolution didn't help, so as you suggest trying fps and bit rate could work, e.g. try VBR rather than CBR. I'd also try dropping from H.265 to H.264 or even MJPEG (ugh), which will be less work to decode at the receiving end.

[mluchterhand]

Thank you everyone for the assistance. I should add that all of these cameras are Amcrest brand as well. For some reason, adding a regular network switch between the router and NVR has helped tremendously. I now get virtually 0 packet loss but I am still getting spikes about every 5 seconds which results in choppy video. I have taken the following additional steps to try to stop the spikes but nothing has helped:

Lowering Resolution from 4K to 2560x1440 on all cameras
Disabling Motion Detection
Lowering Bit Stream from 4096kbps to 3072kbps on all cameras
Disabling Extra Stream on all cameras

I would think that this should have freed up some resources on the NVR but it has not seemed to help. Here are my current settings which are still resulting in spikes/choppiness every 5 seconds or so:

Stream Type: General
Encode Type: H.264H
Resolution: 2560x1440
FPS: 15
StreamCtrl: BRC CBR
Bit Stream: 3072kbps
Iframes: 40
Extra Stream: Disabled

I did try to change the encode type from H.264H to H.264 and it did not help. Any other suggestions?

[jack7]

Are you now getting the choppy video/spike on both your NV console and a network device? What kind of network device and software are you using to display camera video and how is the device connected to your router?

[phifer9059]

I know this is an older thread but I have a similar issue. My problem exists if I plug the NVR into a switch behind my cable modem/router. When I plug directly into the cable modem I have no issue, but I have tried connecting to 2 different model Cisco switches and 2 different TP-Link switches. I have 8 Amcrest 4K cameras connected. The LAN port on the NVR registers as a 100 Mbps connection.

The NVR is a NV4108E-HS running System Version:3.215.00AC000.0, Build Date: 2018-01-05. This is not an issue but a nusense.

[Revo2Maxx]

@phifer9059 Hello and welcome to the Forum.

So it kind of sounds like a Cable issue

So could you please explain your problem more and or maybe move to another thread for your problem as it might be different.

So to see if I understand what your saying. When your connected to your Router with no other switch or hub in the way your able to connect just fine? However if you plug into one of your Cisco or Tp-Link Switches you now have connection issues?

Top of my Head I am going to guess as stated before a cable issue.

When your connected to one of your Cisco Switches have you checked the Status of the port it is connected to?

Your not looking for Package Loss really your looking for Internal MAC Receive Errors or Frame Check Sequence (FCS) Errors. If you haven't been in to the menu of your switches. Log into the Admin account, then on one of mine menu is on left side on the other it is on the top lol.. But your looking for status. Then you want to click the Port Drop Down box and click the Port it is connected to, In say one I was having issues with g24. It will bring up all up and down data and then under that area is some other days Any # over 0 in either of them 2 I posted says there is a Port or Cable issue.

Also if your NVR is a POE, All ports on the NVR would be on a different network so if you wanted to connect to the cameras you would want to have a Switch on the back side of the NVR... While I am not going to get into a way to setup so you can run a computer on both front and backside of the NVR it can be done with the right hardware.

The status would look something like this...

Interface
Receive Statistics
Total Bytes (Octets) 2685248288
Unicast Packets 377440667
Multicast Packets 71766
Broadcast Packets 760945
Packets with Errors 0
Transmit Statistics
Total Bytes (Octets) 581081431
Unicast Packets 192294874
Multicast Packets 191219
Broadcast Packets 6966
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ethernet-like
Frame Check Sequence (FCS) Errors 0
Single Collision Frames 0
Late Collisions 0
Oversize Packets 0
Internal MAC Receive Errors 0
Received Pause Frames 0
Transmitted Pause Frames 0

[bakin7005]

I'm having exact same issue as the op. Did you get this resolved?

[equinox2021]

I am having the exact same issue as the OP as well and it's been driving me crazy.Trying to ping the NVR and getting super high ping times and more then half of the packets dropping. Do you guys know if there is a way to disable the NVR from acting as a DHCP server? I generally prefer setting up VLANs myself and I don't like that the NVR hands out DHCP. I don't usually use Amcrest, I have a client who wanted to use them. It's been a pretty disappointing experience so far TBH, but I could also just be missing something.