IPC-HDW4421C reverted to chinese

[digger11]

I've had my IPC-HDW4421C for almost a year now. I set it up in August of last year, and have had it working under Blue Iris ever since, and have never applied a firmware update, or really had any reason to go in and tweak settings since then. Today I wanted to increase its frame rate, and imagine my surprise when I found that it now is only offering a Chinese user interface.

With Chrome I can log in and have it translate the pages so that I can look around and make minor changes, but the only thing that looks like a language setting in the UI only has Simplified Chinese as a choice.

Version information is as follows:
Device type IPC-HDW4421C
Software version 2.400.0000.10.R, build: 2015-06-18
WEB version 3.2.1.277266
ONVIF version 2.4.1

Does anyone know how I can switch the camera back to English?
Has anyone else run into this before?
Anyone know where I could find newer firmware for this camera?

 

[bp2008]

I have not looked lately, but I could not find a compatible firmware for these

 

[nayr]

I was just helping someone on IRC hack some Dahua firmware, it did not appear that there is ANY security on the firmware.. We poked arround a bit and I came to the following conclusion.

Some AliExpress sellers are purchasing chinese-only cameras, connecting via serial and renaming the English.txt to SimpChineese.txt and effectively making it an English Camera..

The problem appears to be if you do a hard-reset on the camera, it renames the language file and reverts it back to Simplified Chinese..

There are some serial connections directly on the camera's circuit board that let you get console access, if you can get into the camera's console I think its just a matter of renaming that file back.. I havent actually done it, I was just helping someone else who was doing it and sharing with me the results.

If you can get the firmware image, repacking it seems to be a fairly trivial thing.

Otherwise there is no functional difference between the camera now and before, other than the translation file is wrong.. dont let it bother you too much if you cant get it back to English.

 

[digger11]

The problem appears to be if you do a hard-reset on the camera, it renames the language file and reverts it back to Simplified Chinese..

I don't think the camera went through a hard reset as I had configured the camera to display portrait instead of landscape, and changed the admin password. Neither of those settings had reverted to defaults.

I sent a message to the seller, Julia Li, via aliexpress asking if they could provide me with new firmware. Haven't heard anything back yet.

Worst comes to worst, I can live with it. Chrome will translate the UI well enough I can get around ok and make changes if needed.