Just like having a seperate PoE switch offers more flexibility, it seems reasonable that using a mini tower or small form factor PC running NVR software would offer the most flexibility, particularly with higher bitrate feeds since you can put a 6th or 7th gen intel processor with QuickSync support in a PC and have enough processing power to run several dozen cameras at high bitrates. But, it is regularly updated and offers more flexibility in a lot of areas.

they offer a limited set of features, firmware updates are slow, they have a small memory footprint and run with fairly low-end multicore processors, use passive cooling, and have been reported to overheat under high load (like during IVS triggers and with multiple high bitrate streams.) More recently people have called out the issues around losing/skipping frames when breaking up video files and creating video smapshots from IVS triggers (though those may be fixed in recent firmware.) At the same time, software like Blue Iris is 3rd party, and may not support all the features of the cameras, plus I'm sure it has its own limitations and bugs. I was originally planning to buy a Dahua 5216 NVR since they are designed to work with the cameras, but they're obviously not perfect. Obviously I'm looking for information because I am trying to decide which way to go myself. Why do you prefer one over the other? What would you change if you were doing it all from scratch? I'm really interested to hear from people who switched from one to the other, and how that has improved the management and use of their cameras.

This also may not be the ideal sub-forum for this question, but I am specifically looking for real world experiences from people who have multiple Dahua cameras and have used (or still use) both Dahua NVR appliances and PC-based NVR software in their surveillance system. I know this topic has been beat to death in other forums and it has become a controvertial topic with some people.

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