Arecont Vision "duo" camera

[EdwinDrood]

I got three of these. They are meant to be mounted on corners of buildings or in hallways.
These cameras that have "two sensors" in each one. In other words Arecont Vision sells "DUO" cameras that have two cameras in one housing (with one network cable).

Specifically I got the MicroDome Duo AV6655DN-28. This is an older deprecated model. (the 28 designates 2.8mm lenses)

These are two 3MP cameras. The documentation specifies that both H.264 and MJPEG streams are supported. The documentation also says that ONVIF is supported, but it really did not work right.

I found out the hard way that this brand of camera does NOT like having two streams (although supported) the cameras cannot support the double streams without giving up something.

My goal was to get two cameras in Xeoma off of one cable (one IP address)

The web interface is really lacking. Instead you can make some changes via sending specific commands on the http url (or you can send commands via the IP utility that you can download.)

Here is what I have found from my experimentation:
First set the h.264 quality to 30 from the web interface (reduces the quality of the image but solves other problems.)

If you leave the Preview URL empty and use:
Camera 1 Archive URL
[2048x1536 16 fps h264 1Mb] rtsp://192.168.1.2/h264.sdp1?res=full&ssn=673
Camera 2 Archive URL
[2048x1536 16 fps h264 1Mb] rtsp://192.168.1.2/h264.sdp2?res=full&ssn=623

(the last ssn only needs to be unique since the two streams are coming from the same IP address)

The above settings gave the best results.

I was getting really good streams at 17 fps Enabling UDP worked. Although Xeoma complained about the preview URL being invalid, Xeoma handled it nicely. There is an option in Motion Detect to use the Archive stream.

The other option (that is better on the CPU usage) is to have this:
Camera 1:
Preview:
[1024x768 2 fps mjpeg 300Kb] http://192.168.1.2/mjpeg1?res=half&doublescan=0&fps=2&ssn=672
Archive
[2048x1536 9 fps h264 600Kb] rtsp://192.168.1.2/h264.sdp1?res=full&ssn=673

Camera 2:
Preview:
[1024x768 2 fps mjpeg 300Kb] http://192.168.1.2/mjpeg2?res=half&doublescan=0&fps=2&ssn=622
Archive
[2048x1536 9 fps h264 600Kb] rtsp://192.168.1.2/h264.sdp2?res=full&ssn=623

This reduced my Archive stream to 9 fps. The preview / motion detect stream was only 1 fps. Note: Xeoma has an option to turn off warnings about low FPS.

I got a few dropped frames on the Archive, but for the most part, this worked (UDP setting does not work).

I spent way too much time going through the command options for these cameras. I would not recommend these cameras.

However, if you are looking for cameras that work and have two sensors in one unit, these are functioning. It is just very frustrating to find the correct settings.