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How I changed my D-Link camera to a locally managed IP camera
- boboche 3y agoFor those who are anti-cloud or want a 2-tier system for any good reasons, Been using this with several wyzecam V2 cameras for 2 years with no issues other than the cameras not being low light sensitive like the V3, otherwise the setup is pretty solid and fast. https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks
- rahimnathwani 3y agoWhat do you use for recording? I've thought of replacing cloud cameras, but I'd still want: - recording (not just live view) - alerts - offsite storage What's the best way to set this up these days? Zoneminder running at home? With syncthing handling off-site storage to a VPS?
- housemusicfan 3y agoZoneminder is your grandpa's NVR. The kids are using Frigate these days. Or if you aren't against proprietary software, Blue Iris on Windows is a popular option.
- rahimnathwani 3y agoHaha that shows how long it's been since I looked into this stuff! I did a clearout recently and gave away 5 Xiaomi Xiaofang cameras that I'd flashed with samhacks firmware years ago, but never gotten around to using. If I'd known about Frigate, I might have kept them. But I guess there are better cameras available now?
- syntaxing 3y agoNot OP but frigate works with any camera with RTSP. You can get Amcrest PoE cameras that are great quality that are around $50. Works without wifi or an app but someone in HN posted that the newer ones need an app? But I haven’t come across one and the newest one I got was about six months ago.
- gardnr 3y agoFrigate was a bit limited in usefulness until they added OpenVINO and TensorRT support in April. Trying to find a Coral TPU these days can be a bit of a challenge.
- syntaxing 3y agoI run frigate (mines runs off their Docker image but you can use other alternatives like home assistant plugin). I also pair frigate with scrypted so you can tie the cameras into HomeKit. It’s pretty much the best of both worlds, online storage and detection using iCloud (if I trust a company when it comes to privacy, it’s Apple) and local storage and detection using frigate.
- epakai 3y agoNot OP, but I configured a mosquitto server. Then a simple shell script service with 'mosquitto_sub' and ffmpeg to fetch the rtsp stream on motion events [0]. Somewhat crude, but it was only for a temporary setup. Another option seems to be Home Assistant [1] [0] https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks/blob/master/hacks/faq.md#what-mqtt-messages-does-the-camera-use https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks/blob/mas... [1] https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks/blob/master/integration/homeassistant/homeassistant.md https://github.com/EliasKotlyar/Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks/blob/mas...
- boboche 3y agoFtp upload, local storage and some that I dont mind being exposed are sending to telegram. Looking into frigate right now, guess that makes me a grandpa ;)
- shellerik 3y agoI've been using Agent DVR for recording, alerts and local storage though the alerts rely on a non-local MQTT broker (HiveMQ) due to the double-NAT setup my ISP imposes, otherwise I would have used a local Mosquitto broker. Here is a diagram I put together about my setup. https://i.imgur.com/mAmP9rA.png https://i.imgur.com/mAmP9rA.png
- firefalcon222 3y agoWyze V2 with Dafang-hacks have been super reliable in the past but these cams are now out of production with no reliable confirmation of this working with the V3s. I have been in the market for cheap 20-30$ cams like Wyze V2 with reliable setup like Dafang-hacks for a while but unable to find a good alternative yet.
- colordrops 3y agoI was not happy with wyze V3 but found reolink to work fine without internet, and Amcrest to be the best overall for being open and working without needing fancy software. I'd wholehearted recommend Amcrest except they don't have a very wide angle cam.
- bradknowles 3y agoThe issue with Amcrest and Wyze (and hundreds of other brands), is that they're just re-badging Dahua cameras, which are banned in the US. See https://ipvm.com/reports/ban-law https://ipvm.com/reports/ban-law for more information. Of the lower cost and reasonably well-known names, the only brand that doesn't seem to be doing that is Reolink.
- chaldron 3y agoI have been using wz_mini_hacks [1] on my Wyze V3 and have been pretty happy with it. Among other things, it has a “self-hosted” mode which patches the binaries running on the camera to no longer phone home to Wyze servers. I’ve been using it on my local network over RTSP with no issues. [1] https://github.com/gtxaspec/wz_mini_hacks https://github.com/gtxaspec/wz_mini_hacks
- ed25519FUUU 3y agoI love this idea! All of my IP cameras just FTP to my server where they get immediately uploaded to my google drive. It works perfectly and it’s cheap but they’re still Chinese cameras connected to the Internet. Is there a list of cameras that can be converted like this?
