101AV 8CH Security Camera System 1080P Full HD H.265/H.264 2in1 DVR/NVR, HD-TVI/CVI/AHD/IP, 1TB HDD, HDMI/VGA/BNC Video Out, Mobile APPs for Home/Office, Work w/ Analog & Network Cam up to 4MP(no PoE)

This is an updated review. After having problems with my initial unit and leaving a negative review here, one can see that the company reached out to me to correct the issue. Five business days after I responded to them (typical shipping time via UPS Ground from the west coast to the east coast) a new DVR arrived complete with shipping label to return the faulty unit. I swapped everything out, and the new DVR has been working for a couple of weeks with no issues, except the annoying beeping still happened occasionally, even though I *THOUGHT* I had disabled all of the alarms. With no further action on my part, 101AV called me again today to follow up and make sure everything was working well. When I told him about the alarm, he walked me through the process to turn it off, and also helped me realize that it was not connected to the internet. As it turned out, that was the cause of the alarm. The Ethernet cable I used had a broken retention clip and wasn't making good contact with the port. The technician was very friendly and helpful, and here's the part where the customer service goes above and beyond...he left me with his cell phone number and told me if I had any further problems not to hesitate to call and ask for help. That kind of service is worth five stars in my book! Based on my experience, I can't help but feel that a person can buy with confidence knowing that this company will stand behind their product. I have changed my initial rating of one star to a well earned five stars.Initial review I left:This DVR is an absolute lemon. By all indications, it worked fine at first, but over the past several weeks, cameras have been dropping out at random for a few minutes at a time. Now it seems that the DVR is rebooting itself every few minutes. This resets all of the settings to default, in particular the video loss alarm, which causes loud, annoying beeping every few minutes. Of course I am well past the Amazon return window. I fully regret this purchase. If you're shopping for a DVR, move on and choose something else.Edit: The company responded to this review and asked that I contact them. When I did, they very quickly decided to send a replacement unit with a return label for the defect. Since this process is still pending, I will leave the initial review as is, but will update as the situation progresses. I am impressed by the level of customer service.

I ordered this from Amazon to replace a hard-to-use DVR that came with my camera system. The prior DVR used remote viewing software that was hard to configure. I didn't know enough about ports and IP addresses to make it work well without professional IT assistance any time that it crashed. This new DVR arrived yesterday. It took me about an hour to get it up and running. It recognized my existing cameras immediately. I then downloaded the cell phone viewing app (Guarding Vision) and I had remote access. I then added it to my spouse's phone and my iPad. (using the same login for each, so we can probably only view remotely on one device at a time). I was able to do all of this myself by following the quick start up guide that came with the dvr. Now, to be fair, there are lots of options and settings that I did not fool around with. And probably never will. I just programmed mine to record on motion. Playback of recorded events on the cell phone app has worked well so far. So I'm giving this 5 stars b/c I was able to set the whole thing up in about an hour, whereas I had spent many days unsuccessfully trying to reconfigure my old dvr to allow remote viewing.UPDATE: I just loaded the viewing software on my desktop computer at work and we now have remote viewing on our phones, tablets, and work computer. It was very easy to set up. I just followed the instructions on setting up the "CMS" software that came with the disk. Still very impressed.

This DVR is excellent and worth every penny. Motion is so much smoother at 12FPS recording than the old box it replaced, camera quality is vastly improved over the old DVR with the same Bosch cameras, nice SUNON MagLev bearing fan which have a reputation for reliability, setup is intuitive and has MANY options. Being able to fine-tune motion capture settings, compression using H.265+ and cloud/NAS storage are phenomenal. Mine had a Seagate 1TB surveillance grade 3.5" SATA HDD inside.Important note on live view software bundled on the CD. If your company is like ours, you want your staff to be able to watch the cameras via a live viewing program on their PCs. (Live monitoring works via IP address in Internet Explorer too, but it takes up a significant portion of the screen. The bundled software is much cleaner) Problem is, the program WILL NOT LAUNCH in Windows 7 and possibly higher unless the user is logged in as an administrator. To fix this you need to change the security settings on the C:\program files\CMS station\ folder *and all subfolders* to allow your non-admin users full read/write access. Once that is done, those users will be able to launch the program too.All in all, incredibly powerful and compact DVR with slightly tricky to set up Windows monitoring software (took me 30 mins), but once you get it running it's great.