What are my choices for fully-functional web browsers for Dahua cameras these days?

[sumguy]

I currently have a few HDW4431C-A and HDW2431T-AS-S2 cameras that are now 5-ish years old but working well. I have them set up to do in-camera detection and send email with photo when they detect something.

When I want to change their setup or watch them in real time, I have a couple of handy PC's running Windows 7 and IE 10. But I'd like to get something working under Windows 10. They say that IE 10 doesn't run on Win-10.

I think these old cameras were also fully usable with Chrome, but I will never run Chrome on any PC that I own or use.

I don't believe I've ever gotten Firefox to work properly with these cameras (ie to see live video). Does anyone here get full functionality with Win-10 and FF?

I'm wondering if that is still the case with these old cameras, or even newer cameras (either made by Dahua or Hikvision if I ever get any more cameras).

Is Chrome (or IE-10) still the only game in town when it comes to having a fully functional browser interface with these cameras?

 

[bigredfish]

I have pretty good luck with Pale Moon 32 bit on most OS

 

[Tinman]

Just recently been playing with Brave Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser It is a chromium based web browser but has some neat features. Seems to work with all my Dahua camera's GUI.

 

[TonyR]

Just recently been playing with Brave Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser It is a chromium based web browser but has some neat features. Seems to work with all my Dahua camera's GUI.

Same here...using Brave for about 3 years now.
My 3 Amcrest (Dahua) IP2M-841 cams were f/w updated over 2 years ago to work ONLY with a Chromium-based browser.

EDIT: To be accurate, I can configure settings in those 3 cams with IE11 but cannot view any live video in the webGUI unless I use a Chromium-based browser.

 

[sumguy]

A few months ago I picked up some refurbished HP Slim desktop PC's that came pre-installed with Win-10 home. They had 4 gb ram and a 1 tb conventional hard drive. Came with a new keyboard and mouse. They couldn't have been much more than a year old. $170 (CAD) each. I upped the ram to 8 gb and replaced the hard drives with 512 gb M2 solid state drives. I downloaded Win-10 2022 H2 ISO from Micro$haft, put it on a bootable thumb drive and went to work installing Win-10 and customizing the shit out of it so that it doesn't update itself and contacting microsoft constantly for garbage. I did this back in 2016 for the win-7 PC's I have and I was loathing the idea of finally doing this for win-10, knowing how much they lock it down so you have practically no control over it. Plus I was able to do this without having to sign up a Micro$haft account to get Windows to validate itself (The license keys are built into the BIOS). I then used macrium reflect to clone the drive to a couple other M2 drives, just plug them into the other HP's and bingo - instant system.

I put FF on it and used that browser for downloading more tools and stuff that would give me the total control over the OS. But I knew these cameras really only use activex plugins so I was wondering how I was going to work with them using the IE (I guess IE 11) that comes with Win-10 - or use Edge. The Win-10 ISO that I got still had IE-11 that you can find and run without too much trouble, but by default it keeps triggering Edge and then edge wants to nuke IE if you give it a chance.

So I found out how to totally stop IE from re-directing to Edge and stop Edge from tampering with IE, and set their default pages to a blank page when you open them (instead of the media info-tainment leftist / marxist garbage they normally want to put in front of your face).

And then I went to work on the security settings of IE-11 and YES! It will open these Dahua cameras just fine! Live video and everything.

But I'm guessing unless you were doing back-flips for the past year or two and prevented Win-10 from nuking IE-11 from your system, not a lot of people will be in the position these days to have web access to these cameras using a real IE browser.

 

[TonyR]

A few months ago I picked up some refurbished HP Slim desktop PC's that came pre-installed with Win-10 home. They had 4 gb ram and a 1 tb conventional hard drive. Came with a new keyboard and mouse. They couldn't have been much more than a year old. $170 (CAD) each. I upped the ram to 8 gb and replaced the hard drives with 512 gb M2 solid state drives. I downloaded Win-10 2022 H2 ISO from Micro$haft, put it on a bootable thumb drive and went to work installing Win-10 and customizing the shit out of it so that it doesn't update itself and contacting microsoft constantly for garbage. I did this for the win-7 PC's I have and I was loathing the idea of finally doing this for win-10, knowing how much they lock it down so you have practically no control over it. Plus I was able to do this without having to sign up a Micro$haft account to get Windows to validate itself (The license keys are built into the BIOS). I then used macrium reflect to clone the drive to a couple other M2 drives, just plug them into the other HP's and bingo - instant system.