- syntaxing 3y agoMost xiaomi camera and white labels mostly work. I side load the customer firmware on a Yi camera and it’s been a solid wifi camera. The VLAN it’s on has zero internet access.
- zakki 3y agoI have an idea but needs some works: Create a network just for the camera(s) - I.e. different wifi router. Find out the server IP that the camera sends it’s video to. Connect a pc/rpi to this camera’s wifi router on WAN port. Assign all camera’s server IP you found above to this pc/rpi. You should get all the traffic from cameras to their server. Up to you now what you are going to do.
- zo1 3y agoUnless the canera uses HTTPS and certificate pinning so you can't re-assign a different IP to their domain. Snark: Good job privacy advocates!
- tommiegannert 3y agoI wrote a custom FTP->GDrive proxy daemon for use by my scanner. (I wanted USB->GDrive, but it turns out my Brother scanner wouldn't allow me to override scanning parameters on its display for USB, but it does for FTP...) What are you using for this transfer?
- ed25519FUUU 3y agoI use a simple inotify script on the receiving FTP server that waits for a new file descriptor to close and then uses rclone to upload it.
- AHOHA 3y agoI can do the same with almost any IP camera and even USB one with low latency and maximum quality the camera can supports. If anyone is interested in such setup I can do a quick write up about or maybe a repo with the configs needed.
- smokeydoe 3y agoI think most of us here are interested in such setup…
- jamiek88 3y agoI too would love to hear more!
- lylejantzi3rd 3y agoYes, please. I have a Kasa cam I'd love to make local.
- bozhark 3y agoPlease do!
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- qingcharles 3y agoThis tutorial is fiendishly thorough. Hats off to Bjorn for the sheer amount of time he must have spent developing this technique and then very carefully documenting it.
- theogravity 3y agoThe photos have the IDs partially blacked out but not the barcodes under it, FYI. Not sure if those are just encoded versions of those values or not.
- yonatan8070 3y agoPretty sure they are the encoded versions, but I couldn't get them to scan by taking a screenshot and sharing it to Binary Eye [1] [1] https://github.com/markusfisch/BinaryEye https://github.com/markusfisch/BinaryEye
- bruceallmighty 3y agoI don't mean to be rude, but did you even look at the images? Those QR codes are clearly blurred with a non-QR-like circular overlay...
- theogravity 3y agoYou're not being rude at all! I didn't have a "problem" with the blacked-out areas, I was concerned about the ones that were clearly exposed without any redaction.
- TonyTrapp 3y agoThere's still a lot of information visible through those circles. You might not be able to recover every bit, but that's not necessary with QR's built-in redundancy. So I too wonder how much data could be recovered from this.
- oceanplexian 3y agoIt’s cool and I get that there’s a certain element of hacker mentality, but given the seriousness of the use case, all I can think of is why? Do you really want to rely on some firmware hack of a shitty D-Link camera to be the only thing standing between a robber and your stuff? You can buy a proper IP cam from Amcrest, Dahua or TP-Link for a few hundred bucks, wire it into PoE and have at least a fighting chance of identifying who stole your stuff. Anything less than a high quality camera placed in exactly the right place, and all you will accomplish is snapping a really blurry picture of your things being stolen, speaking from experience.
- giantrobot 3y agoUnless a Nest camera is trained in Ninjitsu it’s not going to do a damned thing to stop a robber from stealing anything. Cameras are for monitoring spaces, in the best case recording someone doing something bad in enough detail it can be used in court if they’re caught. So long as the quality is decent and the camera successfully records an event, there’s little difference between a hacked D-Link or Nest camera in terms of functionality.
- IshKebab 3y agoHis entire point is "as long as the quality is decent". I think he's right - low quality CCTV will just tell you what you already knew - your stuff was stolen by a man of average build wearing clothes.
- giantrobot 3y agoI've got some Nest cameras, the actual quality isn't much better than a shitty old D-Link camera I have. The Nest cameras have decent sensors but tiny primary lenses so there's a lot of pre-filtering before the video is even encoded. Fine details get blurred to shit if you actually try zooming on something like a license plate or logos. The main difference I've noticed with the Nests vs older shittier cameras is their lenses have wider fields of view. So while the sensors have more pixels they're just picking up more background details vs more subject details. It lets them to have less precise positioning/aiming to cover a target area but they do t give you necessarily more detail on any individual part of the frame.
- butz 3y agoI love how QR code was obfuscated.
