Support for Security Camera System via NVR - ESeeCloud/dvr163

I tried several ways to connect, but there is a proprietary and non document protocol that flash client uses.
Chinese stuff (not always) can get telnet up, boot using serial port, and start telnet service in busybox.

Now I’m trying to use cams without the NVR, connecting to my wifi

We can connect these camera saperately only through cable but not with wifi , if we can connect the camera through wifi then it can be useful

I have an amorvue branded set and my cameras can be used independently (and wirelessly) although the firmware inside them is very limited when compared to the standalone wireless cameras that you can buy.

But i think this NVR has been packaged with many different camera types - so your comments about camera capabilities are not going to apply to everyone that has one of these NVR’s

unable to do these steps ,
how to get the wireless name password and then connect it ?

and i can discard my nvr if i can connect any of the paired cameras can work separately through wifi …

Hello,

Maybe you can help me? I am fairly new too.
I have NVR sold to me as an NVR but has dvr on the unit, its from 163com, which is used hardwired and uses POE. My NVR box suddenly beeped three or four times then it died (no lights nor sound. It’s still under warranty but I bought it on Ebay and the guys don’t speak English and don’t understand me, even though I have emailed them twice. This is my 3rd unit from them and all 3 units have up and died on or around 12 months or less. It’s been a costly adventure with them. On the box it has 163.com Model D8208. I took it to another power point and plugged it in and now all it does is beep.

I did a blonde thing and removed the hard drive out of the dvr and reformatted it, plugged it back in to the dvr box and now I have 4 lights flashing (but no beeps). The four lights that are flashing is showing on the mother board in the unit. I thought it would be easy to get the software online. But I am finding this difficult. My house is up for sale so I have to fix the CCTV as it’s advertised with CCTV. But I am so broke at the moment. :frowning: I’ve tried to get this sottware from the 163com but to no avail.

Would anyone have a link to download the software/hardware needed for the dvr box for this unit please? Any help is so much appreciated.

Thank you

thanks now my NVR systems is working with home assistant through

but it is only for snapshot ,
how to work with this NVR with video and home assistant .?

I think that is what most of us here would like to find out, especially the ability to utilize the motion capture events. I think the best we have is the generic mjpeg stream which is at least better than nothing!

Did you try the hard drive in another system?

DVR systems technically “should” use special hard drives rated for “Surveillance” use. They are designed to be recording 24/7. The typical hard drives that we buy for our computers are generally not designed for constant use and will “die” much sooner than a “Surveillance” hard drive. Since all of your problems occur after about 12 months, I would suspect and test the hard drive itself.

Alternatively, this seems counterintuitive - but my Dad has one of these units and it wasn’t recognizing his hard drive at all. After a lot of trial and error, I eventually discovered that the problem was the power cord/adapter. It was providing power - but not enough current to power the hard drive. Try replacing the existing power supply with one rated for at least 3A and see if that fixes it.

+1 to that! I had an NVR which I thought had failed. Turns out it was the cheap-o power supply that had come with it originally. The “failed” NVR worked fine on the power supply for the new NVR I bought to replace it.

Same for cameras. I’ve had a couple fail, and again, a new power supply was the solution. 3A is the minimum, but I suspect quality control isn’t that good on these things. 4A or higher costs a bit more, but it’s cheaper than throwing them away and buying new ones all the time!

I may have found a relatively elegant solution for receiving “motion detected” events. It would be great if someone with HA knowledge could wrap this in an add-on to integrate with HA. I have this configured on my Raspberry Pi.

  1. Install a postfix server https://samhobbs.co.uk/2013/12/raspberry-pi-email-server-part-1-postfix

    Skip Mailbox Setup and everything after Some Access Restrictions. The server does not need to be exposed to the internet so there’s no need to lock it down. It will also not have a “mailbox” as it will directly pipe the message when it comes in.

    The DVR requires sending a password so we must enable SASL with Dovecot

  2. Install Dovecot (this command was in the Mailbox Setup section that we skipped)

    sudo apt-get install dovecot-common
    
  3. Use Dovecot

    Do the Instruct Postfix to use Dovecot SASL steps from https://samhobbs.co.uk/2013/12/raspberry-pi-email-server-part-2-dovecot.

    I made my user’s name push.

    Test with the Testing SASL steps.

  4. Configure the DVR

    Go to Network Setup > Email in the DVR menu

    SMTP Provider: Custom
    SMTP Server: hassio (or whatever your server is called, IP should work as well)
    Encryption Type: None
    Sender: push (or whatever you named the user)
    Password: (your user’s password)
    Sendee 1: push (or whatever you named the user)
    Subject: (whatever you want)

    If you press Test you should be able to look at /var/log/mail.log on the server and see the message being received.

  5. Last but not least… Pipe your messages to whatever script you want

    Open /etc/aliases and append a line (change push to be Sendee 1 if needed)

    push: |/path/to/script
    

    Save the file and execute newaliases command. Now you can do whatever you want in /path/to/script. Example /path/to/script to write the raw data out to a file called emaildata.txt:

    #!/bin/sh
    
    cat > "/emaildata.txt"
    

    I am piping mine to a python script that sends the image to my phone via Pushbullet https://github.com/pgross41/email2pb

I hope someone finds this helpful and is able to make it into an add-on!

