Trouble Downgrading DS-2CD4065F-A from 5.3.0 to 5.2.0

[woodsie]

I have six of these cameras running on a DS-7608NI-SE/P NVR. They are all running with the V5.2.0 build 140721 firmware that they came with and working very nicely with this NVR.

I purchased a seventh DS-2CD4065F-A (a year later) and it came with V5.3.0 build 150513 firmware and it does NOT play nice with the older firmer ware on my NVR and based on my research it's due to how security changed from V5.2.X to V5.3.X camera firmware. Looking on the Hikvision FTP site, it does not appear that there are any firmware upgrades available for my NVR that will get it to a level where it can play nice with this new camera.

What I'd like to do is downgrade this camera to the same firmware that I have on all my other cameras that are working for me right now. I tried to use Hikvision TFTP on all of the 5.2.X firmware versions available on the FTP site for this camera and it fails to update. I'm sure I'm using TFTP correctly because I tried 5.3.0 build 150513 (same as what it shipped with) to unbrick myself after the failed attempts and it accepted that firmware just fine using TFTP and the camera is operational again.

Is it possible that the camera hardware simply won't accept anything lower than 5.3.0 or is there something else I'm missing here that I need to do to make this work?

ETA: All of my cameras are US retail versions if that makes any difference.

 

[Brad_C]

I have some 2CD4526 and a 2CD6026. The 6026 came with a 5.1 version while the 4526 both came with an un-released 5.2 version (higher than those publicly available). I can downgrade the 6026 back down to any version but I can't downgrade the 4526 lower than 5.3.0. Hikvision have a habit of making minor changes in the hardware as models evolve and build the newer firmware to work with those. In general you can't downgrade below what the device came with out of the box because it either has hardware that is unsupported in the lower versions, or they've put some config gumph in there to prevent it from happening. Either way, nobody has really dug into it deeply enough to sort it out, and of course it changes from hardware model to hardware model.

When I bought the 4526 I bought 2 for me and one for a mate. His is still untouched in the box, so when I get a moment I'm going to borrow it and clone the mtd partitions so I can restore mine back to whatever they came with from the factory.

Have you activated the camera in SADP and set a password? You might have to do that and then feed the password into the NVR manually to get it to work.

 

[woodsie]

I have some 2CD4526 and a 2CD6026. The 6026 came with a 5.1 version while the 4526 both came with an un-released 5.2 version (higher than those publicly available). I can downgrade the 6026 back down to any version but I can't downgrade the 4526 lower than 5.3.0. Hikvision have a habit of making minor changes in the hardware as models evolve and build the newer firmware to work with those. In general you can't downgrade below what the device came with out of the box because it either has hardware that is unsupported in the lower versions, or they've put some config gumph in there to prevent it from happening. Either way, nobody has really dug into it deeply enough to sort it out, and of course it changes from hardware model to hardware model.

When I bought the 4526 I bought 2 for me and one for a mate. His is still untouched in the box, so when I get a moment I'm going to borrow it and clone the mtd partitions so I can restore mine back to whatever they came with from the factory.

Have you activated the camera in SADP and set a password? You might have to do that and then feed the password into the NVR manually to get it to work.

Thanks for the explanation. That is about what I feared.

I have activated the camera in SADP and then feed the password in the NVR manually but it still had some issues. I moved on quickly to the idea of downgrading the firmware though so I don't think I fully exhausted that idea. I will try it again tomorrow and see if I have better luck.

 

[woodsie]

Alright, well I came back to it today and added the camera manually and it appears to be working. I'd rather have it work plug and play like the others but this gets the job done.

It still has one weird behavior where when I try to change the resolution from the NVR web interface it will sometimes kick a "device error" message but then save successfully on the 2nd try. Oh well, at least it works.