I wanted a standalone IP camera to remotely monitor the interior of a cabin during the off-season, and send motion alerts via email. After researching the various options, I bought a DS-2CD2532F-IS from a reseller on Amazon.ca, blissfully unaware of the potential problems that could result from firmware issues.
My first clue that something was up is that there was no English anywhere on the box or camera, and all of the hard copy documentation was in Chinese. The included mini-CD had some English documentation, though - a start-up guide, and a couple of different user guides (neither of which was the correct one for this camera).
This is my first IP camera, so after getting it up and running I went through all of the menus / sub-menus to get acquainted with the various items. I immediately noticed that although the camera was stickered as "v5.3.0_150327" (date 04/2015), the firmware actually shows as "V5.2.5 build 141201" in the configuration menu.
One of the first things I tried setting up was email alerts. I was unsuccessful at doing this, despite testing it with combinations of gmail & gmx sender accounts, various ports (25 / 465 / 587), SSL enabled / disabled, etc. No matter what I tried, the Test would return a "Testing failed" message. I couldn't get a successful test when attempting to get the Time synched to a server, either.
So I thought, okay, let's see if I can at least establish remote access using the camera's
DDNS capability. I registered at
www.hiddns.com, and configured the camera to use HiDDNS. But when I went back to the website and tried adding the camera, it returned "The device does not exist", which suggests the camera failed to establish a presence on the website. I later found some documentation suggesting that the camera should ask to be rebooted after you enable DDNS & save the domain info, but it didn't do that. I rebooted it, but was still unable to get DDNS to work with HiDDNS despite many attempts.
My Asus router has built-in functionality for No-IP, so I established a trial account there, set up the router, and was successfully able to access the camera remotely. A small but important victory...
I therefore have nearly complete functionality, including the ability to access the camera remotely, and review the microSD card using Playback. But I really want to have email alert functionality, so I thought I should update the firmware. Fortunately, I discovered this thread before embarking on that adventure - thanks to all who have contributed here!
So to make a long story short, I'm currently trying to decide whether to keep the camera, or return it and look for a North America version from an authorized reseller. With the exception of the email alerts, I'm very happy with everything else about the camera. I'm leaning towards returning it, but before doing so I wanted to check whether anybody here has had similar issues with email alerts and HiDDNS (which I assume is related to flaws in the after-market firmware, and/or regional issues), and been able to resolve them without hacking the camera - something I'd prefer to avoid doing because of the time it could take (my technical capabilities are fairly modest).
Any thoughts would be appreciated!