0Getting the most out of HikVision Cameras

I have a 4Mpix Hik­Vi­sion mini dome cam­era for CCTV on the house. It provides a pretty reas­on­able pic­ture con­sid­er­ing the price, but the man­age­ment inter­face is a bit rub­bish and get­ting it set up with any­thing is a bit of a nuis­ance, so heres some notes on get­ting it working…

Firmware

It is well worth updat­ing the firm­ware but Hik­Vi­sion don’t make this easy to find. My cam­era is a DS-2CD1341‑I, but googling for it does­n’t help reveal any firm­ware for it. You need to know that it is often ref­ered to by Hik­Vi­sion as part of the 1×41 series or the R6 plat­form. At time of writ­ing (1^st May 2020) the latest firm­ware for all R6 cam­er­as includ­ing mine is 5.5.82, which is avail­able from Hik­Vi­sion Europe.

Admin

Des­pite recent firm­ware hik­vi­sion haven’t figured out a way to write a plu­gin for Chrome or Fire­fox, so you are forced to use the very ancient Inter­net Explorer 11 to do things like update the firm­ware on the camera!

Adding to Milestone XProtect

You need to enable the cam­er­a’s ONVIF fea­ture, which is found in Net­work -> Advanced Set­tings -> Integ­ra­tion Protocol
Set a user­name and pass­word to access the cam­era with ONVIF
Once ONVIF is enabled, in mile­stone add the cam­era manu­ally by expand­ing “Record­ing Serv­ers”, then right click on your serv­er name and select “add hard­ware”. Select the manu­al option, use the add but­ton and add the ONVIF user­name and pass­word you set on the cam­era, then click next. Select “clear all” and then scroll down to ONVIF and expand it and select “ONVIF Con­form­ant Device” and click next. On the next page enter just the IP address of the cam­era, and click next. From here it should be suc­cess­fully detec­ted and you can click next and yes through the rest of the menus

Accessing streams directly

I found at least 2 paths that work to access the stream from my cam­era dir­ectly. These will work in some­thing like VLC play­er, but can­’t be web-streamed as they are RTSP which no browsers nat­ively support.

• rtsp://user­name:pass­word@ip-address:554/Streaming/channels/101
• rtsp://user­name:pass­word@ip-address:554/h264/ch1/main/av_stream

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