How to hack 5.1.2 firmware on China region cameras to English

Okay so I'm half out of the woods, thanks Dale, don't know you but could give you a man hug! So with Dales files i was able to recover my working 5.2.0 Camera, it's now back to english running back to the 5.1.6 that I had before I got zealous.

Now if someone can magically make my other one respond to anything, that would be great!

Tory
 
WELL BOO!! I think I confused myself and got back on the one that has been working the whole time. HAHAHAHAHA , well..

So I'm back to being 1 for 2. I still have one that won't respond to anything. Link light stays on constant when it has link, but it won't attempt to tftp nor does it spit anything out on the wire.

BAH I got excited for nothing, since I just reconfigured the one that has always been on 1.5.6 and not fixed the one that I feel is bricked. Especially since it will not attempt a tftp.

So I'm back to looking for ideas.

Earlier post with much excitement:: UUGH

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA WHOOHOOO.. Well what do you know, placing my davinci.tar.gz from my current and working 5.1.6 camera actually worked last night. It was actually the same IP as that camera so no wonder I couldn't find it. I saw the link light flashing when it came back up and decided to see what it was doing, so connected to my MAC, ran tcpdump on that interface and low and behold saw advertisements for 192.168.12.206 that was my good working camera (one of the ones I had not messed with), so that means moving the the divinci.tar.gz file from one cam to the other worked.... So looks like I'm golden.. Dale still get a man hug for providing those files!! They are trustworthy and work!
 
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I posted a question a few days ago about remote telnet. If anyone is interested I was able to do this by first accessing the remote router and setting up a non-standard external port forwarded to internal standard telnet Port 23. I did this because I have a NAS on the same router and didn't want to directly open Port 23 to the outside world even temporarily. But thanks to CBX and his app mentioned elsewhere on this forum I found it totally unnecessary to telnet any files. Running his one-time app eliminates the need to install a new Davinci file after every firmware upgrade. It's web based so no need to telnet and it's as simple as selecting a custom cfs file and clicking Upgrade. In fact after running the app I tried an experiment. I upgraded a Chinese version using the English 5.1.6 digicap.dav. Normally this attempt to upgrade would fail but it worked. After reboot all was in English without the need to telnet the 5.1.6 Davinci file.
 
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ipso said:
I posted a question a few days ago about remote telnet. If anyone is interested I was able to do this by first accessing the remote router and setting up a non-standard external port forwarded to internal standard telnet Port 23.
Click to expand...
This was with pre 5.2.0 firmware, right?
 
Correct, this was 5.1.6. I understand CBX upgraded to 5.2.0 on a camera he had already run his app. After the upgrade characters remain in English. I'm tempted to do this on my 5.1.6 camera but will hold off for now until I understand the benefits of 5.2.0.
 
ipso said:
Correct, this was 5.1.6. I understand CBX upgraded to 5.2.0 on a camera he had already run his app. After the upgrade characters remain in English. I'm tempted to do this on my 5.1.6 camera but will hold off for now until I understand the benefits of 5.2.0.
Click to expand...

Other than the addition of SSH and thus SCP and the removal of FTP, there appears to be more negatives than positives on the 5.2.0 version, that i just returned from :) folks are citing that there are some features on 5.1.6 that don't work as well on 5.2.0, so sounds like it's the best thing to hold off.

I may not know a bunch but I've read a ton trying to bail myself out of my predicament :)

Tory
 
I read about people complaining that 5.2.0 is a step backward from 5.1.6. I have an english camera that I upgraded to 5.2.0 already and want to downgrade but I can't find 5.1.6 on the Hikvision ftp server. It has 5.1.4 beta and 5.2.0, but nothing in between. Did they remove it?
Does anyone have 5.1.6 unmodified (English) firmware?
I'm looking for it here:
ftp://hikfirmware:Hikvision123@ftp.hikvisionusa.com/Hikvision_IP_Camera_Firmware/Raptor_2xxx_Series/
[Edit]
Of course after posting I finally found it after one more search. HERE (WrightwoodSurveillance.com).
 
