Around 16:00 three cameras go offline a few minutes apart. They give the "no signal" error in BI; won't respond to restart.
Upon http access they present the standard Amcrest login screen, minus the "IP Camera Web Access" text above the credential fields, and the password field populates in plaintext. The login button does nothing however (just in case this is an evil portal I try an incorrect password). My next suspicion is that a service in the camera went down and it can no longer do any back end javascript.
- amcrest.png (104.61 KiB) Viewed 708 times
So changing the credentials in BI results in the error message changing from the "no signal" screen to the "invalid username/password" screen, so the camera is clearly still online, and communicating with BI, just not with all services running.
The fact that all three went offline a few minutes apart would lead me to believe it was a firmware issue related to a communication problem with their C&C servers, however I'm pretty sure they are all running the same FW and the other five cameras did not go offline.
I was able to restore the feeds by checking "Use RTP/UDP ports" in the BI advanced options, and picking some random port number, so I got the feed back anyway, however the http UI still won't allow me to login.
I can't do a hard reboot at this time fyi.
Eventually I was able to login to only one of the three via the http page, and only once, and I was greeted with the usual looking live screen but now it is asking me to download a chrome extension in order to view the live feed, as if this is some grey market HikVision camera from ten years ago using an IE-only activeX plugin! This extension however appears to be a legit one from Amcrest. I did not download it.
Questions:
WTF is going on here? I have been running these cameras for over a year elsewhere with no such issues, then three go down from a weird firmware glitch within minutes of each other?
Do these cameras have some default mode that their webserver switches to if HTML5 is not working or something? That's why it asked me to download an extension to view live video when it knows damn well an extension is not supposed to be needed?
And why was I able to restore my feeds by picking a random RTP/UDP port in BI advanced settings? AFAIK the only UDP port setting in the camera config is 37778. Why can I tell BI to use 37772 and I get my feed back? Do these cameras keep all incoming ports open just in case someone needs to use RTP/UDP?
Thanks in advance! Help much appreciated!