Reolink NVR (RLN8-410) – Initial Setup Wizard / Format Hard Drive / Add Cameras / Continuous Recording

Today we are configuring Reolink’s 8-channel, 4K Network Video Recorder for first time use. We’ll walk through the initial steps required to get the NVR up and running and review some issues you may run into. I’ll connect the cameras to the back of the NVR with the supplied cables and run through the NVR initiation process, to ensure the cameras are working as expected and that we can record footage to the internal hard drive. I like to verify this basic functionality before installing the cameras in their permanent location to ensure all parts are working. If the system was fully installed and there was a connection issue, it would be much harder to debug and troubleshoot when my wires are tucked away in walls or the attic.

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(as of May 13, 2024 23:36 GMT -06:00 - )

This NVR can be purchased on its own or as a part of a kit with multiple cameras. This one came as an all-in-one solution with 4 x 4K cameras. I have already unboxed the system and introduced all of their technical specifications in a previous video. Do check that out for a solid understanding of what this system includes and offers. The NVR alone will run you about $200US. As a part of a 4-camera kit, the cost is closer to 500, which, like I mentioned before if a great price for such a quality system. I’ll add direct links to Reolink and Amazon in the description. Sometimes I have coupon codes for use on the Reolink site, which I will also add below.

Let’s start off by connecting all the hardware to the NVR

Using the included network cables, I’ll connect the 4 cameras to the PoE ports on the back of the NVR.
This system will work without Internet but Internet will be required for remote access. Let’s continue without Internet for now.
HDMI connection for my monitor.
Connect the mouse from the kit.
Connect the power supply.
Let’s get this powered up by flicking the power switch.

NVR Software Setup Wizard. Password creation page:

The startup splash page. Looks nice. While the device is booting up, I want to set some expectations.
- On first start up, the NVR will bring us into a setup wizard, which is exactly what we want, guidance or help getting the system functional. Reolink goes a little overboard with the wizard for an initial setup. They take us down a pretty long complicated and technical path which is not required for an initial setup, without including help text or guidance along the way, as we would expect to see from a help assistant tool. We’re going to skip over those unnecessary sections as this video is about getting the basics functional, before proceeding to the outdoor installation. We’ll revisit those complex settings in a future video from the NVR’s main menu.
First off, I am asked to select a language. I’ll leave that as English.
Now, this is for the user name “admin”. I need to create a password of at least 6 characters. Too bad you couldn’t connect a keyboard here for the setup process. I tried and it doesn’t work. Also, to make capital letters, or numbers, click the little “ab” icon in the text box. With that said, there will be a learning curve to figure out these oddities of the user interface. Also, “Enter” should read as “Ok” as it simply closes the keyboard and doesn’t actually submit the form, like an “Enter” key would.
You can see that all 4 of the connected cameras were just automatically recognized and activated by the NVR with no input for me. That’s an awesome sign and even better that they were automatically detected and added.
Level is the level of access this account should have. It’s disabled because this is the admin account needs to have the highest level of control and its setup first.
With the Enable Password checkbox checked, this mean you will need to enter the password when accessing the NVR system directly. I will leave that off.
At the bottom of this dialog we have “Display wizard when booting up”. This will show the wizard on boot up every time I start the NVR. I will leave that off and if I need to revisit it, there is a wizard button on the main menu bar. These options are available in the main menu anyways.
Click “Next”.

