Can I use a router and an iPhone to access a Yucheng (Hikvision) PTZ camera? How to access the camera (it's not a WiFi-equipped camera)?

L

LilAbner

n3wb
Jul 16, 2020
13
0
San Diego, CA
Got a non-PoE camera from AliExpress. Ran 12V to it, plugged it into an Amcrest NVR, got a great picture, and was able to use the Amcrest interface to manually pivot the camera left/right, up/down, and zoom in/out. So those functions are working well, so far so good.

But I couldn't get the NVR's interface to set up a series of locations for the camera to look, and step through them automatically to sort of "patrol" the street. Called Amcrest, who said I was pressing the right buttons, but that sometimes 3rd party cameras' features don't all work on Amcrest NVRs. Hmm.

So I ran the camera's cable directly to a router I hadn't used in a while and loaded BlueIris on my iPhone, paid $9.99 for the privilege. After it was installed, first thing it asked me was for the number of my BlueIris license. Umm, where do I find that? Will BlueIris send me a license sometime? Giving them the money was quite easy, getting a license hasn't happened yet.

Once I get BlueIris licensed and running, I hope to use it to set up a pattern of places to look and zoom to, and then get the camera running that route autonomously while I plug the camera's RJ45 cable back into the Amcrest recorder.

Do I have the right idea here?

And, anybody know where to find the license number of the BlueIris installation on my phone?

Thanx all!
 
LilAbner said:
And, anybody know where to find the license number of the BlueIris installation on my phone?
Click to expand...
The BI phone app only works with a licensed copy of the BI program for a PC, available here.
You will be e-mailed the license info to activate the software on the PC first, (which you download and install), then the phone app will work.

The BI PC acts as a server for your cameras and/or NVR which you access using your smartphone or another PC either locally (LAN) or remotely (WAN).

In order to get the most out of Blue Iris, I suggest you read Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris and Optimizing Blue Iris' CPU Usage
 
Ouch, $58??? I thought it was just a $10 phone app. Hmm.

All I really wanted it for, was to set up a sequence of places for the PTZ camera to point, and start it automatically running through them over and over. Once it gets going, I may never use that software again. And I'll just use the Amcrest NVR to record whatever pictures it sends from wherever it's pointing. The NVR might never even know it's a PTZ camera.

Groan.

Right now the PTZ camera is plugged into 12V, and into a router that puts out WiFi. Not plugged into the Amcrest NVR at all. I hope to communicate with it using my iPhone, and program a few places to look so it will "patrol the street" by itself. Once I get that running, I'll unplug the ethernet cable from the router and plug it back into the NVR, and let the NVR record whatever pictures the camera sends.

Anybody know of a security-camera phone app that communicates with a local router, that in turn is connected to a Yucheng PTZ camera? So it can program a few sequences of places the camera can point to? Doesn't need to be fancy. Or expensive.
 
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Have you tried logging into the camera's embedded webGUI (using it's IP address) ? I would think you could set up the "patrol function" that way. You should also be able to set up "presets" (a specific x,y coordinate) and have the patrol function visit those presets and dwell on each one for a certain duration.

BTW, Blue Iris is one of the most feature-packed, configurable and deployed VMS's anywhere and at $58 it's a steal. Someday when you feel like you want to have more and better cams and want to really do more with them then you might re-consider Blue Iris.
 
Hi, TonyR, thanks for replying! Actually while the camera was plugged into the Amcrest NVR, the NVR had a function for creating Presets. I created several, and later was able to tell it, "Go to Preset 1", followed by "Go to Preset 2", and "Go to Preset 3". With each command, it did exactly as I had programmed.

When I pressed the button for "Go to Preset 1", it moved to the first x.y location and zoomed to the z value I had given it. Perfect. Then with the next "Go to Preset 2" command, it moved to the second x,y location, and zoomed to the second z value. And same thing for the third "Go to Preset 3".

But I don't know if it was the NVR that remembered the Presets, or the camera that remembered them.

When I told it "Go to Preset 1", did the NVR simply tell the camera "Go to the first preset you were taught", and later "Go to the second" and "Go to the third"?

Or did the NVR tell the camera, "Go to x=-10.5, y=12.2, zoom=3X", so that the camera never had to think and never had to be taught any presets?

I hope the NVR was doing the former, and that the camera had already memorized beforehand the values for every Preset.

Am I phrasing my concerns understandably? My apologies if not.
 
If you never logged into the camera's webGUI to set those presets then it must have been handled by the NVR.
I cannot say as I use Blue Iris and not a NVR.
 
Hmm. I don't recall logging in as you describe.

After I was playing with presets (described above), I disconnected the camera from the NVR, and plugged it into a router only. On my desktop computer I can see the name of the small WiFi net the router broadcasts. It's still that way now. Would that be the way to log into the camera's webGUI?

(The camera itself has no wifi capability, its only output is the RJ45 connector).
 
LilAbner said:
Hmm. I don't recall logging in as you describe.

Would that be the way to log into the camera's webGUI?

(The camera itself has no wifi capability, its only output is the RJ45 connector).
Click to expand...
As I stated in post #4 and re-iterated by @civic17 in post #8, with camera on network, type in the camera's IP address into your web browser of PC that's on same LAN as your camera.
 
I've been gone for a while, sorry. How do i find the IP address of the camera? No IP address written on any tags on the body of the camera. There is a MAC address listed on a sticker on the side of the camera. Not the same thing, I know, but will that help?
 
Is that Amcrest NVR providing POE to the camera?
 
Nope. I've had most of this system for a while. An Amcrest PoE NVR, five Amcrest PoE fixed-lens cameras, and this new Yucheng Hikvision PTZ camera that is not PoE. So I ran 110VAC to the garage location near the Yucheng camera, fastened its power supply to the wall there, and ran its 12VDC to the camera from there.

The Yucheng PTZ camera has been providing a beautiful picture to the Amcrest NVR from Day 1. And I found that I can manually pan, tilt, and zoom the PTZ camera using the NVR's mouse and Amcrest's NVR interface. But I can't get the camera to memorize several presets and then move from one to the other automatically (called a "tour" I think?).
 
Well, finally bit the bullet and purchased the Windows version of BlueIris, if only for the reason of finding what the IP address of the new PTZ camera was. Unplugged the camera from the NVR and plugged it into its own standalone router that also produced WiFi. Logged off the house's usual WiFi and logged in to this standalone router. BlueIris found the IP address for the camera. I logged onto the IP address, and there it was, the camera's own little webpage.

It showed a picture of what the PTZ camera was seeing in real time, though in not very good resolution. But it's definitely logged into the camera itself.

Couple of things I'd like to find, that I haven't yet:

1.) A way of resetting the camera all the way back to original factory settings. That's because when I first got the camera out of the box and plugged it in, it gave me a good picture, AND started drawing a green rectangle around every human form it saw. Excellent. Then I started playing with the Amcrest NVR interface to it, and somewhere in there it quit drawing those rectangles. I don't know what I did, but somehow I cancelled the rectangles. Wish I could get them back. So far I haven't seen a way to do that, even when I plug the camera's IP address into the browser and log into it.

2.) A way of creating presets inside the camera itself (when I'm plugged into the camera's own internal website), and telling the camera to start cruising from preset to preset. Haven't found the part of the camera's own little web page that does that yet.

But, progress is being made!
 
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