Vatilon cameras firmware update instructions?

[Salcamo]

I have number of Vatilon's PB4 and H42 cameras deployed. Generally I'm happy with performance but there appeared to be some bugs:

• Loosing NTP settings, regularly drops to manual time settings and then displayed time will drift. When NTP set - it does sync as expected but usually after a few hours I've notice it is a few seconds off, at that time NTP usually swapped to manual time setting. Some cameras retain NTP settings for days and some lose it in hours.
• Half of the day, NYC/-6hours time zone, during day it does not serve still JPEGs, instead it returns zero size file with normal "200" HTTP response. Then usually at night it serves stills just fine. URL of still is .IP.../cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi. I was troubleshooting networking/routing problems but was able to unquestionably isolate it to the cameras.

Finally noticed that Vatilon posted firmware update for both models. Well, there is no update in web interface and none of my NVRs able to update these cameras. My present problematic firmware is V1.10.55-20230512
Another piece of info: my cameras are firewalled from the Internet, no access to mothership, but DHCP with option 42 is active and working fine, so is NTP and DNS on local LAN. I also map many popular public NTPs to my own time server.

Anybody has any info on how to update firmware on Vatilon cameras?
Maybe somebody familiar with problems I'm having with NTP and still JPEGs?

Thanks y'all for any help!

 

[Salcamo]

Surprisingly silence. Well, I will share my own resolution. Here what I found and I guess also lost:

Cameras from Vatilon, aka Huishi, super popular on Ali-express-baba, all suffering from the same problem: Most of the time some cameras serving still/JPEG of zero size. Unless your setup uses JPEGs - you may never noticed. I use them to re-serve stills on web page, unreliable JPEG is a headache. And it was a puzzle. RTSP can be slow or stutter, but never frozen or unavailable. Stills being mostly OK at night but most days, with bright sun, was no stills. I did exclude network problem, clock settings and bunch of other stuff. I also managed to update firmware (see instructions at the end of this post) - but problem persisted.

I had one or two cameras after resent image tweaks suddenly appeared working during day. Going through image controls I was able to correlate amount of the details in the image to zero size JPEG: To reduce amount of detail I did reduce sharpness, in my case all below "60" (128/center being default), or set manual over-exposure or under-exposure. This is with cameras looking at busy objects like grass or trees. Cameras looking at flatter objects with fewer details never exhibited such problem. Confirmed 100%.

Selecting lower resolution or quality settings does not help. I bet the problem is in sharpness/differentiating spatial filter code where sharpening may produce forbidden pixel values that JPEG encoder cannot process. Somehow MPEG encoder able to process it.

This is so obviously a bug in JPEG encoder in the camera. Attempts to contact Vatilon/Huishi to report bug are unsuccessful.

I have number of models from the same manufacturer, some purchased as boards and some found in various brands/no_brand integrated cameras. Models I have and confirmed as all having the same problem: H42, PB1, PB4, IF26C(53).

I've seeing number of threads on this forum where folks discussing mysteriously unreliable JPEG stills. Advice to them: try to turn down sharpness slider.


Now, the firmware update: the only way to update the firmware is through "batch update", exclusively 64-bit Windows application that installs WinPCap driver (part of WireShark that sniffs all traffic). I guess it might be the way to write such application, but I think there are ways to do the same application without PCap, and therefore use of PCap is suspicious to me. That app only downloadable form WiFi cameras section, but works with all wired cameras from that manufacturer.


What I've lost: last hope of confidence in that specific brand. Images with turned down sharpness looks horrible, essentially unusable. No attempt by manufacturer to fix it. I guess I will have to look for different brand and swap already deployed camera boards.