Cobra 63890 8 Channel Security DVR - Intro

This blog is about the Cobra 63890 8 Channel Security DVR. Specifically to help those who want to make use of its features but were not able to figure out how to set it up - or get a particular feature to work. This is where owners can share their tips and tricks (and even hacks) to get the most out of this device! Please post your tips and I'll update the blog appropriately. I don't intend for this to be a review - you can do that more effectively at the Harbor Freight web site.

Harbor Freight's product page for Cobra DVR 

I purchased this device in early 2018 from a Harbor Freight store on sale for about $200. I chose it for the following features:

• HD cameras with night vision (4 included and inputs for a total of 8)
• Large capacity recording (1 TB hard drive included)
• Motion detection with masking feature to reduce false detections
• Remote access and notifications

 The Manual

I downloaded the manual and read it before purchasing the unit. At first read, it looks complete, but when you start setting it up you realize that there are a number of features that are unclear - and I suspect may not actually exist in the product.

I discovered another security camera / DVR company name that has a nearly identical product. The hardware and user interface is so nearly identical that I suspect that they are built by the same company. The company name is ANNKE. This may explain why the manual mentions features you "may have". The manual was written to cover many similar products and wasn't completely cleaned up for Harbor Freight to remove irrelevant statements. Here's a link to a good instructional video on the ANNKE system.

I noticed that the manual has a humorous contradiction: "To prevent electric shock, do not attempt to disassemble DVR". However it also states "Clean the internal dust regularly". Since the power supply is external, the DVR only has 12V inside, so getting shocked is not a concern.

Terminology: When you see the term "Alarm". They are referring to either motion detected on one of the cameras that has motion detection enabled or an external alarm sensor has been tripped. However this model does not have connectors to attach external sensors. PTZ refers to cameras that can be remotely controlled - Pan Tilt and Zoom. The term Capture or Snapshot refers to photos taken by the camera (.JPG format) - not videos.

Phoning home:  There's a lot of talk about "Internet of Things" (IOT) devices that 'phone home' and leave users wondering what's going on. Is my IOT device spying on me? I'm not an alarmist, but I keep my eye on devices and watch where they connect to, so that was one of the first things I checked. It does send data out. It sends UDP packets to 47.90.204.196 owned by Zhuhai Raysharp Technology Co of Guangdong China. These packets are probably to help with remote access apps. It also sends packets to devices WITHIN my network - that's a bit strange to my thinking, but I can't really say what it's doing. I just blocked this IP address in my router's firewall.
If you are nervous about this, you can unplug from the network and still make use of the DVR without a network connection. You can view and control it from the user interface (monitor and mouse). You won't have remote access or Email notifications.

The Hardware

DVR: This contains a standard SATA 1TB hard drive, and it appears that you can simply swap it out with a new one if you ever need to. The back of the unit has eight analog camera inputs with BNC type connectors.  You can also plug in older NTSC cameras and the DVR automatically recognizes the lower resolution camera and handles it correctly. I suspect that PAL cameras are recognized too.  I don't have one to try so let me know if you've tried one. There are several types of analog cameras interfaces I had not heard of  AHD  TVI  CVI. According to the manual this supports them all. The supplied cameras are identified as TVI.

There are only four audio inputs which correspond to the first four camera inputs. There's very little mention of audio in the user manual. The Record section of the user interface includes a checkbox for cameras 1 through 4 if you want to record audio along with the recorded video.

There is a wire connector for the RS-485 PTZ control. I don't have a PTZ camera, but I plan to look into what signaling is done on this interface.

Cameras: These cameras are touted as HD (effective resolution 1920x1080) They use the word "effective" since the cameras are analog not digital. This is probably a cost savings and perhaps a longer cable run is possible. I don't have the means to test the actual resolution, but it is definitely a great improvement compared to a standard NTSC camera. The night vision is quite effective. The supplied cameras do not have microphones and don't support PTZ.

Cables:
Each cable is actually a pair of conductors that are for power and video. If you want to use the PTZ feature, you'll need to run another cable run, and of course a camera that supports PTZ. 

Power Supplies:
Two identical 12VDC supplies included - one for the DVR and one for powering the four cameras.

Remote:
A handheld remote is included and can be used instead of the mouse for convenience.

Exploring the Features

The user manual  gets you started, but there are a few things that are not specifically stated or are confusing.

Motion Detection, masking areas and sensitivity:

The motion detection masking and sensitivity is configured in the Alarm section of the menus. You can record motion from the camera where motion was detected and you can also select other cameras to start recording too. This might be useful if you want to record motion at your front door, but the camera picks up too much surrounding motion and triggers to often. So install a second camera overhead pointing down on the area, and enable motion detection on that camera. But have it configured to cause recording from the first camera that is at a lower angle.

The poorly named option "Enabled" should be set to "Enabled" (a bit confusing). They should have called the option "Motion Detection".

ALARM MENU

But you're not done yet, you have to go into the Record Schedule menu, select motion and highlight the area of the table that corresponds to the time and day of week that you want the motion detection feature active. The same menu also allows you to select the time that you want continuous recordings made (called "Normal") .

Recording Schedule Menu

 Example showing motion recording always enabled

 The Capture and Capture Schedule menus are similar, but refer to taking still pictures .

