Counter to every rational bone in my body, I like having security cameras installed at home. Practically speaking, they’re a great way to prove that it’s your neighbor’s dog that’s been leaving presents on the lawn. Otherwise, a camera system is probably frivolous. Though I’d very much liked to have grabbed a nice bundle of Unifi or generic PoE ONVIF cameras for my house, I instead opted for a very budget friendly (and FRUSTRATING) Zmodo Simplified PoE NVR system. For under $300 all in, you can have 4-8 cameras, an NVR, and a hard drive to record on. 2-star reviews seem to be no match for the sheer bargain value of these NVR systems. Warranty support for the cameras seems to be OK, but technical support and company policy regarding feature removal are atrocious.
My NVR is a Simplified PoE system and came with 4 cameras. I normally view my cameras on the Zviewer desktop app, which is intuitive enough. You open up the app, add your NVR either by IP address or via network discovery, and you should be off to the races. SHOULD. When I fired up Zviewer for the first time, I added my NVR using its IP address and the (non-default) admin credentials that I had set. Live video wasn’t displaying, but I could edit the remote settings and play back recordings.
Zmodo’s C- technical support advised me to add the camera via the “Lan Search” function, which didn’t work much better. The video wasn’t displaying AND my cameras were showing credential errors. Zviewer also wouldn’t let me edit the login it was using to access my NVR.
Turns out, the fix is pretty easy (and relatively permanent) but clunky as hell. In order to get Zviewer seeing cameras, I needed to manually edit the settings. I am using Zviewer 2.0.1.6 with my Zmodo ZM-SS7009D8-S, but these instructions probably work for a wide range of NVRs. In Windows 10, Zviewer stores settings in %AppData%\Zviewer (AppData/Roaming/Zviewer) in a file called Zsight.db. That interestingly named file is a simple SQLite database. Head over to sqlitebrowser.org, install DB Browser. Then, follow these steps:
- Delete any NVRs in Zviewer.
- Add your NVR via “LAN Search”.
- Close Zviewer.
- Launch DB Browser and open %AppData%\Zviewer\Zsight.db
- Click “Browse Data” and select the Device table from the drop down.
- In order to edit data, click the field (column) that you want to edit, and change the value in the text area on the right side of the screen. After changing the value, click the “Apply” button, or else your changes will be discarded without warning.
- For record 1, edit the following fields:
- Change “Alias” to whatever you want to call your DVR.
- Change “UserName” to the NVR admin you want to use.
- Change “Password” to the password you defined for that admin.
- After you’ve made these three changes, press the “Write Changes” button in the top toolbar. This will commit your changes to the database.
- Relaunch Zviewer to make sure that everything actually works.
Though changing settings like this is needlessly burdensome, it’s worth it to be able to see the cameras on the desktop. That said, if I had to do it all over again, I don’t know if I’d have still purchased a Zmodo NVR. Zmodo may break the NVR even worse with a firmware update down the line, or Zviewer could stop working completely, making my internet accessible camera system as useful as an analog one. YMMV.
