Bluecherry BC-H16480A-16 port video, 16 port audio H.264 / PCIe hardware compression capture card

If your purpose in buying this card is to use it with Zoneminder, move on. Buy another card instead. I've had good success with the PV-149 and with the PV-183. This card does not work well with Zoneminder...it takes an awful lot of effort to get it working and when you do, according to others in the forum, the results are worse than the older PV cards (despite the h.264 encoding.) The card comes with no documentation, despite what it says above. The package contained the card, two 16-port cables (one for video and one for audio,) a 2-pin reset watchdog connector, and a sticker (presumably for your computer to display that you have bluecherry in your computer.) No documentation was found online for the card, and I pretty much set it up by looking at the supplied picture from the vendor and plug-and-pray.

I have not gotten this card working in Zoneminder on Mint Linux (despite the solo driver loading fine and the device appearing in lspci and in /dev/videoX.) I keep getting input/output errors when trying to access the card through Zoneminder, though it does work directly through ffmpeg and the camera software installed on Mint. Some of the folks on the forum got this card to work with ffmpeg, but they say it works worse than the older cards (slow and a lot of artifacts.) The documentation on the Zoneminder HCL, doesn't include any of the steps necessary to get the hardware running and it is purely by brute force that anyone has been able to get anything working. The link in the HCL goes nowhere.

*edit*: removed some of the misinformation from the original review, Bluecherry didn't submit the HCL entry. I did get it working, but was having the same problems that everyone else was having with artifacts.) Switched back to the PV-149 and 183 for now.

I also bought the Bluecherry DVR software and it's the best product on the market. You have to do a little work to assemble a linux server, and in my case I needed a 2U rackmount. For my installation I required a PCIe L bracket, and some extra mounting hardware. The features and accessibility of your video data is unmatched in any other DVR camera server.

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