General configuration:

On the “General configuration” page, we have the connected screen resolution. This is the resolution of the attached monitor and nothing to do with the cameras’ resolution. When setting this value, you can set a lower value than what your monitor supports but, keep in mind, if you set a higher value then you screen can support, no image will be displayed. For example, I was using a 4k monitor a few days ago and I set the resolution here to 4k, but now on my 1080p monitor I see this message. To fix this, I had to reconnect the 4k monitor, then lower this resolution setting on the NVR then reconnect this monitor. Too bad the NVR doesn’t auto-detect the resolution.
Then we have time zone which is straight forward. I am mountain time.
I’m ok with the “Menu Date Format” here and this is also referring to the format in the upper corner of the video feed.
The “Time Format” is 24-hour. I’ll stick with24-hour and again, this will impact the time for the cameras’ on-screen time display.
Give the NVR a name. To use uppercase, click the case toggle here to the right of the field. We’ll see this later when adding the device to the mobile app.
Lastly the Unit ID, which is pre-programmed and cannot be updated. The QR code is used to connect your PC or mobile device to the NVR, which we’ll cover in another video. I’m surprised to see the QR code here at this point in the setup process and not at the end once the NVR is setup and ready to use. Also, some verbiage about the purpose of the QR code would be beneficial here.
If you do scan the code, here is what happens, it just references the Unit ID.
If I scan the code with the Reolink app, it adds the NVR to my mobile device. Also, at this point we can connect to Reolink PC client. It’s a PC app where we can manage the NVR, and like with the mobile app, has better English and a more user-friendly interface. Let’s continue with the Wizard to ensure we don’t miss a critical setup step in the initial setup.
Click “Next”.
If there was a resolution change, the system will ensure you can see the user interface before continuing. I’ll hit “OK”.

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(as of May 13, 2024 05:08 GMT -06:00 - )

Hard disk management:

Next on the “Hard drive management” screen, we see disk information. Label is the internal name given to the drive, format is if the drive has been formatted and mount is if the drive is recognized by the NVR’s firmware and free space is how much usable space is remaining on the drive. This is a 2000GB drive but it indicates a “Capacity” of 1855 with 1792GB of free space. This is expected as the NVR uses the hidden space for file management.
The drive should be formatted when you get the system but I’ll reformat mine to show how the process looks.
Click the checkbox next to the drive to be formatted for use.
Click Init, which would be better if it said “Format”.
And confirm the drive will be formatted and whipped of data.
Now, there is no format progress bar and all of sudden the box disappears, but if I slow down the footage, there was actually a flash of a success message.
Click “Next”.

Network configuration:

Now we move into “Network configuration”. This is not a critical setup step and it seems strange that they would include this in the initial system setup wizard. I can see non-technical people arriving at this point with total confusion on what to do.
This screen is asking, where should the NVR live on the network. Under “Network Access”, we have DHCP which means the NVR will obtain an IP address on your network (from your router) wherever these is one available. You could select Static if you want to give it a permanent IP address.
The “Default Gateway” is the IP address of your modem or router. Any communication from the NVR to your network or the Internet goes through the here. Mine shows as all 0’s because I’m not connect to my router, by here in this shot, I am connected and you can see the IP address of my router.
So, nothing needs to be touched on this screen, so we’ll click “Next”.

Device List:

Here in “Device List”, we have all the cameras connected to the NVR or on my network. Let me click Refresh because this list might not have been updated since before the cameras where detected. Ok cool, here are the cameras with their associated IP addressed given to them by the NVR. The NVR is acting as a router here to control the physically connected cameras.
I’ll quickly update their names here. You cannot update which block they show in or their channel yet, but I will do that once we are done here in the wizard.
Before moving on, I want to show you something. I ran through the wizard with the NVR attached to my home network, where I have multiple security cameras. The NVR recognized these existing cameras and of course the ones connected to the ports on the NVR, but check out this screen. My 4 connected Reolink cameras are all named Camera1 (which is probably the name they are given when their firmware is installed) but notice the Channel status of Disconnect. They actually mean Disconnected but it’s confusing to why since they’re connected to the NVR and should have priority over cameras found on my network. I’ll show you how I fixed this once we are done with the wizard.
Let’s move to the next screen.

Email configuration:

Here we have the “Email Configuration” screen for allowing the NVR to send you email notifications. Again, not required and no additional help provided as a wizard assistant should.
In short, this is all the information about your email account so the NVR can send notification emails to you.
So, let’s skip it by clicking “Next”.