- villgax 3y agoWant something like this for my TP-LINK ones as well. Why the hell can't they have both local hotspot Wifi & the Bluetooth based setup at the same time.
- raesene9 3y agoMy approach with Network cameras with purely local network access has been to get cameras that support ONVIF (which many do), then hook them up with Netcam Studio https://www.netcamstudio.com/ https://www.netcamstudio.com/ After that I block the camera's IP address outbound network access, which should stop them dialing home.
- squarefoot 3y agoNetcamstudio doesn't support Linux, but more importantly it is closed source, so it should be blocked as well from going outside.
- Dalewyn 3y agoYou would make a better case if you would argue with objective evidence of malicious behaviour rather than a cry for ideological purity. I don't know what Netcam Studio is nor what it does and I'm not interested in finding out since I'm not going to use it, but what kind of licensing it has would be the least of my immediate security concerns.
- squarefoot 3y agoYou missed my point: security is a process, not a product. If I don't trust a closed hardware/source camera, then why should I trust a closed source software, especially one that would have access to all video feeds, and if run on the main desktop machine also all data on the local network and the Internet? You're right when calling for evidence, and I have none, but what if the software one day turns malicious and it's being caught only when the damage is done? Sorry, but the risks are too high.
- raesene9 3y agoAs I'm OP in this, I can give you my risk decision. I block cameras from cloud access as they innately have this as a capability, the cloud systems they connect to are a target for attackers and hardware manufacturers in general are not well known for their software security. I don't explicitly block netcam studio as, it runs on a windows host that I want to connect to the Internet for patches, it's a commercial product I paid a license for, so there's some incentives for the developer to maintain it, it has no innate cloud functionality, so less risk of hijack. My risk profile is such that I'm not expecting directed attacks at me, I'm more likely to be caught up in a wider attack on a service.
- ulrischa 3y agoWould it not be simpler to build a own with a raspberry?
- greatgib 3y agoFor something so critical as IP camera, I'm so frustrated that there isn't a single consumer product that you could use locally or without a manufacturer cloud. I know we could use a setup with a raspberry, but I would like the usual nice functions of such a problem like: motor and a performant movement détection alerts. All of that without having to develop all of that myself. I would easy buy the product 2 or 3 times the price we pay for current consumer products.
- EthicalSimilar 3y agoSorry? There are plenty of PoE cameras that you can use and control locally without any cloud interaction. I use a ReoLink camera controlled with Synology Surveillance Station ran on a local NAS setup. It allows me to pan the camera and it also has movement detection. There’s many more advanced use cases you can use with local IP cameras. Just yesterday I purchased one of Synology’s “deep learning” NVRs which allows person detection, face recognition, license plate recognition and more on top of all the standard features (zooming, panning, tilting) with my local Domar cameras.
- dewey 3y agoRelated thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36447024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36447024
- Angostura 3y ago> For something so critical as IP camera, I'm so frustrated that there isn't a single consumer product that you could use locally or without a manufacturer cloud. Pretty sure all the Apple Homekit stuff lets you do this
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nucleardog 3y agoThere’s a _TON_ of options available. Find any camera that supports ONVIF and they support a more or less standardized protocol for discovery and control. All of my cameras are cheap Aliexpress ones that I have never let connect to the internet (nor installed any janky manufacturer apps). They’re on a VLAN where the only other device is a machine running Blue Iris to do all the camera stuff. It supports PTZ, very configurable motion detection, alerting (including just triggering external apps so you can wire up whatever you want to it), etc. Total investment here is like $30/camera for the cheap PoE IP cameras and $80 for Blue Iris.
- xchip 3y agoD-Link is also end-of-servicing many of their cameras, this means they disable the cloud service, rendering the cameras useless and forcing you to buy new ones. I have a DCS-5030L that I am trying to hack. I already dumped the spi EPROM firmware and disassembled uboot using Ghidra to patch the secure boot.
- slj 3y agoI followed this tutorial in 2019, and can report that the cameras are still in operation today.
- thrdbndndn 3y agoI don't know you can use https on an IP, let alone a LAN IP. How?
- jandrese 3y agoFor a self signed cert you can drop your local root server in the cert store when modifying the image. But you may not need to go this far, cheap clients sometimes don’t even check the validity of the cert.
- activiation 3y agoI just blocked mine from accessing the internet
- secstate 3y agoI just use generic USB cameras (pick your quality) and stream over HTTP with MJPEG using ustreamer. Works surprisingly well, but you have to implement all the processing and storage yourself. All you get is a screenshot URL and a streaming URL.