Skip to content
Scott Lamb edited this page Apr 23, 2021 · 10 revisions

Note: Moonfire NVR's author discourages buying Dahua cameras for ethical reasons. He believes that Dahua is writing custom software to support the Uyghur genocide. Keep using any Dahua cameras you already own, but please don't buy more!

Dahua IPC-HDW5231R-Z

This has been a popular model on the ipcamtalk.com forums since late 2016 (see thread), though as of 2019 there are some newer cameras to consider.

RTSP paths:

  • main stream: /cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0
  • sub stream: /cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0

Security: as with many cheap cameras, this one is hopelessly insecure. Moonfire NVR's author has it installed on a separate LAN segment such that the NVR can initiate TCP connections to the camera, but the camera can not initiate connections to the NVR, LAN, or Internet. See also the Dahua Camera Best Practices on ipcamtalk.com.

Configuration:

  • Web UI:
    • With recent firmware (see this forum), it works in a modern web browser.
    • The model's original firmware didn't. Moonfire NVR's author for a while used a Windows 10 virtual machine with Internet Explorer and Dahua's ActiveX plugin.
  • Desktop software: Dahua's SmartPSS software appears to mostly work on macOS and Windows.
  • ONVIF: works in limited testing. Likely doesn't support all features of the camera, such as toggling "Smart Codec" mode.

Video encoding: Moonfire NVR supports the H.264H mode (not H.265 yet; see issue #33). "Smart Codec" appears to work correctly (see issue #41).

Audio encoding: Not yet supported—regardless of your settings, Moonfire NVR won't record audio. See issue #34.

On-camera motion detection: In progress (see issue #29). There are various APIs for this:

  1. Dahua's proprietary API, described here. The experimental camera-motion program uses this successfully, provided the camera has sufficiently new firmware.
  2. ONVIF PullPoint API. Not recommended. This camera's support is buggy. In particular, as described in this thread, the camera supports up to five active subscriptions. Each time a connection is abruptly lost (such as if the NVR machine loses power), one of these is "leaked" until a timeout frustratingly far in the future.
  3. ONVIF Basic Subscriptions. Untested. This is a poor API, as described here.
  4. ONVIF/RTSP Metadata Streams. These appear to work on this camera, as described here. Moonfire NVR doesn't support configuring or using them. It might someday.
Clone this wiki locally