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  1. 3 years later... probably not much help to you now. :) The IPC-HFW4300S I originally fixed is still going strong, although I've basically retired it and just plug it in here and there for interesting things (right now it's watching the local critters that come and go). I have another old IPC-HFW4300S I was using for that and it died suddenly. I remembered posting this info and came back to look at the pinouts I'd figured out (after I'd already re-done it... just came here to confirm it was still the same). Wouldn't you know, this other one failed with the exact same pin #3 (the yellow-orange wire). And this one had been mostly protected during it's useful life. It was only recently when I temporarily put it in a spot without any good waterproofing that it quickly corroded the pins in the jack. I was just going to toss the thing... it's MANY years old and still has the annoying issue where you can only login using IE. Chrome/Edge/Firefox all freak out and don't let you enter characters correctly in the login boxes, like it's always backspacing over what you just typed. Strange. But maybe I'll put another spare connector on this and give it some life in some unused corner of the yard. To answer your question, when I punched the wires down for those 2 wires that connect to multiple pins, I just punched them down in both spots. Or you could use a jumper. I think for proper POE it needs to be on both.
  2. Adding my own 2 cents. My IPC-HFW4300S (version 1) died last night. I had an issue with it before where water got into the RJ-45 and slightly corroded the pins... at the time I just cleaned it off the best I could (alcohol, a little dab of WD40) and got the copper nice and shiny. Well, one of the pins ended up basically just snapping off (pin #3). Well, that's no good. So, I cut off the connector and got my multimeter out to figure out which of the 6 wires (yeah, just 6, and totally funky colors) went to which pin. I'll confirm what was posted previously: Brown = pin 1 Purple = pin 2 Orange = pin 3 Yellow = pin 4+5 Blue = pin 6 Grey = pin 7+8 The yellow/gray are for the PoE so it's fine they're basically tied together. That did have me wondering though. I had an RJ45 jack leftover from wiring my house and punched it down, plugged it in, and I'm back in action. For the separate power connector (black/white/green/red) I just cut them off and taped the leads over to make sure they won't touch anything or each other. This will all go into a waterproof junction box anyway when I put it in it's new location (I had a new camera I hadn't quite figured out where to put yet, so when the Dahua failed I swapped it for that spot). What seemed to cause the pin to break totally this time was a bad o-ring on the waterproof connector, or it wasn't snug enough. Water found it's way in after some heavy rains. Meh... it happens here. I started just using waterproof junction boxes for all of my new cameras a few years ago but hadn't refitted the existing ones. It's worth it, and you can paint them to blend in so it works out well for me. I assume others might just stuff the wires somewhere else or have it run through a wall, or just leave them exposed (but nicely staples) like I had been doing, which is kind of ugly when I think about it. Lesson I learned: do it right and save yourself hassles down the road.
  3. The broadcast IP is correct. You might be thinking of the gateway IP address which is a different thing. Broadcast addresses are typically going to be the IP address where the host part of the subnet is all ones in binary (255 in the last octet of a class C address like yours, for example). But don't worry about that, it won't affect you really. Sounds like you might need to reflash or flash a different version if the web interface isn't working.
  4. I'm just trying this out actually... finally had some quiet time to tinker with my PAL version of the 4300S. After flashing, the firmware reports itself as: Software Version: 2.420.0000.0.R, build : 2014-04-19 WEB Version: 3.2.4.184667 ONVIF Version: 2.4.1 So that's up from the other one which said: Software Version 2.400.0000.0.R, build : 2013-12-31 WEB Version 3.2.4.161826 ONVIF Version 2.3 I haven't noticed a whole lot of differences in the GUI. Comparing the backup files before and after, I see that for the most part they actually *removed* some stuff that didn't really belong in a bullet camera. Things like PTZ preset stuff, and a few alarm related things. In the video settings, there are some minor interface changes to the new 2.4 day/night settings. I think they're making it clearer that the new "sensitivity" and "delay" settings are specifically for the day/night sensitivity and delay (those 2 settings are prefixed with the text "D&N" now, and delay is a drop-down box, not a slider). There are some other slight rearranging of things on that screen, nothing too drastic (mirror and flip moving above the 3D NR settings for example). One big thing I see is that the new "Interest Area" tab in the video settings is missing... I don't know if it moved somewhere else or if it's just gone from the UI, but I can clearly see that the interest area I created previously is still in effect. So the feature itself still works, you just can't adjust it. Peculiar. I can see in the page source where that tab *should* be, but the tab itself doesn't show up. Maybe they ran into some feedback about problems with it, so they're hiding it for now but the functionality is still in place apparently. So if you like that feature, you're better off giving this version a pass... but who knows what other kinds of under-the-hood fixes are present. What else... ONVIF authentication settings moved to a sub-tab of Connections, and that's probably a better place than it's own "Access Platform" screen. That's about all I could tell from just poking around... like I said, probably some other fixes and stuff, but the big things were the removal of the "Interest Area" settings itself, and just general re-arranging of a few screens, minor layout changes.
