Sweet sixteen

In the last ten years digital video recorder designers have taken us down some interesting highways and byways, not to mention a fair number of dead ends, but in the end what really matters is the facility to continuously record multiple channels of high-quality video and audio for long periods of time, quickly identify and find items of interest, make live views and recordings widely accessible and to be able to export recordings to easily readable media.

The Lilin 2160 DVR is not the perfect DVR by any means but it does a pretty good job of fulfilling those basic requirements and without too much in the way of unnecessary frills and froth. It's a 16-channel triplex machine providing simultaneous recording, live viewing and playback, and for good measure it has one audio recording channel. In addition to normal local monitor functions it also has network capabilities for remote viewing, playback, recording and PTZ camera control through a standard browser or supplied network viewer software.

Each input channel has associated alarm and motion detector facilities with the option for email notification. Inside the case there are two SATA drives, one of which is 'hot-swappable', and there's provision for two external SATA drives which can take the system's storage capacity up to a very respectable 4 terabytes. Recordings may be exported to optical disc using its on-board CD/RW drive or to USB memory devices.

Our sample came with a 128Mb pen drive. We're not sure if this is part of the accessory pack but if it's not it should be. They cost pennies these days and it's one of those things you can never lay your hands on when you want one. Incidentally, there is a postscript to this little snippet of information, but we'll come to that in a moment.

Resolution is switchable between 720 x 240 pixels (field mode) and 320 x 240 (CIF) at up to 400 frames/sec, depending on the number of cameras and frame rate and quality settings. There's a good range of playback speeds (2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x, 64x) accessed through a jog/shuttle dial or the supplied remote handset. It has a 2x zoom facility, freeze live view, four independently configurable Spot Monitor and two Main Monitor outputs, and in common with most DVRs we've seen recently everything is controlled by a version of the tried and tested and very reliable Linux operating system.

Aside from the slightly gaudy chrome buttons the front panel is a model of simplicity. On the left hand side a display panel sports a row of mode/status LEDs and a set of playback keys, this is hinged and opens to reveal the loading drawer for the CD/RW drive and the removable hard disk drive, mounted in a lockable (and somewhat fiddly) sliding tray.

In the centre of the front panel there is a bank of 16 camera selector and display mode buttons. To the right of that a circular cluster of menu/cursor controls plus three big shiny buttons for selecting menu and backup functions. On the far right is the jog/shuttle playback dial and below that a single USB port.

Behind the scenes on the left side and top half of the back panel there is a small forest of BNC sockets for the camera inputs and loop-throughs, four Spot monitor and two main monitor outputs. In fact this machine is unusually well endowed in the video output department with extra S-Video and VGA outputs, next to the BNC sockets.

Two RS-485 sockets handle 'daisy-chained' connections to other DVRs and optional keyboard controllers. To the right of that are five phono sockets for audio inputs and output and close to the centre of the panel is a single RJ-45 LAN socket and two more RS-485 sockets for PTZ camera telemetry. All alarm inputs and outputs are routed through a 25-pin D-Sub connector and to the left of the cooling fan vent are the two SATA II connectors for external RAID drives. The main on/off switch and mains socket are on the far right of the case.

Inside the case the main PCB occupies the upper right hand quadrant of the case; the PSU board is on the left and the hard and optical drives and the spare drive bay is at the front. As well as providing faster data transfer speeds SATA drive power and data cables are a lot smaller than their IDE counterparts, giving the interior a neat uncluttered look.

Compared with several DVRs we've seen recently, which look as though they have been hewn from solid ingots of metal, the 2160's casework and panels are made of noticeably lighter and thinner materials; nevertheless the general standard of construction is still very good but from the looks of it the case doesn't look as though it would fare very well if treated harshly or carelessly.

Setup and operation

The Lilin PDR-2160 16-Channel DVR is the heart of the company's CCTV system, and is well suited to a wide range of applications...

It is virtually ready to run straight out of the box though obviously there are a few preliminaries to attend to and these are to be found on the setup menu. The main menu opens with eight options: Camera, Monitor, Record, Alarm, System, Network, PTZ and Backup. Selections are made using the circular control cluster on the front panel or the duplicate set on the remote handset.

