About flashing different vendor's cams:
- flashed Iptronic Hi3516a_imx178 with the latest firmware via Web access - camera got bricked (no http responce, no streams, etc...)
- however it was still available via IPCSearch tool
- flashed it with IPCSearch to latest firmware again (wasn't able to flash previous versions - got errors)
- camera booted and became available via Web
- at first there was no any video, however everything came to normal after reset to factory defaults (via Web - even no button reset was required)
Don't get me wrong - I'm not seducing you to flash the cam as in your case it may lead to unrecoverable error...