  5. I'm playing with the interest area, and it seems like you can't set each of your 4 rectangles to dark or clear separately... you pick your areas and then they are *all* clear or *all* dark. For fun, I picked some boring parts of the image and set them to dark, and you can REALLY tell the difference. Those "dark" regions are super pixellated. So if you have some parts of your FOV that you really don't care about, set them to dark and call it good. You'll free up bandwidth for the parts you do care about to show up better. Or if you have some area that you're really interested in but the other stuff is something you still want to show up somewhat okay, then use the "clear" option and highlight those areas. I tested that out as well, although I've only got some boring static things to look at like the neighbor's parked car. But the difference is pretty obvious. It's like the 3d noise removal is working differently for that area... kind of like it seems grainier in a sense, but more detail/less blur from frame to frame. I'd really have to see it on a moving object to get a real sense of it, but it's definitely a cool feature, and probably worth the upgrade by itself. In fact, the "clear" thing may be why I had my Blue Iris issue, because I had originally marked a large section of my driveway to be "clear"... maybe that pumped up the image stream past what my bandwidth limit could handle. Speaking of bandwidth, I was able to go to CBR and 4096 Kbps at 20 frames (iframe 40) which is something I had issues with previously when I first got the camera. It seems like that's working pretty good right now so I'm leaving it that way.
  6. Hmm... one *small* thing... After the firmware update, Blue Iris is having trouble getting the video stream from the camera. That's odd. It can query the ONVIF info just fine, so I tried both that and the regular Dahua RTSP setup, but in either case, it just says it couldn't connect to the camera. Which I assume merely means it's having trouble with the video stream and not really a connection issue. BI just shows "No signal - I/O error: 0" If I tell Blue Iris to "Skip initial DNS and reachability tests" I might get a single frame out of it at first, but then nothing. I'm going to have to experiment some and see if there are particular settings in the video encoding that Blue Iris doesn't like. I'm guessing this problem is particular to Blue Iris... the video from the web interface shows up just fine, so I know the camera itself is working, but I don't have anything else handy to actually test the H.264 stream. ---- Testing a bit here before I post... if I switch the camera to 1080P then BI sees it just fine. My 3MP settings were for H.264H (I also tried H.264, no change), 20 FPS, VBR, Quality: 4, Bit Rate: 2048, and iframe of 40. Pretty conservative settings, I think. I left all those the same when I switched to 1080P. Back at 3MP, I got BI working again by changing the frame rate to 10, CBR, 4096 for bit rate, and 20 for iframe. Maybe my old settings with the lower bandwidth were just causing the stream to simply not be able to "fit" into that 2048 Kbps bit rate I gave it. I only did that originally because when I first installed the camera, it seemed like either it or BI was struggling with the data coming in. Mind you, the computer I run BI on is a nice i7-3770K system with 32GB of memory and a dedicated RAID 0 for the video recordings, so it's not underpowered by any stretch. Anyway, just be aware that if you install this firmware upgrade and BI is having issues, you might want to check some things because what worked before may not work after.
