How to connect two monitors to Hikvision NVR using VGA and HDMI connections?

In this tutorial, we will show how to connect two monitors to a Hikvision NVR using separately the VGA and the HDMI connections.

Many of the Hikvision Pro-series NVRs offer 2 x VGA & 2 x HDMI and they usually support multi-screen setup. Here we tested the NVRs that offer only one VGA and one HDMI input. The tested models: K-series and I-series.

Hikvision K-series

Models: DS-7604NI-K1-4P(B) / DS-7608NI-K2-8P / DS-7616NI-K2-16P / DS-7716NI-K4-16P / DS-7732NI-K4-16P

When we connected a monitor to both the VGA & HDMI of a 7604 4-channel NVR we were able to see the usual K-series interface on both screens at the same time, but with the older K-series interface when viewing on two monitors your actions will be synchronized (e.g. when you move the mouse on one screen the mouse will do the same movement on the 2nd screen, and this is the same for any action whether it’s opening menus and selecting individual live streams).

So the main disadvantage of this is that you can’t have different live views streaming on each monitor, both monitors will show exactly the same thing and the only difference will be that one will be a VGA quality.

The advantage of these synchronized displays is if you have a setup with say a large wall-mounted monitor and a smaller desktop monitor, you can have the HDMI output to the big screen while you operate from a smaller VGA screen, this kind of setup would be useful for any situation where you need to demonstrate a feature of the NVR or playback footage in real-time to a large group of people.

Hikvision I-series

Models: DS-7608NI-I2-8P / DS-7616NI-I2-16P / DS-7716NI-I4-16P /DS-7632NI-I4-16P / DS-7732NI-I4-16P.

On a 7716-I NVR, we connected two monitors to the VGA & HDMI connections on the back and we got the live streams displayed on both monitors just like we did with the K-series NVR.

The difference with the I-series NVRs is that they use the latest 4.0 GUI (interface), and on the live view page of this new interface you will find an icon in the bottom right of the screen labeled ‘AUX Monitor’ (see image below).

Clicking this icon allows for you to switch control between the HDMI & VGA screens and allows you to move through the NVR menus on one screen whilst keeping the cameras streaming on the 2nd screen.
Now that you have the ability to switch between and control multiple screens you would obviously want to be able to set each screen up with its own camera stream layouts, to do this simply go to the System page (cog icon at the top of the 4.0 GUI) .

Then click the Live View tab and select the view page from the dropdown options. On this page, you can switch between the HDMI & VGA screen and set the camera stream layout for each monitor (see image below).

There are limitations to how you can set the layouts, you can set the same camera to appear on both screens in the same place or in different positions and you can also spread all 16/32 cameras out across the 2 screens.

The main thing you can’t do is have a camera appear in different positions when using different live view layouts on the same screen (e.g. if you put camera 1 in the top-left position for the 2*2 layout it will also appear in this top left position when you switch to the 3*3 layout).

Hikvision 9600 Series

For these models, a lot of them have 2 x VGA & 2 x HDMI connections. We assume that the 2 x connections on these models take the multi-screen setup one step further by allowing you to seamlessly move your mouse between screens (like you can with a 2 screen setup on a PC.

Thus allowing you to adjust each screen’s layout with ease and see all your camera streams in full quality via HDMI connection on both screens. Be aware that you will only see the full-resolution stream of each camera when you select to view the mainstream.