Door Sensor Alarm Recording on Viewtron Security DVRs / NVRs
You can trigger video surveillance recording on Viewtron security camera DVRs and NVRs based on alarms from external sensors. Watch this video to see how easy it is to search, playback, and export video footage that was recorded from a magnetic door sensor opening. All of the events when the door sensor opens are conveniently bookmarked on the DVR so they are easy to find.
CCTV DVR / IP Camera NVR Alarm Inputs
Viewtron CCTV camera DVRs and Viewtron IP camera NVRs have an alarm input / alarm output terminal on the back of them for integration with external sensors. You can use the alarm inputs to connect devices such as magnetic door sensors and passive infrared motion detector. Then, you can trigger video surveillance recording and other actions based on activity from those external alarm devices.
Magnetic Door / Window Sensor Integration with DVR
I attached this magnetic door sensor to this small box for testing DVR alarm integrations here at CCTV camera Pros.
I used 18/2 conductor cable to hard wire the door sensor to the alarm input on the Viewtron DVR / NVR.
Locate Video Recording Footage Triggered from External Sensors
This is the video playback screen on a Viewtron NVR (looks the same on Viewtron DVRs). Notice that the timeline that is displayed on the right is color coded. This NVR is setup to record continuously 24/7, and also based on motion detection and alarm sensor events. So essentially, the NVR is always recording video and any significant activity such as motion detection or the alarm sensor being triggered are bookmarked so that they are easy to locate. These recording type annotations are also available in on the video playback screen in the mobile app.
Alarm Sensor Event Search
Another way to locate all of the events triggered by the door sensor is via the Search and Backup screen on Viewtron DVRs / NVRs.
On the Search and Backup screen do the following:
- Select By Event.
- Select the Date and Time range to search.
- Select the Camera(s) to search.
- Select Sensor as the type of Event.
- Click on the Search button.
- You can click on the play button to launch the small preview player. Or you can click on the check box for the event and click Backup near the bottom of the screen to launch the full screen player. You can also click on the Backup button when one of more events are selected to backup the video to an external USB drive. You can watch this video that shows in detail how-to backup video surveillance events to a USB thumb drive on Viewtron DVRs.
Security DVR Video Playback from Mobile App
All of the different types of video recordings are also labeled on the video player timeline in the mobile app for iPhone and Android. You can see in the above screenshot of the iPhone app that the continuous video recording, alarm sensor recordings, and motion detection recordings are color coded on the timeline so that they are easy to find. This screenshot was captured when I was remotely connected to the Viewtron IP camera NVR at CCTV Camera Pros from the Viewtron mobile app. The recorded video playback screen looks the same on both iPhone and Android mobile apps for Viewtron.
Security Camera Alarm Video Demos
Want to see additional videos of security cameras with alarm integrations? CCTV Camera Pros has an entire library of demos using DVR alarm inputs, alarm outputs, and active deterrent alarm security cameras.
Have Questions / Need Help?
If you have any questions about this article or anything relates to security camera systems, please email me any time at mike@viewtron.com.
Video Transcript
Here is a text transcript of the video at the top of this web page.
Hey guys, Mike from CCTV Camera Pros here. In this video I’m going to show you how easy it is to locate alarm events on our Viewtron security camera DVRs that were triggered by external sensors. So I’m going to be using this magnetic door and window sensor here and I have that hardwired to the back of the Viewtron NVR.
That NVR has all of our IP cameras here at the office recording to it. And I’m going to associate that magnetic door sensor with that particular security camera, the one that monitors our main sales floor here. And the idea is that anytime this door is open, you know, this is, we’re using this as a door. Anytime that door is opened, the DVR bookmarks that event and triggers sensor recording on this particular camera. And then the user interface of the Viewtron NVR makes it extremely easy to go back and find all those sensor triggered events.
There’s a couple ways to do it and I’m going to show you both of them. Let’s take a look.
So, here’s the live security camera view on the Viewtron NVR that this IP camera is connected to. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to come into the room here and I’m going to, I’m going to grab this little box that I made that has the magnetic door and window sensor connected to it. And again that’s hardwired back to the NVR and notice when I open the door, video recording is triggered. And you can see that that’s annotated by the on screen display there by that red dot. That means alarm sensor recording was triggered. You also see in a couple seconds that that red light will go out and we’re back to continuous recording which is annotated in blue. So next if I go into playback, this opens the recorded video player and you’ll see a opens and annotated on the timeline are all the different types of recording. So alarm sensor events are annotated in red.
So, you can easily jump to any alarm sensor recording event. And you’ll also notice that motion detection events are annotated in yellow and the continuous recording is annotated in blue. And I can use this timeline to just jump around to anywhere. And, and if I want to go full screen and get rid of the timeline, I could click that icon and there’s the full screen recording. This happens to be a 4K resolution Viewtron IP camera, so we’re recording at 4K resolution right now. So the next thing I would do is I’m going to go back to the NVR and show you another way to find those events. So I’m back at the live view again, and if I go back to the menu and go to the search and backup screen, you’ll notice at the top of the screen there’s different ways to search. And if I click on by event, what that allows me to do is that allows me to select one or more of the cameras on this system and then select the specific type of event I want to search for.
So in this case, I want to search for alarm sensor recording. So I’ll just check that. And when I click search, it only shows me the sensor recording events. If I click this play button next to any of the event entries, it opens up this mini player that I could preview what happened. But if I want to play back full screen, I could check that box and click Playback. And now I’m back at the full screen View video playback player. So when I’m done, I could click the X in the lower right. And then last if I wanted to, I could also check off any of these events and click backup.
I have a USB thumb drive inserted into the NVR and I could conveniently back up any of these alarm sensor recording events to the USB thumb drive.
Guys, I hope this video has been helpful. I want to mention some other information before we wrap up. So although I used a magnetic door sensor and I connected that to one of the alarm inputs on the Viewtron DVR, here you can connect any type of alarm device. So we’ve also tested like passive infrared motion detectors. If you want to set up like a panic push button. Really any type of alarm that sends an open / close signal. You can connect to these alarm input ports on the Viewtron NVR. And I have it set up just to trigger recording on this one particular camera.
But if you want to associate a sensor with multiple cameras, you can trigger recording on multiple cameras as well. Guys, if you have any questions about alarm sensor integration with security camera systems with these Viewtron DVRs and NVRs, you can reach out to me anytime. I could be reached directly at mike@viewtron.com. If you want to learn more about integrating external alarm sensors with security camera systems, I have additional videos and little projects that I’ve done that I’ve documented. You can see all of them at www.viewtron.com/alarm. Thank you for watching.