  7. Thanks, this is awesome. I have two HFW4300S cameras. One from Amazon which is the PAL version, and one which is the NTSC version. I installed this on the PAL version and it updated just fine. I'm too chicken to even consider putting this on the NTSC cam so I'm not going to. The new features do seem pretty cool though... the extra motion detection options are nice. I also see that it now supports SNMP v3 if you're into that. I saved my config settings before and after and in comparing the two I was able to spot some of the things they added in addition to what was in that PDF document. Nothing too mindblowing, although I see settings in there for day/night sensitivity settings (defaults to "2" apparently) and day/night switch delay (defaults to "6"). Not sure what exactly that would do, but I have a good guess. It'd be cool to adjust it slightly so it switches to/from color mode slightly different. For instance, on this camera I can leave it in color mode a bit longer and still get a good image, compared to when it switches automatically. I may tinker with that later. The GUI adjustments for those are found in the "Conditions" screen for the profiles. Apparently "2" is medium sensitivity (out of low, medium, high) and the delay ranges from 2-10. The built-in help screen doesn't really indicate what the different settings do... is delay in seconds or minutes? Not sure. For instance, when my motion floodlights kick in, there's ample light to switch to color mode at night, but unless the lights are on for 1-2 minutes, it won't flip to color. Maybe I can tweak it so it switches to color mode quicker in that case. There are of course the documented things like the additional substream, but I only ever use the main one going into BlueIris, but that would still be a nice option for some. 720P is an option in the substream settings now (only on substream 2), besides D1 and CIF (which vary between PAL and NTSC as to the exact resolution). Be sure to check some of your settings... for instance, I previously didn't have privacy masking set to anything, but when I looked, there were a series of 4 rectangles setup from top-left going diagonally down/right. Not sure why, but easy to remove them. It still had masking disabled so it wouldn't have used those areas anyway. The layout of that "Overlay" screen looks a lot nicer too. Which reminds me, they did slightly update their CSS a bit... Nothing too crazy, things like the top-right tabs for "Live", "Setup", etc being slightly wider, and a few other spacing changes. You can overlay a picture now. Maybe for watermarking your snapshots, or sticking some logo or something on there. I guess that could come in handy for some uses. It can only be a max 16KB in size and max 128x128 pixels, 256 color BMP. So yeah, logo or watermark is pretty much what I'm thinking. There's a new tab in the "Video" section called "Interest Area". You can draw a rectangular area on the image (or multiple areas, up to 4) and set the image quality to either "Dark" or "Clear" for each one. I'm guessing that will tweak the compression settings, maybe? I'm going to try it out and for my area of interest, set it to "clear" and see if it's less fuzzy than usual if I'm digitally zoomed in. And the new "Abnormality" settings under "Event". It can create an alarm for cases of network disconnect or IP conflict as well as if someone fails to logon X times (3-10 is the range and send an email or raise an alarm once it crosses that point. I'm a little nervous about how it says it will lock the account after that threshold... it doesn't say if/when it auto unlocks the account. What if someone tried it (or I just kept fat-fingering the pass) too many times... am I locked out until a power cycle? Still, that's good to prevent brute-force attempts to gain access. There's a NAS option under Storage -> Destination, but I don't seem to be able to click "enable". Also, when I compared the backed up config files, I also saw settings in there about SMB storage but I don't see that anywhere in the GUI. Wouldn't that be cool. For the NAS, if I wanted to force it, maybe I could update the config backup to set it true and add the values, then restore that config. But I'm not planning to fuss with that right now. I had some FTP settings in my old version but I had FTP disabled at the time. It did NOT carry over those FTP settings... maybe because it wasn't enabled? So keep that in mind. Oh yeah, ONVIF 2.3. Not a big deal to me, but it's there. Here's the info from my version screen: Software Version 2.400.0000.0.R, build : 2013-12-31 WEB Version 3.2.4.161826 ONVIF Version 2.3 (note the new ONVIF thing shows up) There could be more subtle differences... I haven't really gone through everything. Now if I could get my hands on the NTSC version. That "Interest Area" would be a much more useful option on my other camera since it covers my front door... I want clear faces and would happily sacrifice some blur on the surrounding bushes and trees to get that.
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