@Alan2000,
Glad to hear you got everything working. With ONVIF being a somewhat universal standard, Hikvision can't region-enforce their products using that protocol, since the practice of region-locking at the hardware/firmware level is not an industry-wide standard.
Those chinese characters you are seeing on the date/time stamp is actually the day of the week. The cheater solution to this is to disable the DAY stamp but leave DATE and TIME, and this can be done per camera in the NVR itself, no hacks or mods required:
If you were to direct-dial into the web interface of these cameras, you'd be welcomed to more Chinese characters. (perhaps you've already done this). While the NVR does skew certain options that can be set in the cameras themselves, for most out of the box users, it shouldn't matter too much. The only setting that I usually change is the Smart IR, noise reduction, and the frequency. In the US we're 60Hz and the cameras from China default to 50. (Europe).
Regarding setting these cameras to English (US-region compatible) firmware, If your cameras are made pre 12/2014 (there's a fine line as to when in December the switch was made, but if the camera has a 5.2.3 sticker, assume its newer, not older), I'm going to call these "old" cameras. These I've used the 5.2.0 firmware package provided here and have full english interfaces and menus and no issues. I've tried to bring these to 5.2.5 just because (no real benefit anyways), and they flip back to Chinese for some reason. Haven't really had the time to bother with it, so I let it go.
5.2.0 English:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kgc3djfww4ogin5/Raptor_2_520_f_10_14_c.dav?dl=1
If they were made after 12/2014, they likely employ the newer checksum and as such the older firmwares using the older checksum will not work and will brick your camera. At this point 5.2.5 is required, which is included in the 5.3.0 Downgrader from this thread:
https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthrea...are-Downgrader-5-3-0-Chinese-to-5-2-5-English
Read that thread quite thoroughly. While I've done this personally and it has worked, it seems like not everyone has perfect clean success. It is worth noting both 5.2.0 and 5.2.5 will both need pushed via
TFTP. There is a readme included with the TFTP server that walks you through everything as far as setting up the recovery process. Please note that TFTP recovery will wipe camera settings. If there are any important ones that you can't remember, make note of these prior to TFTP'ing new firmware.
As a final sum-up note, regardless of the camera firmware version, once you have your camera in English, leave it. Newer versions don't necessarily mean improved performance/features. In most cases, it actually means feature removal/restrictions. There are many threads here that document this very well.