I recently started working as tech support for a retail company that has around 50 shops. Each shop has about 6-8 hikvision cameras connected to a nvr that connects to the internet. The company has been using the ivms4200 software to view all 400 or so cameras. They are currently migrating to their own custom built system for everything, and they've since asked me if it was possible to no longer use the ivms4200 software and view the camera livestreams through their system, which is has a web UI. I did some reasearch and found you can do this, but every tutorial I came across has asked to port forward and open ports, but I think that will be a security risk. The thing is without any port forwarding ivms4200 can view live streams just by loging in through hik-connect credentials. So im assuming there is a way to view the streams without port forwarding? Can someone tell me how this would be possible or atleast what to google, because every google search gives me the same tutorial of port forwarding ports and accesing through ip. Many thanks in advance.
alastairstevenson
Staff member
The usual, more secure, solution would be to connect up using a VPN, which is designed for secure remote access.
edit By the way - best not to expose the public IP addresses for those systems, they are very open, so many potentially vulnerable ports.
You'll just be attracting the attention of the hackers.
And this is a VPN you host, not a paid VPN to hide your IP address for illegal streaming and porno.
ipcamtalk.com
VPN Primer for Noobs
The internet is a force of nature; no video surveillance system made was designed to be exposed to those forces.. NEVER FORWARD PORTS to your NVR or Cameras, doing such things not only exposes you to severe security problems, but everyone else on the internet too.. Hackers dont want your video...
sebastiantombs
Known around here
Another consideration is that when viewing cameras through an NVR connection it is a composite video using lower bit rates than the full resolution of the cameras, typically using the sub stream from each camera then further downsizing for the composite video. when viewing each camera, especially the main streams, the bandwidth for 400 cameras will be horrendously high. That's true even for the sub streams. That may be a factor to consider.
Hello, thanks for the suggestions. The main reason we wanted to switch was that ivms4200 runs extremely slow for them, I then discovered ivms 4200 lite and it seems to run much faster than ivms4200 so i think we are going with using that instead, thanks for the info.
If you can do this while remote, then there is still a huge security risk IMHO. Any time your system is exposed to the WWW and is protected only by a user name and password, that is a problem IMHO. Worse yet, the only way I think this can work (although I could be wrong) is if the local system/software is really providing access to some unknown remote server in some unknown country. Anytime someone is connecting to the "local" system this way, they are really connecting to this remote server which then has access to your local system. This is how they are able to connect without having to open or forward any ports on your local network. The only other explanation is if the software really opened some ports on your system without you knowing it (UPnP or something similar). Personally I would find a way to turn off this "remote access" functionality of the software and use VPN to create a secure tunnel that people that are remote can access to view to system as if they were local. That is the only "secure" method that I would be comfortable using.
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