whoslooking:
you solved my problem! (but now I can't send PMs for some reason)...
To recap (for anyone else's benefit):
I have about 40 hikvision cameras deployed at different sites (DS-2CD2632F-IS) and they've all been great for the price.
I always buy "cheap" and get chinese versions but thats never been a problem at all.
i had one camera that kept going dark on the screen after about 20 hours (but still responding) that i kept having to reboot in order to bring back online.
it was still feeding video (software showed frames, http responded properly, etc).
I quickly decided to update firmware without doing much reading and bricked the camera.
While starting my troubleshooting I put up the Hikvision
TFTP service with a possible fix (not the fix...) to flash and asked a coworker to go restart that camera.
He restarted the whole PoE switch and restarted 3 cameras bricking all 3 of them turning my small problem into a bigger problem.
After tons of reading and testing and reading and testing I reached out to Whoslooking and he diagnosed that I needed to change the region/language flag from 2 to 1 using hiktools.
before changing the language, I would run TFTP and reboot my camera and it would pull the firmware successfully but I never saw the message that system update was complete.
after a manual reboot, the phone would show in SADP eventually but had no "encoding channels" and DSP version was blank.
this means it is running in "safe mode" or some sort of minimal recovery mode.
After changing the language flag, I do see the system update complete message (first clue everything was all better).
I've now saved all 3 of my bricked cameras and learned more about these cameras than i may have ever wanted to know!
thanks a ton whoslooking!
If you're ever in DC/northern VA, let me know: your beers are on me!