Hello basically i can access my cameras thru IP in local network:
There is also working streaming in VLC using that config:
Setup 4x IP cameras from NVR_wifi_720hd_h264_eseecloud vendor doesnt really matter, (annke sannce, zosi or whatever eseecloud based )
My cameras are using LAN ports instead WIFI connection.
NVR has ip 192.168.1.2
Cameras are from range 192.168.1.168-171.
ch0_0.264 - main stream
ch0_1.264 - sub stream

camera:    
  - platform: generic
    name: right
    still_image_url: "http://192.168.1.2/cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi?chn=0&u=admin&p=Password"
    stream_source: "rtsp://[email protected]:80/ch0_0.264"
  - platform: generic
    name: back
    still_image_url: "http://192.168.1.2/cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi?chn=1&u=admin&p=Password"
    stream_source: "rtsp://[email protected]:80/ch0_0.264"
  - platform: generic
    name: front
    still_image_url: "http://192.168.1.2/cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi?chn=2&u=admin&p=Password"
    stream_source: "rtsp://[email protected]:80/ch0_0.264"
  - platform: generic
    name: left
    still_image_url: "http://192.168.1.2/cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi?chn=3&u=admin&p=Password"
    stream_source: "rtsp://[email protected]:80/ch0_0.264"

You can also try use stream source direct from NVR for each camera, just dont forget to change channel f ex “chn=1” for camera 2:

http://ip:port/cgi-bin/sp.cgi?chn=0&u=USER&p=PASSWORD

http://192.168.1.2/cgi-bin/sp.cgi?chn=0&u=admin&p=Password
http://192.168.1.2/cgi-bin/sp.cgi?chn=1&u=admin&p=Password
http://192.168.1.2/cgi-bin/sp.cgi?chn=2&u=admin&p=Password
http://192.168.1.2/cgi-bin/sp.cgi?chn=3&u=admin&p=Password

I tested it for SANNCE 720P WIFI 4CH system but im sure will work for others eseecloud china NVRs

3 Likes

I’m trying to connect some camera’s i now use with eseecloud no NVR, just some simple Ipcamera like this one http://help.dvr163.com/index.php/P1 i found some info - https://gist.github.com/maxious/c8915a436b532ab09e61bf937295a5d2 - but to be honnest my knowledge is not that good to find a way to use the in HA i also found this info, maybe useful https://github.com/andead/juancamera-proxy maybe some smart people find away to integrate and simplify this in HA?

@lejbek you pretty much solved it. I had never been able to connect to the cameras directly because mine are using wi-fi. I plugged one in and the RTSP stream worked right away. I also found this which explains how to log into the web interface and make the camera accessible directly via wi-fi. See page 5 http://www.global-export-import.eu/WEBSET_DOWNLOADS/611/N3004+%204XIPC165_EN.pdf

Also to update my previous comment… I’m handling motion events by writing the image to a file (which HA can see) and calling a service with the HA API. It uses email2http.py. When the service runs it sends a notification to my phone. I want to setup the UI in HA to allow toggles for which channels send me notifications but I’m not there yet.

Here’s an example of the handle_email file:

cat > "emaildata.txt"

# Write the image to file
/usr/bin/python email2file.py\
  --out_directory "/usr/share/hassio/homeassistant/www/images"\
  "emaildata.txt";

# Notify Home Assistant
/usr/bin/python email2http.py\
  --auth_header "Bearer ABCD1234"\
  --url "http://192.168.1.2:8123/api/services/script/motion_detected_notification"\
  "emaildata.txt";

@krisgalle that GitHub repo is interesting. It looks like it’s meant to connect to a camera (as opposed to an NVR) but port 64444 can’t be a coincidence. I tried running the proxy but when I hit it there’s an error. I may try removing my password and trying again since it’s hardcoded to username admin and a blank password. I wish I could read the code to try tweaking it but I have no clue what it’s doing.

i’m not so familiar with running scipts, can you explain how to run that proxy and what needs to be installed.

Regards Kris

thank you so much for this!!! works with N48WHE_I41V_4 (1080p)

1 Like

I created a HassIO add-on that allows HA to receive motion detection emails and do things with it.

  • Notify Home Assistant
    Send a POST request to HA with info from the email including a base64 encoded image field. Useful for triggering scripts such as a phone notification.

  • Upload to Dropbox
    Backup all the motion emails to a Dropbox folder by channel # and date

  • Forward to another email
    Forward the email from HA to a regular email address

I don’t know the correct way to share add-ons, here is the repository which you should be able to add to your add-on store:

I also have pre-built images here (the dvr163-hass images)
https://hub.docker.com/u/pgross41

I would love to keep adding features such as a UI to browse the Dropbox images in a gallery view with a button to download the video(s) associated to a given image. Also maybe a proxy for the NVR’s request to automatically sync the clock because I don’t let my NVR talk to the internet and for some reason the clock slowly gets out of sync plus the clocks change twice a year.

I hope someone else here finds the add-on useful! I tried to document everything but log a GitHub issue if there are any issues.

Hello,
Can you tell me what model of NVR do you have? and also the version of your FW.
Regards
Stefano

I am still looking for a way to access the RTSP stream wirelessly via the NVR (the solution above requires the camera be hardwired or connected directly to the router instead the NVR).

Since Flash was retired the web UI no longer works in modern browsers. If you visit with IE it installs a WebClient.exe file and the streams are super high quality (compared to the flash version). I tried “decompiling” the exe but did not have much luck. I also listened with wireshark and found a new URL GET /bubble/live?ch=0&stream=0 which appears to hang if I open with VLC. I feel like I’m closer but also not. ¯\(ツ)

Maybe someone else can crack it.

1 Like

Hello!!
I’m also trying to find a way for access the video of the cameras.
The link that you have found is related to the cameras or NVR?

Thanks a lot
Stefano

The bubble URL I mentioned above was related to the NVR. My cameras are all connected via the NVR so I can’t see their traffic, they are in their own NVR network.