PiKVM to NVR

 

Trying to connect to your IP Camera Network Video Recorder (NVR) via your PiKVM and it’s not working? No video from the NVR on your PiKVM or the mouse is not working fully or at all? Here is how to fix it. This should work for any NVR/DVR, however it has been tested successfully on the following:

Dahua NVR to PiKVM

Reolink NVR to PiKVM

Swann NVR to PiKVM

Lorex NVR to PiKVM

Hikvision NVR to PiKVM

The reason your PiKVM is not working with your NVR is the resolution (1920x1080 or higher) at 60Hz, and the mouse mode. The resolution issue results in no video and the mouse mode makes it so you cant move your mouse around or sometimes click. To fix the video issue, you could drop your NVR HDMI settings to a lower resolution, lower than 1920x1080. I did not want to do that, so here's how i did it.

Connect to the PiKVM via terminal in the webUI or SSH

https:<pikvmip> or ssh <pikvmip>

Change to root

su

Enable read/write mode

rw

Follow the steps below to change the resolution and Hz

Enable 1920x1080 resolution at 60Hz (Source: https://wiki.geekworm.com/X680?TheOrder=1)

To support max resolution 1920x1080 60Hz （for V1.5 only)

nano /boot/config.txt

Change the line7 from dtoverlay=tc358743 to dtoverlay=tc358743,4lane=1

Save and exit by hitting CTRL + X, answering Y and hitting Enter when prompted.

Editing the EDID

nano /etc/kvmd/tc358743-edid.hex

Delete existing EDID data, then copy and paste below new EDID data

00FFFFFFFFFFFF005262888800888888
1C150103800000780AEE91A3544C9926
0F505400000001010101010101010101
010101010101011D007251D01E206E28
5500C48E2100001E8C0AD08A20E02D10
103E9600138E2100001E000000FC0054
6F73686962612D4832430A20000000FD
003B3D0F2E0F1E0A202020202020014F
020323454F041303021211012021A23C
3D3E1F102309070766030C00300080E3
007F8C8C0AD08A20E02D10103E9600C4
8E210000188C0AD08A20E02D10103E96
00138E210000188C0AA01451F0160026
7C4300138E2100009800000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000087

Save the config

CTRL + O, Enter

Exit Nano

CTRL + X, Enter

Now that you have changed your resolution, you need to modify the mouse settings as the remote mouse may not work with your NVR.

Enable Single relative mouse mode (source: https://docs.pikvm.org/mouse/#single-relative-mode)

Edit the KVMD override file

nano /etc/kvmd/override.yaml

Add the following to the file:

kvmd:
    hid:
        mouse:
            absolute: false
            horizontal_wheel: false

Save the config

CTRL + O, Enter

Exit Nano

CTRL + X, Enter

Change the system back to read-only 

ro

(NOTE: THIS STEP IS IMPORTANT!!!! You could destroy your MicroSD or whatever storage if you forget this step.)

Reboot the PiKVM

reboot

Wait a few minutes for the device to come back online and connect to the WebUI of the PiKVM and you should see your NVR video and be able to click around.

 

 Now you can see we get a picture and mouse!!

Shoutouts

Geekworm, for their documentation, technical support and great products! No endorsement, I but their stuff all the time, plus the official PiKVM prebuilts.

PiKVM, for their excellent documentation, hardware and software.

Reddit users curiouswidget, mehstg, hendrics2 and the subreddit pikvm:

https://www.reddit.com/user/curiouswidget/

https://www.reddit.com/user/mehstg/

https://www.reddit.com/user/hendrics2/ 

https://www.reddit.com/r/pikvm/comments/oc8x57/

 

Keyword/Search Terms:PiKVM,EDID,NVR,Hikvision,Dahua,Amcrest,kvmd,60hz,50hz,dtoverlay,geekworm,video,mouse,no picture,no video,rasberry pi,raspberrypi,HDMI,USB.

Personal Media Organizer: digiKam

Looking to replace cloud solutions such as Google Photo's, ACDSee and Adobe with an offline application that won't have your personal data? Try digiKam. This thing is amazing and has so many feature, it runs offline and can be a portable app. It supports Windows, Linux and MacOS. You can use it to organize, modify, tag and consume your digital photographs and videos.

 

 

Site: https://www.digikam.org/

Top Features:

Face Recognition - Automatically identify people (offline, no internet) once you train the facial recognition component. It works fairly well.

No Cloud - No need to worry about your personal data leaving your desktop.

Exif Viewer - See on a map where the photo was taken and a small thumbnail of the image if GPS data is in the exif data of the photo.

Tags - Use custom tags to quickly search and view your content

TikTok: Video currently unavailable - Fix

 

If you click on a video or saved TikTok link and get the error message "Video currently unavailable", here's what to do.

 

Go to https://ssstik.io, enter the URL of the video you cannot access and click download.

There you go, you have a copy of the video downloaded and can now view it.

External Hard Drive Turned RAW (Fixed!)

Recently my 4TB exFat external USB Hard Drive (HDD) turned RAW, most likely due to not safely removing or some sort of corruption. I spent hours trying to get it back without having to recover each file. Both Windows and Linux could not read it, the drive appeared to be unformatted (no filesystem). Here's how I quickly fixed it and was able to get back all my data and use of the drive within minutes.

 

Boot a Ubuntu desktop (you can use a Live CD if you don't have one installed), open up the program called 'Disk Utility' and note the drive location (ex. /dev/sdb) of the affected drive.

Launch the app/program called 'Terminal' and type sudo exfatfsck <drivelocation> which should look something like this: "sudo exfatfsck /dev/sdb"

Normally this will fix it (has in the past for me), however this time I got the error "ERROR: invalid VBR checksum 0x7d00716 (expected 0xc069f9f)."

So, I connected the USB drive to a Mac Desktop/Laptop. Opened up the program/app called 'Terminal' and typed Typed "diskutil list" and hit enter.

Saw that my 4TB HDD was /dev/disk2, then typed "sudo fsck_exfat -d /dev/disk2" and hit enter.

Saw a bunch of lines scroll by and waited to see a prompt that asked me to "update?", so I typed "y" and hit enter. Once it was done, I exited and unplugged the device. Went back to my machine, plugged it in and saw that I was able to see all the data again like nothing happened!!

Hope this helps someone.

If you have NTFS or FAT, you can try "sudo fsck /dev/sdb" in Linux to see if it fixes the issue for you.

 All credit goes to /u/bgdawes on reddit, in this post.

Note: I take no responsibility for data loss. I tried soo many things including free software such as TestDisk, MiniTool Partition Wizard and AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition. This is what did it for me and was the fastest and easiest by far.

Android Phone No Sound (Fixed)

 If you are experiencing no sound from any of your android applications/apps and the ringer is still working, I may have a fix for you. The issue is most likely due to your headphone jack, either via software or physically (port may be dirty and shorting the connection so the device thinks there is a headphone plugged in).

Fix 1 - Check Android Services

Go to Settings, Apps/App Info, Choose Disabled Apps (or All Apps if you don't have this option) and look for any that may be related to sound. Re-enable it and reboot the device. If that does not work or nothing is disabled that may be affecting sound, move on to fix #2.

Fix 2 - Install Headphone Disable App

Install a headphone disabling app from the app store and disable the headphone and that should work. Be sure that you trust the app and the app permissions are acceptable to you. I take no responsibility for any app you install. I tested using the iTech Solutions Apps (4th from the left below), which worked, however I did not like the permissions it required so I uninstalled it until I can find a better one.

Hope this works for you like it did for me! Comment and let me know.