I just spent literally an entire day working on connecting my mix of camera brands to my Speco N8NXP that I purchased almost a year ago.
I don't know if anyone else is in the same boat as me and couldn't can't get this thing to work properly, but seeing as I have it all working now I feel like I could help others struggling.
The first breakthrough was flashing the Amcrest and Dahua cameras with all the same firmware. I used DH_IPC-HX5X3X-Rhea_MultiLang_NP_Stream3_V2.800.0000013.0.R.191202 for all my two Amcrest and Dahua cameras. Obviously there are a lot of different models. All were 4k that were purchased late 2019 if that helps.
The second breakthrough i had was working out why the IP addresses wouldn't hold and would change over to this 192.168.78.x address. Maybe everyone knows this, but the Speco NVR will set the camera IP address through the ARP/PING process (which I never knew existed) to this address range. I didn't see this covered anywhere, and I think it's different from the Dahua NVR's. When I finally worked this out, I could let the NVR set all the IP addresses.
The third item was plugging my ethernet (network) cable from the laptop directly into one of the POE ports while doing camera configuration. This helped tremedously as then my laptop could communicate directly with the cameras as needed. The other way was having a POE injector, but that worked until I plugged them into the NVR and the IP address changed without notice, and it looked like the cameras went offline.
Fourth, get the Dahua config tool, you need it to find the dang cameras, although knowing they will get a 192.168.78.x address is half the battle. Also knowing that the only way to stop them going back to this address range is to uncheck the "Set IP address through arp/ping" checkbox, then you can use whatever address you like. However, the NVR seems to struggle more with this option than letting it do it's thing. I had issues where the NVR couldn't communicate with the cameras.
Fifth, don't bother with the search option, it doesn't seem to work.
Sixth, set all your cameras to ONVIF, and "customized". There was no Dahua option, and I couldn't get the SpecoA or SpecoB to work with the Dahua cameras. As long as you make those changes and use the right IP / Password it should actually work.
Seventh, the mobile app is not awesome. Speco One works for IOS, so does SecureGuardClient. Neither works well for playback (if you can work it out let me know). The web seems to work for playback. IE is supported, otherwise you can get this plugin for Chrome that looks like a different browser that works too. I use Firefox mostly, no luck there.
I have probably 16 hours into it now, and I feel like I knew what I was doing with networking, but clearly didn't have any NVR experience. It only clicked about the IP's after reading how the Dahua NVR's behaved, and then having it click as to why the IP's kept changing to this weird address range from their default. This was a quick write-up and could be written better, if anyone has questions I can put more time into it, just don't know if I am the last person on earth still trying to use this thing without re-flashing with Dahua firmware (that seemed like a project in itself).
I don't know if anyone else is in the same boat as me and couldn't can't get this thing to work properly, but seeing as I have it all working now I feel like I could help others struggling.
The first breakthrough was flashing the Amcrest and Dahua cameras with all the same firmware. I used DH_IPC-HX5X3X-Rhea_MultiLang_NP_Stream3_V2.800.0000013.0.R.191202 for all my two Amcrest and Dahua cameras. Obviously there are a lot of different models. All were 4k that were purchased late 2019 if that helps.
The second breakthrough i had was working out why the IP addresses wouldn't hold and would change over to this 192.168.78.x address. Maybe everyone knows this, but the Speco NVR will set the camera IP address through the ARP/PING process (which I never knew existed) to this address range. I didn't see this covered anywhere, and I think it's different from the Dahua NVR's. When I finally worked this out, I could let the NVR set all the IP addresses.
The third item was plugging my ethernet (network) cable from the laptop directly into one of the POE ports while doing camera configuration. This helped tremedously as then my laptop could communicate directly with the cameras as needed. The other way was having a POE injector, but that worked until I plugged them into the NVR and the IP address changed without notice, and it looked like the cameras went offline.
Fourth, get the Dahua config tool, you need it to find the dang cameras, although knowing they will get a 192.168.78.x address is half the battle. Also knowing that the only way to stop them going back to this address range is to uncheck the "Set IP address through arp/ping" checkbox, then you can use whatever address you like. However, the NVR seems to struggle more with this option than letting it do it's thing. I had issues where the NVR couldn't communicate with the cameras.
Fifth, don't bother with the search option, it doesn't seem to work.
Sixth, set all your cameras to ONVIF, and "customized". There was no Dahua option, and I couldn't get the SpecoA or SpecoB to work with the Dahua cameras. As long as you make those changes and use the right IP / Password it should actually work.
Seventh, the mobile app is not awesome. Speco One works for IOS, so does SecureGuardClient. Neither works well for playback (if you can work it out let me know). The web seems to work for playback. IE is supported, otherwise you can get this plugin for Chrome that looks like a different browser that works too. I use Firefox mostly, no luck there.
I have probably 16 hours into it now, and I feel like I knew what I was doing with networking, but clearly didn't have any NVR experience. It only clicked about the IP's after reading how the Dahua NVR's behaved, and then having it click as to why the IP's kept changing to this weird address range from their default. This was a quick write-up and could be written better, if anyone has questions I can put more time into it, just don't know if I am the last person on earth still trying to use this thing without re-flashing with Dahua firmware (that seemed like a project in itself).
