To me, Dahua has much friendlier resale model in the U.S. than Hikvision that does not really want their cameras resold in the U.S., only to installers.
I've talked to Hikvision about closing the doors to the hacks being done a year ago, but they didn't seem interested. One can get euro versions of the cameras in Chine and pay maybe $10-20 more than local China cameras, so yes, that may raise prices to some, but when you factor in paying someone to hack them for you, what's the real benefit to you when the hacker is charging more than the price difference on the cameras. So to me, either keep the value prop by making the hacks open, or shut the hacks down totally and force people pay $10-20 more for the euro version of the cameras. This limbo of hacking only benefits the people charging for the hacks. Does it benefit my daughter to kill this, yes, not having to deal with hacks and having a product that's supported by the manufacturer or dealer is a huge benefit for her and to her customers. When there's an issue with Dahua, she can engage the U.S. authorized distributor and Dahua to solve your problem. With Hikvision, it's terrible, Hikvision USA won't help even if she buys them from authorized distributors and distribution channels are not skilled like Dahua and are worthless. So the best customer experience is legit U.S. product with U.S. support, but if paying more for that is not important to you, there are choices as most of you know and not only do I share the region code hack, but I came up with instructions for a simple hack to make your Chinese camera English, albeit with day of week in Chinese. Who else has done that here? And I have a couple of people working on the 5.2.5 hack and make that open. What do I have to gain by doing that? Will Hikvision make it harder next time, sure, but they have been closing the door a little at a time since version 5.0. Look at it this way, the only person that published the region code hack about a year ago was CBX, what bits to change, not me, and it took Hikvision a year to figure out how to make this harder, but clearly not impossible. If CBX never published this a year ago, we would not be discussing this now.