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Remember: After making changes to the settings press/click the APPLY button.
MEDIA PORT:
This is the port that the DVR will use to send information through. The most
important things are that:
1. You’ll need to enable UPnP on your router (see
“Remote Access” on page
58
) so your router can selectively open these ports, allowing the DVR to
communicate via the Internet. If your router doesn’t support UPnP, you have
two options. You can either get a new router (which we’d actually recommend -
UPnP is such a good feature!) or you can manually forward ports from the router
to the DVR. Port forwarding is a technical and involved process, recommended
only for the technically inclined.
2.
Nothing else share this port. The default port number is 9000, which is not used
by many other devices/programs. However, particularly if you have another DVR
or DVR-like device, something might be using this port already. If this is the case,
change this value to be unique.
WEB PORT:
This is the port through which you will be able to communicate with the
DVR. Like the MEDIA PORT, it will need to be forwarded properly in order to ensure
smooth, latency-free communication. We recommend changing this value to “85”, as
this port is seldom used by other devices or applications.
IP ADDRESS:
Just as houses and businesses need to have an address which iden-
tifi es their location on the road network, so too do computers and other devices
need addresses (called IP ADDRESSES) to identify their position on the electronic
network. The DVR uses IPv4 addressing, which consists of four groups of numbers
between 0 and 255, separated by periods. For example, a typical IP address might be
“192.168.1.24” or something similar. The most important thing when setting the IP
address is that nothing else on your network shares that IP address.
NETMASK (SUBNET MASK):
If the IP address is like a street address, then a sub-
network is like your neighborhood. This will be formatted in a similar way to the
IP address (ie. four numbers up to 255 separated by periods) but contain very dif-
ferent numbers. In the above example, the Subnet Mask might be something like:
“255.255.255.0”.
GATEWAY:
This is the address of the “way to the Internet” - to continue the road anal-
ogy, this is like your local access point to the highway. This is an IP address in the
same format as the others, and is typically very similar to the IP address of the DVR. To
continue the above examples, it might be something such as: “192.168.1.254”.
DNS:
“Domain Name System”. Everything on the Internet is located via an IP address
- however, for ease of use, we associate domain names (such as “
www.exampledo-
mainname.com
”) with those IP addresses. This index is accessible in many locations
online, and we call those locations “DNS servers”.
