DVR sending data out?

[MetzLyov]

Hi,

I've been following this thread since i joined the forum. I was wondering if there are any update available. I've wanted to get a dvr. But if the dvr is going to "call home", I want to know the necessary steps in preventing it from happening.

Thanks

I can tell you that none of the major manufacturers have this "feature" active.. and they better keep it that way.. Not to say that they have not tried before but were not able to get away with it.

It is safer to go with the majors... your Panasonic, Sanyo, American Dynamics, Bosch, GE Security and few others. They know that they can face a legal challenge which will diminish their position in the market.

Your second and third tier manufacturers do them for a simple reason... to find out where their DVRs end up... geographically it is important for them to know this piece of information, so that they can concentrate on areas that sell more.

We worked with few of such manufacturers few years ago.. Right from the beginning we realized what they were doing and confronted them directly... They gave us every excuse under the sun and some could not disable the feature because some of the DVRs were embedded... In short, we dropped them for good and never looked back.

Working with major manufacturers not only guarantees that none of such nonsense occur, but also the support and the warranty, which others can not provide..

What type of DVR are you looking for? PC based or embedded? How many channels to record and how much internal storage?

I personally prefer embedded systems - all the system software and the applications reside on the flash memory.. and the hard drives are used only to store video... very easy to manage and not susceptible to any virus attacks nor require any typical OS based updates...

[Robocoach]

Haven't been here for a bit, but have somewhat of an update.
Apparently Nuvico is working on an OS version update which will permit the "call-home" feature to be disabled, however, it will be on by default. Is this going to become the default OS? Who knows. Will it be documented? My guess is that it probably won't, because of other "features" that have not been documented that should have been.
An explanation that I received about the reason they call home is to help provide remote connectivity - dynamic DNS - and that all the unit sends out is IP, model and serial number. Huh? Like there isn't a million DNS servers out there already to do this instead. What I do find interesting is the text on the main page the DVR points to (dvrstation.com). Besides written in faulty english (not exactly confidence-inspiring), functionality is there to view DVR's. This web page is apparently a web-based version of a software viewer called DvrPlayer that is provided with the DVR. Why someone would want to do this over the Internet via a questionable web site is beyond me.

[N. A. Corbier]

Just to note something... Dynamic DNS requires a device to call home every so often to report the new IP address to the Dynamic DNS script. If you have the device on a static IP that can either be routed (either from a public IP or via NAT), then you have no need for Dynamic DNS.

The fact that the device is bundling Dynamic DNS updating with their DVR remote viewing software is fun, though.