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Hello, this is great and interesting information..
I was wondering where this research is being discussed?

How was it known to “Change string from 38 a0 9d e5 to 01 a0 a0 e3” to enable the drop down to allow for other languages.

If it is another board that cannot be posted please PM me with the location.

I appreciate any information.
M
 
I believe CBX use gdb, the Linux debugger to go line by line on the binary to find the spot. You can get the source for this and cross compile it on your PC by changing the makefile to cross compile to run on an ARM processor, then put it on the camera. Sort of tedious, but doable. What he's doing is changing a command that loads a byte from memory into a register and changed to to a mov command that takes the literal value 1 into that register so the camera thinks it's English. You'll need to understand the RISC instruction set but it's not hard. Also, you can just open the binary in a disassembler and follow the code that way, but better to do it as it's running.
 
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If I understand correctly, there's no public way to switch from Chinese to English with the firmware 5.2. The only way is to pay CBX to get his patch. Which bother me a bit. Not at all because I would need to pay CBX. Searching for an answer to this problem for the last 3 hours, I can see that CBX has done a tremendous amount of work and I really appreciate his ethic. Always thinking about Hikvision IP (more like him would be nice). At the same time, with his knowledge, I don't believe a minute that he is unemployed, unless he wants to. At least, I would hire him if I could lol. The main problem for me is that I like to understand what I'm doing. I would still prefer to pay for the know how then just for a patch. But At the end, I'll probably just get the patch ....
 
Vin Tekiel said:
If I understand correctly, there's no public way to switch from Chinese to English with the firmware 5.2. The only way is to pay CBX to get his patch. Which bother me a bit. Not at all because I would need to pay CBX. Searching for an answer to this problem for the last 3 hours, I can see that CBX has done a tremendous amount of work and I really appreciate his ethic. Always thinking about Hikvision IP (more like him would be nice). At the same time, with his knowledge, I don't believe a minute that he is unemployed, unless he wants to. At least, I would hire him if I could lol. The main problem for me is that I like to understand what I'm doing. I would still prefer to pay for the know how then just for a patch. But At the end, I'll probably just get the patch ....
Click to expand...

Thanks for your kind words :)

I really am unemployed, but I don't claim UK benefits. I was a linux systems administrator for almost 20 years, but got made redundant 3 years ago. I have personal health issues that make a normal office 9-5 next to impossible.

I try to take a stance of what is fair and reasonable. I've been privately asked to do things that would be way across the line and politely refuse whatever the money is. But changing the language/features to English/International I think is fair and I have helped a lot of people whilst making a small modest income (a tiny fraction of the good old company car + pension + bonus + big salary days though :( )

The manufacturer may or may not agree of course.
 
Need a quick sanity check before potential camera bricking :)

Just got a DS-2CD3332-I in. Fresh out of the box it's 5.1.0. This camera has NO reset button, unlike my other turrets! It has multi-language drop down AND the day of the week is in English.

I tried to use the web interface to upgrade it to 5.2.0 with English firmware that worked on my other turrets and get a language mismatch (when I tried web on them it just failed, so I had to TFTP them).

TFTP worked great to upgrade my other cams, but before I try it on this do I need to be aware of anything else?

The lack of the reset button is pretty alarming, but I paid very little for this camera so I'm hoping I can work with it. Firmware 5.1.0 doesn't cut it for me, so I absolutely need 5.2.0.

I assume that since this is already English I can just TFTP, but on the other hand the camera is clearly aware of some discrepancy between it and the firmware I'm trying to load, hence the language mismatch error.

Thanks!

EDIT: I was able to use the Web UI to successfully update to 5.2.0 with raptor firmware from the 5.2.0 thread: http://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php?1078-Firmware-5-2-0-in-English
 
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im confused here, do all hikvision cameras have Chinese firmware now ?? don't they make English firmware any more?? or what is going on here? or do they make a USA hikvisions cameras and they cost more and Chinese version cameras cheaper or something???
this is confusing me.
 
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