Hikvision Cameras on Dahua NVR with user defined Camera Names

[dcarskadon]

I spent a few hours fighting this tonight. I read several articles online that all said you can ONLY add as ONVIF (put this in bold, as the entire lesson from this thread is this) and that it is completely impossible to set a camera name on the Dahua NVR.
The cameras I was trying to connect are older Lorex cameras (which are really hikvision). They have the latest firmware on them.

So connection method 1: Who needs to read the manual, lets just key in the IP of the camera and hit search and see what happens,. Camera is detected as ONVIF, cool. We edit the camera and put in the correct password and it connects. Yea!. Camera is named Channel1 (or whatever channel slot you associated. Okay, fine, lets go to "Camera Names" and change. Change "Channel2" to whatever, apply the change, and a success message comes back. If I go back to live view, still reads as "Channel2". If I go back to the camera names page, yup, back to Channel2. At this point, I am getting upset. Now I am trying to see if I can SSH to the DVR and change this default or SSH to the camera,... something. After wasting my time with that, download the free hikvision DVR software and connect one up, maybe I can set something via it that somehow I cant do on the cameras web admin page.. worth a shot. Nope, yet again, a waste of time. I try to add one of our Dahua cameras next. That took all of about 10 seconds, and the name is retrieved from the camera. Okay, so now it dawns on me that the page for camera names is really a GET/SET deal. It gets the name of the camera from its connection method, and if you change the name here, then it SETs it via that connection method. Clearly ONVIF must support this to some degree, or at least Dahua's firmware assumes as much. What other options can we try. I see Custom as a choice. Immediately I see that Custom is just RTSP URLs, now I am hoping, okay sounds like dumb mode... maybe that will work? The answer is YES. Now the NVR sees the camera connected in stupid mode (via custom AKA rtsp), which changes the behavior of the camera name page. Dahua literally has an article on how to properly connect Hikvision cameras, and they clearly state ONVIF, so that is not helpful. Overall, I think part of the frustration revolves around marketing (i.e. just toss out your non Dahua cams), I could be wrong. Anyway, maybe someone stumbles on my thread googling the issue (same as what I did, and what most of us do).

 

[dcarskadon]

An update to my own post here. So there is a catch sadly. While using custom lets you freely name the cameras, what it does break is motion detection. If you are recording constantly then all good. For us means time to buy 15 more Dahua cameras. The Hikvision cams we have at the plant are from the oldest original off the shelf system, so probably not terrible to replace those very old cameras anyway, so all good.

 

[Carcus]

ONVIF is like a compatibility protocol between different brands and the way it's implemented is different between manufactures, onvif versions and models of cameras. I would neve expect it to be as good as using the same brand NVR with the same brand cameras, functionality is always limited.

For what its worth I have added many Hikvision cameras to a Dahua NVRs with ONVIF and was surprised that name could be changed.

Anything from old 2332/5 2345 models all the way up to newer 2385 and hilook T260 models, no issue with renaming the cameras at all.

You should be able to access the cameras interface through the cameras menu on the web interface by clicking the E under webpage (see attached) and manually change the OSD settings.

 

[dcarskadon]

Very cool. So based on that, I think my issue is: These old cameras came from what started as a small system, of an off the shelf Lorex from years ago. While those cameras have the "latest" firmware, which for those models, is super old, point it, they were designed to go with that DVR, so would have been no compelling reason to fully support the naming via ONVIF. The OSD settings are correct, just something in ONVIF that is failing to communicate properly with that locked in firmware I think is all.