HIKVISION DS-2CD2032-I camera

[swulf]

I have got the HIKVISION DS-2CD2032-I IP camera (Amazon) to work well with Zoneminder V1.28.1. I'm documenting this here as I can't seem to create a page on the forum.

The firmware of the camera I have is V5.2.5 build 141201, as reported by its internal webpage. I did not update the camera firmware as it works just fine.

My Zoneminder monitor settings are as follows.

General tab:

• Source Type: Ffmpeg
• Maximum FPS: Not Set

Source tab:

• Source Path: rtsp://username:password@camera_ip_address/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0
• Remote Method: RTP/RTSP
• Options: Empty
• Target Colorspace: 24 bit colour
• Capture Width (pixels): 1920
• Capture Height (pixels): 1080
• Preserve Aspect Ratio: Not Checked
• Orientation: Normal
• Deinterlacing: Disabled

Setting up the camera itself is fairly straightforward. As supplied, its IP address is 192.0.0.64. All the camera configuration tasks can be performed through the inbuilt web interface that can be accessed by pointing a browser at the camera's IP address. The supplied user name is admin and the default password is 12345. What's convenient is that you can log in to the camera from another machine on the network even when the camera is connected to Zoneminder, so minor configuration changes are made easier (you don't have to disconnect the camera).

If anyone has any questions about my experience with this camera, or needs more details, I am happy to provide.

Thanks to the help I've received from members of this forum, I have got this far! =D

[valentt]

How are you satisfied with camera? Is it fully working under zoneminder?

[swulf]

I am very satisfied with the camera. The image quality is really excellent - the best I have ever seen from a surveillance camera - and it has some very nice features which I was not expecting. One particularly nice one is that it will recognize when the scene is too dark to give a good colour image, and it automatically switches to a greyscale image and turns on its array of infra-red LEDs to provide more illumination. You can also add your own text overlays (time, date, camera name, custom strings) to the image, amongst other features.

The image updating is fast (Zoneminder reports about 25 fps in the monitor window) and I am currently running the camera constantly to check out its reliability. Only a few days so far, but not a single issue up to now.

In the Amazon reviews you see some people talk about 'brown box' cameras, ones that come in a plain cardboard box, and they advise people to steer clear of them. I have one of the 'brown box' cameras - looks like a 'bulk' package from HIKVISION rather than a 'consumer' one, but the box was new, undamaged and everything was there. The camera, installation CD and instruction sheet (printed, not a photocopy, but all in Chinese), even screws to mount the camera and a shroud for the RJ45 connector. So I'm convinced I'm not getting a knock-off.

[Linwood]

So I'm convinced I'm not getting a knock-off.

The primary difference I think (I have slightly different models) is that there is a US and Chinese hardware version. What you probably got is the chinese hardware with hacked firmware, which means the firmware updates from Hikvision will not work (or will return it to chinese only as the case may be, but my attempt was to brick the camera).

So long as you do not need firmware updates (and mostly why would you?), this is no big deal, but do some careful research before trying to flash any firmware. I bricked mine and had to jump through some serious hoops to get it back (grabbing a TFTP window and a special recovery tool from Hikvision).

[swulf]

I don't know whether the version of the camera I got has 'hacked' firmware. How do I tell?

Since everything seems to be working well, I don't see the need to upgrade, as you say.

[kenneth558]

Thank you immensely for this post. I bought two DS-2CD2332-I, not the DS-2CD2032-I, and your settings are just what I needed!

Then I tried a second camera of the same model. No go. Instead, I had to use the following setting, which I found out worked fine with both cameras:

Source Path: rtsp://username:password@camera_ip/rtsp://camera_ip/ISAPI/Streaming/channels/1
(Really the Source Path doesn't display correctly in this forum entry. It is a concatenation of rtsp://username:password@camera_ip/ and rtsp://camera_ip/ISAPI/Streaming/channels/1)

Remote Method: RTP/RTSP

It took me several days to figure it out! Weird how the double hash twice. Looks like a separate login before stream request.

[kenneth558]

I was wondering why we weren't getting higher resolution, so I fed the stream into vlc, which displayed a message
"The XVideo rendering acceleration driver does not support the required resolution of 2048x1536 pixels but 2046x1536 pixels instead.
Acceleration will thus be disabled. Performance may be degraded severely if the resolution is large." So I told zm to use the 2046x1536, and it does seem to work. I say "seem" because it is nighttime here right now and the dark resolution might not be as good as daytime resolution (?). At least I do get a coherent stream return from the camera using 2046 x 1536. But zm settings of 2048x1536 also produce a coherent output.

[bbunge]

On the WIKI: http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Hikvision

[swulf]

I wanted to add something there but it didn't like my login... so I posted it here.

[Gary S]

I purchased one of these Hikvision cameras and installed it today using the instructions here. It works well with Zoneminder 1.26.5

[thefuzz4]

So don't mean to resurrect and old thread here but I wanted to just post that I was having issues with my Hikvision cameras with the crappy image. My problem turned out to be that the cameras were on a different VLAN than zoneminder. I tried to move my zoneminder box off to the vlan with the cams but that turned out to be more of a pain than it was worth due to all the firewall rules I was going to have to punch for that 1 server to have access to the world. So instead I just gave that box another NIC (its a VM so easy peasy) and assigned that NIC to the VLAN with the cameras and viola all is well no more 200+ events a day from the cams having distorted images. I initially thought it wasn't that big of a deal to just have the traffic pass through pfsense but turns out its not such a good idea . So in case someone else has these issues and you're in the same boat as me this is what I did to fix it.