One of the best features of the modern day security DVR (Digital Video Recorder) is the ability to view your security cameras when you are away from home. This feature allows you to check up on your employees, family at home, or anything else big brother is watching over. Many of today’s DVRs are networkable units. This means that you can connect the DVR to your network at home or in your business and therefore connecting your DVR to the World Wide Web.

1. The First step is to connect the security DVR to the network.
• This is done by plugging a standard CAT5 cable into the DVR and into your router.
2. Next, you will assign an IP address and web port to the DVR.
• This will be an internal IP address (usually begins with 192.XXX.XX.X).
• You may also be able to select DHCP to have the DVR grab an available IP address from your router.
3. Once the configuration is complete in your DVR, the next step is to verify that everything is working correctly internally.
• To do this, you will open internet explorer and in the address bar, you will type in HTTP://192.XXX.XXX.XX:YY where X represents your internal IP address and Y represents your web port.
• If the port you used is 80, you can skip the web port.
4. At this point, it is likely that you will be prompted to download an active X.
• Be sure to allow the active X download.
• If there is a problem and you are unable to connect to the DVR and you have not been prompted to download an active X, I would check your security settings.
• In internet explorer, go to <tools>, <settings>, select security and choose customize.
• Scroll down until you see the active X settings.
• Make sure every active X setting is either set to prompt or allow.
• Then close internet explorer and restart it.
• Once you have this working, it is time to move forward.
5. The next step is to forward the ports in your router.
• Every router is different, as is every DVR.
• Basically, you will open the ports that are explained in the manual.
• These settings in the DVR will allow the outside traffic to access your DVR if they have the correct log in user name and password.
6. Once this is complete, you will need to test this from a computer outside of your network.
• Once you have access to a computer on the outside, just go into internet explorer, type in the same as you did from inside the network, only this time use the external IP address of your router.
• If you do not know your external IP address, you can go to www.whatismyip.com from inside your network and it will give you your external IP address.
• If you are unable to connect and you have correctly typed in the IP address and if you are able to connect to your security DVR from inside the network, just not from the outside, you can pretty much assume that the issue is in your port forwarding settings.

Tags: remote view, Security Cameras, security dvr, view from internet

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 4:09 pm and is filed under HowTo Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.