What’s an NVR? How does it differ from a DVR? Does a DVR that can handle both analog and digital signals move into the realm of the NVR? If you’re a systems integrator, you may be asking these same questions when you go to specify the recording medium for a customer’s surveillance system at the protected premises.

“What the heck is the difference between a DVR and an NVR?” chided Jim Kauker, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing for NAVCO Networks and Security, Anaheim, Calif., to SD&I during a discussion on the topic, admitting that there is widespread confusion on product terminology.

“A DVR can reside on the network and the NVR is also on the network and neither cares if it’s an analog or digital camera signal,” he said. “Quite frankly, the end-user doesn’t care. When they want pictures, they want pictures, so you have to figure out the best solution to do that.” For those larger camera systems, NAVCO prefers to build a separate network for customers lessening any objections from IT personnel about putting a piece of hardware—network video recorders--on their network infrastructure. Kauker predicted that in about five years most video storage will be at the edge in SD cards at the cameras.

Up in the air

The video surveillance recording market is definitely in transition. Now that both analog and digital signals can be transferred to DVRs or NVRs and DVRs have become more feature rich, adding capabilities such as point of sale, H.264 video codec, on-board monitors, 1080p, GUI menus, hard drive expansion capability, mobile monitoring, iPhone integration, USB backup, standalone or network connectivity and more--the product category is literally stepping into NVR terrain. And it could be all this cross-migration of technological specs/functions formerly reserved for the NVR that is adding to the confusion.

“It used to be pretty simple that a DVR was just tied to a specific analog camera,” said Lee Caswell, founder and chief marketing officer, Pivot3, Palo Alto, Calif. “The hybrid products now blur the lines a lot. I think of an NVR as something that can be shared by many cameras and users and can be on a distributed or centralized environment. I think that you’re absolutely seeing folks that build DVRs moving to higher quality, server-based products—that’s happening across the board. People are relying on the surveillance data now more than they were in the past and the expectations have ratcheted up.”