UID:

Here we have my NVR’s unique identifier, which we already saw once in the wizard.
The button to send it to email is used if you need a copy of the number to enter into Reolink’s PC client or App. Again, not a major step in setting up the NVR by any means.
Click “Next”.

DDNS configuration:

The “DDNS configuration” for setting up a domain name to your NVR. Pretty technical stuff and actually older technology and not really something you would be ready to setup at this point. Kinda silly to have this in the system initiation wizard.
So, again, let’s skip.

System time configuration:

On the “System time configuration” screen, this is where you could allow your NVR’s time clock and date to be updated and kept in sync over the internet. NTP stands for Network Time Protocol. It’s not a bad idea, so let’s set it up.
Where it says 1440, this is the synchronization interval. I’ll leave it to update every 1440 minutes or 24 hours.
The server and port can be left as it, unless you want to find and use a difference service.
Click the “Sync” button to synchronize the system time right now and test this feature. I get an error when I’m not connected, then I get a message asking me to wait, which never goes away, so I’ll close it. If I was connected to the Net, I would get this confirmation message here.
It seems to be working, so “Next”.

DST configuration:

Next here on the DST screen, you can configure when Daylight Saving Time occurs. Since I turned on the time clock sync feature on the previous screen, this should not really a concern. If I had configured the time sync for every 60 minutes, this would not be required. I will set this to on.
Click “Finish”

So, we have completed the wizard, and we can see the cameras displayed on the screen. If the cameras were not added, as expected, we would right click the home icon to go to the main menu. We are brought to the section called “IP channel”. Here we have the status of each camera connected to the NVR and on the network.

Some status values you could see are Previewing, Offline or Invalid Password. Here I’ll reassign each camera to a different channel placeholder. Once I make my change and hit Apply, it took about 2 minutes for the changes to take effect. Back in my other scenario when I setup the NVR and was connected to my network, the connected cameras had a status of disconnect and here they have a blank status value means there is no channel assigned to the camera. To fix that, I need to give each one a channel, like so and then the NVR will pick them up and display their live feed. A little confusing but a pretty easy fix.

Lastly, let’s make sure all the cameras are recording continuously to the hard drive. Go down to “Recording” and the “Encode” tab here shows the video properties. I’ll check “Record Audio” because I want to record any sound. I’ll keep the other settings as-is because I want to record at 4K resolution with a maximum frame rate with a high-quality Bit Rate. Main Stream of course is the feed recorded by the NVR and the Sub Stream is a lower resolution stream for viewing the feed on the app if you need to save on data or are not in an area with a fast connection. I’ll check all 4 cameras to ensure they all have the same settings.

Over on the Schedule tab, we can configure how we want to handle recording for each camera (or channel) using this dropdown. The “Enable” checkbox allows us to turn on and off the recording schedule, which this is colored section below. Blue mean “Normal” which really means continuous recording. By default, all cameras are continuously recording. Green is to record footage just when motion is detected. White means to skip any recording during this time period. Here, for Camera 2, from Sundays to Thursdays, let’s set it up to record just when motion is detected between 6am and 6pm. And let’s turn off recording on Fridays and Saturdays let’s stop recording on this camera. Hit Apply to save and I’ll make sure it saved by going to camera 3 and then back to 2. Ok, look good to me.

Alright guys, that covers the basics of getting this Reolink 4k system up and running. For me, the wizard covers unnecessary configuration and is too technical for the device initial setup and lacks the assistance you would expect from a wizard. The user interface is a little rough and could use some polishing. On the other hand, I liked how the cameras auto connected and started fulltime recording. Reolink has also redeemed themselves with the mobile app and Reolink client with a good user experience. My advice would be to go through the wizard, like I did and configure the minimum amount to get the system functional. After that, connect with the mobile app, Reolink client or web browser for additional changes and even for playback. More videos to come on this and the advanced features this 4k system offers.