Good day folks.
Not much useful information out there on these cameras except what has been so unselfishly contributed here. Many thanks to all for at least keeping me from going totally nuts trying to figure out the V1.04.11-230511 version I recently acquired.
My platform is
Blue Iris. Having read somewhere (probably an Amazon review..., ahem...) that the app wasn't necessary to get one of these working, I tried every way I could think of and every RTSP MRL address I could find and every port i discovered from a port scan with zero joy.
Then I tried ONVIF Device Manager to see what the hell was going on. No ONVIF. Hmmmm....
It then occured to me that Hik, Dahua and others occasionally implement an additional security layer via an 'ONVIF User' authorization step that enables ONVIF -- if ONVIF is selected along with RTSP -- both of which seem like ridiculous 'feature control options' in the first place, let alone requiring an additional user auth layer to be activated.
Interestingly, the option doesn't exist in the above firmware. I tried just adding a second user but that didn't work.
Ok, then. Let's see if actually registering the device via the Annke Smart app opens things up. Bingo! I mean..., ONVIF!!! RTSP!!! Blue Iris discovers and configures(?) all of the PTZ stuff automagically!.., (to the limited and erratic extent of the firmware itself as described here previously). The coolest discovery was the on screen PTZ control via the mouse without any pre-configuration of anything..., just the default ONVIF (OXML) protocol automatically selected in the PTZ/Control section of the camera configuration during Inspect/Disvover. I'll take it and worry about presets later.
Long and short is registration of the device seems to be required before full functionality is realized, or perhaps more accurately put, possible. On one hand this is an aspect I hadn't read anything about and seems like a fairly valuable piece of information to get one of these things up and running like any normal camera with an otherwise better webUI and firmware platform. On the other hand, the whole cloud thing is in all probability responsible for the 'mind of its own' behaviour in the first place, so 'Catch-22' there.
Just deleting the device from the app seems to kill its ONVIF functionality at the next reboot and you're back to square one unless a workaround is implemented or the device is re-added to the app (re-registered). The easiest approach would obviously be the ability to just establish the required authorization in the firmware and be done with it. Then again, I
may have killed the auth via a factory reset as well. I haven't circled back to check how that actually played out.
Oddly, Tuya is the active p2p link selected. Maybe the Tuya app itself has a better interface than Annke Smart for managing this? Haven't checked that yet either.
FWIW, not having an active p2p connection resulted in zero reboots or timestamp issues. Intentional reboots retained settings and returned the camera to its previous position prior to reboot. This was going on 48hrs. before I logged the camera back in to the p2p session to see if doing so would fix the ONVIF/PTZ issue, which it did.
Next experiment will be saving/exporting the cam config and settings to see if the PTZ stuff is retained in BI without cloud support, unless the .reg config posted earlier does the same thing but better. Still don't quite have my head wrapped around that and the curl stuff yet.
Also, it turned out that RTSP is functional without registration using '/1/h264major' as the address string for main regardless of the encoding setting in the firmware. '/1/h264minor' is the sub.
As far as the basic performance of the camera goes otherwise, I'm impressed with both the image and the available feature set..., at least the features that actually work and don't disappear when the browser is closed. Too bad someone hasn't been handed this project to clean up the broken glass from such an abomidible preliminary effort that doesn't appear to have ever been completed.