960h /w rtsp and documentation

[mathgladiator]

I bought "Amcrest 960H 8CH Security System - Four 800+ TVL IP66 Bullet Cameras (Black)"

I have it all set up and working with my phone and windows machine.

Question 1: What is up with 8x analog versus 8x digial versus 4x analog + 4x digital?

Question 2: I'm trying to get the RTSP to work, and I've been trying with VLC. So far, no luck. I found "https://support.amcrest.com/hc/en-us/ar ... -URL-960H-" which looks promising. I try rtsp://admin:$<InsertPasswordHere>@192.168.1.222:554/h264Preview_01_main and it doesn't work in VLC. I try telnet and I see that port 554 isn't open. The web client and smart client both show the port, but when I use the device via my television, I don't see the port option available. I recently patched to the latest firmware to no avail.

Question 3: Is there documentation for how to talk to the http or media ports? I saw some cgi bin stuff, but it didn't feel like that was for the 960H.

[iHouseServer]

I've been dealing with this problem as well. After the most recent firmware update, RSTP 554 was closed. After countless hours, I found a copy of the old firmware on their Canadian site and rolled the DVR back to the old firmware. Link is bellow.

https://amcrest.ca/firmware

[mathgladiator]

So, I used the CA drivers, and RTSP works, but it seems to crap out after 20 seconds.

Are there plans to re-enable in the US drivers?

What about reliability?

I have made progress in reverse engineering the media port (9000) used by the SmartClient, but I'm slightly stuck at understanding how to re-assemble the "preview" stream.

[iHouseServer]

Good questions about the US drivers. Looks like we'll have to wait and see.

Tip of the hat on your back engineering of port 9000. You're a few steps ahead of me!

[mathgladiator]

I should clean up my work and throw it on github.... maybe someone will more video codec knowledge can help out.