New Amcrest firmware breaks PTZ

Forum for questions and support relating to the 1.30.x releases only.
chris_19
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Feb 04, 2019 1:49 pm

Re: New Amcrest firmware breaks PTZ

Post by chris_19 »

alabamatoy wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:35 pm Might want to suggest that the company you work for do a bit of research on Dahua before burning any bridges. Here is a good place to start: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/eur ... -iot-mess/
Thanks for the link!

Dahua is the OEM for Amcrest. I have confirmed this. AAMOF, Dahua OEMs for a very large market of camera vendors. So the problems mentioned in the article published 08 Oct 2016, would be applicable to a large part of that market.

That said, our cameras are isolated to their on subnet which, in turn, is isolated from any internet access of any sort.

My issue with Amcrest was pretty strictly tech support. The OEM vendor I have purchased my second Dahua camera from exhibits the same general issue, although they are definitely trying hard to handle my requests. I think the real issue is that Dahua does not provide support for its OEM equipment beyond whatever spec. they are provided by the vendor. In every situation there appears to be no path back to the folks writing the firmware.

I have been able to unpack the camera firmware and mount up the *nix file system. So it would seem possible to fix some of the issues assuming they are not hardware issues. I'll probably not go that route simply due to the time and effort involved.
alabamatoy
Posts: 349
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2016 2:53 pm

Re: New Amcrest firmware breaks PTZ

Post by alabamatoy »

So I installed a new Amcrest IP2M-853EW purchased a few weeks ago on my NW. I basically copied the existing working monitor from the IP2M-853EW camera purchased and installed last fall (2018). The new camera video works, but the ZM PTZ control fails with following in the ZM log:

Code: Select all

Camera control command FAILED: '401 Unauthorized' for URL login:password@10.1.1.173:80/cgi-bin/ptz.cgi?action=start&code=Right&channel=0&arg1=0&arg2=1&arg3=0
So now I have two supposedly identical cameras, one works with the PTZ, the other doesnt.

What am I up against? Is this the digest authentication issue? I am running the amcrest841 script which I thought worked for the newer digest authentication.
alabamatoy
Posts: 349
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2016 2:53 pm

Re: New Amcrest firmware breaks PTZ

Post by alabamatoy »

So I will answer my own question. Basically, I am stupid. I had the wrong value in the "control device" field which TCG setup to be the device serial number. Fixed that, and all is right with the world again....
bhearsum
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2020 6:43 pm

Re: New Amcrest firmware breaks PTZ

Post by bhearsum »

Thanks to everyone who's been working on this so far. I've been able to get this working with 1.32.3 + the latest firmware on my IP2M-841. However, it appears that Zoneminder 1.32.3's frontend is not sending the right query parameters when making PTZ requests. For example, it posts to /zm/index.php with paramaters such as:
view=request
request=control
id=6
control=Up
yge=32
Which results in errors like "Invalid control parameter: Up" and "Can't access Up member of object of class ZoneMinder::Control::Amcrest_HTTP".

Changing those requests to send "moveUp" (which matches the method name in Amcrest_HTTP.pm) fixes the problem.

I also tried adjusting the perl module to use "Up", but that failed because the PHP backend doesn't like "Up" as a control parameter (see https://github.com/ZoneMinder/zoneminde ... ns.php#L11)
bhearsum
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2020 6:43 pm

Re: New Amcrest firmware breaks PTZ

Post by bhearsum »

I filed https://github.com/ZoneMinder/zoneminder/issues/2791 for the issue mentioned above.
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