The Camera menu has options to compose and enable a title for each camera (a slow and laborious business...); there's a set of individual video controls (contrast, brightness, hue & saturation) for each input channel, setting camera sequence and dwell times (1 to 99 seconds), a facility to toggle the screen border colour between white, black or grey (it's actually spelt 'Boarder', but you get the idea...). The camera title display sub menu aligns the bottom row of camera titles to the top of sub screens, to prevent them being chopped off on some monitor displays and finally there's a Vertical/Horizontal display adjustment, again to ensure a good fit with the monitor screen.

On the Monitor menu there's an adjustment for the VGA resolution (up to 1280 x 1024), and a switch for Main Monitor Alert, which changes the main monitor output to full screen if an alarm input or the motion detector is triggered. The four Spot monitor outputs can be separately configured for full or sequential displays and to enable or disable caption displays.

The Record menu covers recording speed and quality, it's a global setting and the choice is between 100 CIF/sec and 50 fields/sec. The four quality settings are: Very High, High, Normal and Low, these are also global settings affecting all recording channels. It would have been useful to have an on-screen indication of maximum recording times as otherwise there is no way of knowing when data is being overwritten. There is a chart in the back of the manual. The example given is for a 120Gb drive, which at maximum resolution, fastest frame rate and highest quality setting gives a recording time of 17 hours. At the lowest and slowest settings this rises to 3178 hours.

Still with the Record menu the other options are playback speed (a somewhat odd facility, normally this is handled automatically) and there are sub menus for enabling or disabling recording channels (also a little strange as there's a channel enable function on the Camera menu) and finally the audio input selector, to determine which camera channel is associated with the audio channel.

Alarm Setup includes sub menus for enabling or disabling the 16 alarm inputs and motion sensor, motion sensor Sensitivity, setting the motion targets (16 x 12 grid), buzzer enable and alarm time (0 to 99 seconds) and alarm email alert setup.

The System Setup option covers the usual assortment of configuration, security and housekeeping functions, including time and date set, HDD format and info, Factory Reset, Video System (PAL/NTSC), DVR ID, Language (English, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, German, Spanish, Italian and French), password setup and firmware update.

Network Setup is used to change the machine's IP Address, subnet mask Gateway address and so on. The PTZ menu covers telemetry protocols, camera type, position presets, dwell times, speed and keyboard setup.

Finally, the Backup menu, which is used to copy recordings to a disk or memory module, is responsible for CD-RW drive operation and USB configuration. Here we ran into a little trouble and our review machine refused point blank to recognise the supplied pen drive, or indeed any of the half-dozen other drives we tried it with. We did have more success with the CD-RW drive and backing up a recording involves specifying the start time of the recording. In addition to the video data the DVR also copies a Viewer utility to the disk or drive (Windows only) making PC playback virtually effortless. Aside from one or two minor inconsistencies the DVR's menu system is very straightforward and easy to use. Playback is also refreshingly simple; after pressing the Play button or Key the user is led through a simple sequence of graphical timelines to help zero in on the part of the recording they want to playback. Alternatively recordings can be selected by alarm event, timed event or play back the whole recording.

Performance

At the highest quality (Very High) and resolution settings the 2160 produces a decent image though some processing artefacts were apparent in areas of the picture containing a lot of fine patterned detail and strongly saturated colours. Reducing the quality level to High resulted in an increase in artefacts but the image, whilst slightly degraded was still perfectly useable and the picture defects only became really intrusive on the lowest setting, dipping into sub-VHS territory with a big drop in resolution and fuzzy colours. The range of replay speeds and the very convenient jog/shuttle dial makes it easy to locate a particular time or event. Playback at all speeds is rock-steady and the useful 'zoom' facility is easy to use, with the magnified area movable to any part of the screen using the cursor keys. Network operation, communicating with the DVR through a web browser, went very smoothly and the range of available functions is most impressive. The reduction in image quality over a network is relatively small and – depending on network bandwidth and number of cameras connected – there is only a marginal drop in frame rate, compared with a live view on a monitor.

The supplied network viewer software proved to be less successful and we experienced problems getting it to function. By rights it should have worked but we'll be charitable and put it down to it being flummoxed by our somewhat complicated network setup, so for the moment at least we'll give it the benefit of the doubt.