Email notifications:

This feature lets you receive email notification when a  problem is detected: hard drive error or full, video signal loss (possibly due to tampering) or if motion is detected (alarm event). It will send you an email with an attached JPG file of the captured motion. Seems like a great idea, but I am hesitant to use this feature since I may get a lot of email that contains photos of a tree that is waving in the wind or it's shadow. Even a lamp turning on or off can trigger motion detection. Set your masking area and sensitivity carefully before using this feature. Even with these set properly, you may still get spurious emails when the sun sets and the camera changes from day to night vision. So you may also want to also set the email schedule feature appropriately to prevent your inbox from being overloaded or constantly causing your smartphone to beep incessantly.

Cloud storage:

This feature allows you to have snapshots (still photos) that were taken due to motion detection or manual capture and uploaded to a cloud storage provider. They only support Dropbox. It does not mention if videos can be uploaded in the same way. I don't have a Dropbox account, so I can't test this.

Alarms:

There is a built in speaker that can be configured to beep when motion is detected, and it appears that some variant of the DVR comes with relay outputs to control external devices. I'm thinking that the beeper could be wired to an external jack and I could make it control some external device.

FTP:

FTP is an old protocol for transferring files between computers. It is not a secure protocol unless you use the SFTP variant. I didn't find and support for SFTP.

According to the manual (page 18), this feature allows "...load captured snapshots from DVR to your storage device over FTP." It shows the usual parameters needed for uploading, but that's it. There's no mention of how to make use of the feature! How do you specify which channels you want to configure for uploading snapshots. I clicked on the TestFTP button, and it did create a directory on my FTP server, but I still can't get it to upload snapshots. Note that if you press the TestFTP button again you may get a poorly worded error message error "Creat File Folder Failed!". That's because the first time you clicked TestFTP it created a directory, and the second time it tries to create it again which the FTP server reports that the directory already exists. The DVR should not report this as an error. I'll call this a minor bug. But if FTP doesn't work, it's a major bug.

Saving files to USB:

I was able to select an "event" in the Record Search / Events tab. It gives you several formatting options for saving files. You can select H.264, AVI or MP4 format.  I like the flexibility of supporting several file formats. Your USB thumb drive plugs into a port conveniently located on the front of the device. One note about these formats is that these are really format containers. The video is encoded as H.264 in all three file types. You'll note that the file size is nearly identical regardless of the format you choose.

Audio In

The DVR has four audio input jacks, but there are eight camera inputs, so audio input 1 gets recorded with video input 1 etc. Video inputs 5 - 8 don't have corresponding audio inputs.  The supplied cameras don't have microphones, so I tried using another camera that has audio and I enabled audio for the camera in the 'Parameter-> Mainstream' menus and I got sound in my recordings - and in the streamed output. The volume was very low, so a preamplifier would be helpful. I copied the recorded video files to my PC, I tried all three formats H.264, .AVI and .MP4. When I played them on my PC, only the .AVI and .MP4 had audio. The H.264 file would not play at all with the VLC player. It did play in Media Player Classic, but it had no sound. The .AVI and .MP4 have audio recorded as  "aLaw 8000Hz mono 64kbps" so don't expect it to be high quality. Media Player Classic recognized that the .MP4 file had an audio track, but it didn't recognize the aLaw codec used. 

Audio Out

There is a RCA jack on the back of the COBRA DVR, and once I enabled audio in the
Parameter-> Mainstream menu for cameras 1 through 4, I found that I could monitor sound when viewing a camera live or in playback mode.  The output level is low, so it must be connected to an amplifier.

Streaming

You can monitor a camera remotely if you use a program like the highly recommended VLC software on your remote PC. If your remote PC is outside your home network you'll need to set up your router to do "port forwarding" to pass traffic through port 554 to your DVR. But there's an error in the user manual that will prevent you from remote streaming. The manual shows a screenshot of the VLC window. The URL for monitoring camera 1's mainstream (full resolution video)  should look something like this:

rtsp://192.168.1.120:554/ch01/0  (note the ch01 not ch1)   This works!

The lower resolution stream (referred to as the sub-stream) should be
 rtsp://192.168.1.120:554/ch01/1    (but it doesn't work for me - VLC reports "input can't be opened")

Of course you will need to use your DVR's IP address instead of the above example.

The RTSP menu allows remote streaming to be enabled or disabled, and can be configured for open access or password protected.

A note about VLC. I was able to view (and hear) the stream while on a recent trip using VLC version 3.0.2 . But I found an annoying bug in that version of VLC which causes the stream to stop after about 2 minutes. I found that installing an older version of VLC did not have this bug. The version that I found that worked was 2.2.6.  You can get that older version and others from VLC's site

There is a way to use a web browser to connect to the DVR, but it requires a plugin that needs to be installed first. I was a bit concerned about the app, so I didn't bother exploring this feature.

Tips and tricks

• Your username and password cannot be longer than 8 characters. (This tip comes from several people who posted on the Harbor Freight product review page.)
•  The DVR has a VGA and an HDMI output. You can use both simultaneously if you need to "mirror" the output to another monitor. (Too bad you can't display four cameras on one monitor and four cameras on the other monitor. That would be great)
• Use ch01 not ch1 in the RTSP  URL when connecting with VLC or other streaming application on your PC or smartphone.

Questions I have - please post your answers:

• Bug reports - things that definitely don't work right.
• Is there a firmware update? What is the latest? Mine is V7.1.0.20170523. That looks like a date code of May 23, 2017,
• Has anyone got the FTP feature to work? How?
• External Alarm Device. What is this about?  Does this DVR support it?  Hack?
• PTZ port - does it actually work if you have appropriate camera? Can this port be used for other purposes (alarm out?)
• Sensor inputs - is there another model with this feature.
• Has anyone had better experience with the audio input? What did you use?