psyentific

Camera actually was dead - red failure led on pcb was lit. It was an old 752, and overheated in a cupboard (powered on). Replaced it with a 2432.

Yeah, so I figured out that the camera is broken via overheating. There is a red LED lit on the PCB, and the whole dome housing is quite warm. I tried putting the camera in the refrigerator for a while, and booting it up while it was still cool, but no improvement. I caused this, partly by tucking some unused cables into the dome housing behind the PCB, and partly by locking the camera up in an enclosed space (still powered on) when away from the cubicle. The 752-style dome cameras (and probably all the others) use the entire outer aluminum housing as the heatsink for the CPU (a TI DaVinci in this case). Apparently the thermal operating envelope is a bit narrow and extended heat excursions can kill the camera. I guess a 2010 TI chip was working pretty hard to manage 1200x1600 video. Oh well, learned a lot, now time to buy a 2432 or 2632 to continue the journey.

It's a freebie! A friend's cousin runs an installation business and we asked him if he had camera laying around that accepted audio-in, for testing purposes. This is what we got. It has served very well for testing so far, and for familiarization with Hikvision and IP cams in general, which I needed (I know a lot about digital video already, but first foray into IP cams). This is the first problem w/the camera that wasn't quickly solvable w/help from the internet.

Man, this is a tough one. I've tried resetting the camera again, tried connecting to a Windows laptop (itself set to IP 192.0.0.100), and just can't even see the camera. If I boot into Mac OS X, the Hikvision tools at least report the camera as being online, but won't let me modify it. About the only thing I can think of left to try is taking the POE switch out of the loop by powering the camera directly (12VDC supply), which I'll do this week. Otherwise I guess I get to learn how to try for TFTP firmware recovery/install. This sucks!

Well, we're going to find out - I bought a 75-foot RCA cable and will hook camera audio up from the Hik 752 dome cam I'm using to the back of the Swann 7200 (RCA audio-in jack). Just as soon as I get the dang camera back under control - it got reset to all-defaults and I can see it on the network (via laptop), but can't change the config at the moment for some reason.

So, I was messing around trying to connect my Hikvision camera to a NAS, and accidentally reset the camera to it's default settings of 192.0.0.64, 255.255.255.255, and port 41943. Username and password are apparently still admin and 12345. I can see the camera online in SADP, but it won't let me modify the settings. I get the message "failed to modify settings!" no matter what I do. I can no longer connect to the camera over iView on Internet Explorer either. Anyone had anything similar happen, and how did they solve it? Thanks.

Network Camera Critic helped me out. Because Hikvision listed only one firmware on their website, I assumed it must be backward compatible. No, there are a whole pack of older firmwares available, on a fairly undocumented link. http://www.hikvisioneurope.com/portal/index.php?dir=Product%20Firmware/Cameras/ Once I selected the correct firmware, it was no problem to upgrade, and the .dav file extension was accepted.

So, I've got an old Hikvision 752 ptz camera (circa 2010) that works but doesn't behave properly (doesn't respond to ptz commands, seems to be outputting only the substream video, etc). I'd like to upgrade its firmware from its current V2.0 build 100329 to the 5.x After much suffering, I've got it connected to iView in IE on Windows 7 (finally; had to install Bootcamp on macbook to get this to work - it will not work under a virtual machine). But the iView shows it is looking for a digicap.hex file and I've got digicap.dav Firmware upgrade attempts fail, almost always with the message: "Upgrade Failed", but once with "Network Broken, unknown". Can I not put the newer firmware on this camera? Thanks, Cameron

I did talk to them about this and they said they took down the file because too many people were upgrading who didn't need to, and it was generating problems. Whether the latest firmware has its own bugs, or just users screwing up the upgrade process was not clear. Anyway, they should at least take the link off the web page, but apparently those people don't talk.

So, anyone know if adding a camera with audio capabilities to the Swann 7200 will enable audio recording? I guess that one would have to run a separate cable from the camera's audio-out plug back to the NVR RCA jack?

Okay, IVMS worked. Had to change take the Macbook internet settings out of DHCP and change them manually to match the Swann camera subnet 172.16.1.X, since I didn't want to make any changes to the cam at this point. Also had to figure out that the default user name and password as configured from Swann was admin and 12345 . Now I at least have proof-of-concept of the camera recording on SecuritySpy successfully. Probably we will get a couple more of the same camera and a dedicated Mac Mini to run them on. I'm sure SADP is quicker, and I usually have Parallels and/or Bootcamp installed on my Mac, but not on this laptop at the moment. Also, I usually prefer to figure out how to do it via mac when possible, as that's usually a more robust (& educational) solution for me in the long run. Thanks for you help.

So, I have a few Swann HD-820 (Hikvision DS-2CD2032 really) IP cameras currently hooked up to a Swann NVR8-7200, and I want to migrate some of them over to a 2011 Macbook Air running SecuritySpy NVR software. I know I need a POE switch, so I bought a Zyxel ES1100-8P. I'm fairly network savvy, but I'm a bit stumped at this point. Do I just plug both the mac and the IP cams into the switch (let's assume I don't care about an internet connection at this point, for simplicity)? The mac will complain that there's no internet connection, although it sees the switch. I'm not sure how to find/connect to the camera in this situation though. Help?