Just got one of these, added it to a collection of Lorex and Hikvision. It went surprisingly well and most things work.

Curious if others have it, and have any tips to share.

I am confused (and have seen both recommendations) on setup, Generic/ONVIF or Reolink, both seem to work. I saw one recommendation to set with generic then change (though that would seem to preclude doing inspect later to bring over presets). Is there a description what is different in these settings?

I am using the built in motion/object detection, then throwing it to the AI, and seems to work well, though I have indications that the area masking does not always work (getting correctly recognized objects in the no-detection areas). Not sure if that is happening only when it is moving (PTZ).

Tracking works surprisingly well, except when I walk to close to underneath. Better than I expected.

The 16x zoom is impressive but pretty useless unless you are doing it manually on a static object, there doesn't seem to be such a concept as "when you see an object zoom in to it while tracking". Which would be cool, but probably more than one can expect.

I love their 3D PTZ - any chance it is being considered for Blue Iris (is it even possible over ONVIF)?

Would appreciate any wisdom others have gained to fine tune this. Though Reolink has a pretty limited number of setup items you can change.

Linwood

Sorry I cannot help, but hoping you may be able to steer me in the right direction.

I just got one of these cameras as well. Having fits with it, though.

I can get it to work set up as generic/onvif...And I can view the main stream in hi-res...but then the PTZ controls (set as onvif) are super laggy. If I set the stream to the h.264 substream, which looks like garbage, the PTZ controls work well. Any thoughts?

Motion with the PTZ control in BI for me takes about 2 seconds to react (e.g. to a pan right or left). That's with Generic ONVIF, RTSP H.264/H.265,MJPG/MPEG4.

I am not using a substream and am only running at 4fps. I will say that the 4fps is erratic, it's like I get all 4 frames in the first fraction of a second then a pause until the next second. Very odd, not smooth in the live stream, however the recorded stream is correct and smoothly spaced.

I'm also having the problem that the camera runs about 10s behind after a few hours. Disconnect/reconnect and it comes back current. This seems to be a common complaint.

Audio in works fine, I have had no luck getting audio from BI to the camera to work.

Motion detection from the camera read by BI is working great. I can't tell if it's 10s beyond or not .

Thanks for sharing your experience! Mine seems to correlate with yours.

If I view the main hi res stream, everything is really lagged. If I move the cam with BI PTZ controls, nothing changes in BI view, but the camera actually does move. Just doesn't show up in BI for 10-20 seconds. If I view the secondary 264 stream, everything is instant. Everything works as you would expect it to is using the Reolink PC app, or logging in via HTTPS direct to the camera.

Haven't messed around with the audio yet, so I cannot correlate with your experience.

Thanks again for sharing!

That sounds right. If you disconnect and reconnect the camera just before testing, I bet the main stream is current and PTZ is quick. The issue is latency in the main stream I think.

Some improvement in the main stream latency may be achieved by increasing the BI camera config receive buffer to 12MB. That, combined with a 'special' firmware update from Reolink, completely eliminated the latency issues I'd been experiencing from day one with my 811-A. Works perfectly now.

Never thought of the buffer, I just made it a huge 32mb. This system is memory rich. Will have to check with Reolink. What's odd is I was at maybe 4-5 hours of running and it was in sync (before changing the buffer) Not sure what that means.

With buffer at 32mb the last 24 hours or so fell behind only 3 seconds, so a definite improvement. No response from reolink.

I just went through this with reolink support with my trackmix duo. (Twice the problems!)

Long story short, I'm returning the camera for an RMA. The lag issue is intolerable. Reolink just threw their hands up.

BTW, the lag issue is also present in their app and VLC really throws a fit when viewing the streams long time, so the issue is clearly their firmware. But Reolink is refusing to fix it, so back it goes!

I realize that doesn't help anyone beyond the RMA period, but maybe it'll warn off others against reolink entirely.

Yeah, certainly will be the last Reolink I buy, the buffer was not a real fix, I'm back to 15s. It varies a lot how far off it is. I'm probably within my RMA period but it's installed, had to drill out holes in the bracket a bit, etc., so really can't return it.