I put FF on it and used that browser for downloading more tools and stuff that would give me the total control over the OS. But I knew these cameras really only use activex plugins so I was wondering how I was going to work with them using the IE (I guess IE 11) that comes with Win-10 - or use Edge. The Win-10 ISO that I got still had IE-11 that you can find and run without too much trouble, but by default it keeps triggering Edge and then edge wants to nuke IE if you give it a chance.

So I found out how to totally stop IE from re-directing to Edge and stop Edge from tampering with IE, and set their default pages to a blank page when you open them (instead of the media info-tainment leftist / marxist garbage they normally want to put in front of your face).

And then I went to work on the security settings of IE-11 and YES! It will open these Dahua cameras just fine! Live video and everything.

But I'm guessing unless you were doing back-flips for the past year or two and prevented Win-10 from nuking IE-11 from your system, not a lot of people will be in the position these days to have web access to these cameras using a real IE browser.

Good reading here regarding IE11, starting about post #8 ==>> Looks Like Internet Explorer Died Today

 

[sumguy]

Yes, I saw the task scheduler items when I ran Sys Internals AutoRuns and I nuked them there.

But this is just a heads up that if you do a fresh install of Win-10 2022-H2 you'll still have IE11 on it and if you're careful during the install, if you work with the machine while it doesn't have an internet connection you can stop it from updating itself while you de-activate the windows update mechanism.

Back in the fall of 2016 Milkro$haft was really messing with Win-7 updates, trying to slip in forced updating to Win-10 and other telemetry garbage. I created a slipstreamed bootable install of win-7 just at the point before that garbage happened, so it had all cumulative security patches as of like October 2016, and I've been running a couple of systems like that ever since. Win-7 frozen in time (from a "security" POV) since late 2016, and they're doing just fine.

 

[N-i-k-s-o-n]

The Mozilla 35 browser works best, all elements of the web interface of the cameras are displayed. I am using it on Windows 11.

 

[CCTVCam]

I quite like Vivaldi as a main browser and it's chrome based. Not tested it with Cameras though.

My other choice would be Firefox although again I haven't personally tested it.

 

[sumguy]

I thought that these Dahua cameras only stream live video to a browser using an activex control. When I hit one of those cameras with FF, I get a big black screen where the video should be, with a message "please click here to download and install the plugin". It's a link to "webplugin.exe" that I've run before but it seemed to make no difference to FF. I've opened it with 7zip - it contains about a dozen DLL files and also "WebActiveX.exe".

When you run webplugin.exe, it seems to unpack and put those files here:

Program Files\webrec\Torch\3.0.0.3 (this folder and files dated to 2016)
Program Files\webrec\Torch\3.3.192509.0 (this folder and files dated to 2019)

It could be that one of them is linked to my older camera, and the other to the newer camera.

Again it's not clear to me how FF makes use of those files. I'm guessing they're for IE. No idea what "Torch" is.

 

[Leroy60]

Just a note: I (thought I had) disabled that darn IE_to_edge by renaming the BHO folder from "bho" to "bho_old", and it worked - until it renamed it back to "bho" 4 days later.

 

[StevenFromTexas]

Just a note: I (thought I had) disabled that darn IE_to_edge by renaming the BHO folder from "bho" to "bho_old", and it worked - until it renamed it back to "bho" 4 days later.

I installed a Window 10 Update yesterday and the Microsoft Edge popup popped up again when opening Internet Explorer. It was an easy fix to add "old" to the BHO folder and get rid of what I consider a Microsoft bug which happens to be Microsoft Edge itself. I detest Microsoft Edge. That program was released on Version 0.0000000000000000000001 in my opinion and it still hasn't made it to Version 1.0 in my opinion again.

 

[digger11]

This is something I just tried out today that allows me run IE on my Windows 11 laptop.

1. Open Notepad.
2. Add the following single line of text...
   CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application").Visible=true
3. Click on File -> Save as.
4. Click on the drop-down menu next to “Save as type” and change it to “All files (.)“.
5. Give the file you are about to save the File name IE.vbs and save it on the desktop.
6. Double click the IE.vbs file.

 

[heliosventrures]

This is something I just tried out today that allows me run IE on my Windows 11 laptop.

1. Open Notepad.
2. Add the following single line of text...
   CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application").Visible=true
3. Click on File -> Save as.
4. Click on the drop-down menu next to “Save as type” and change it to “All files (.)“.
5. Give the file you are about to save the File name IE.vbs and save it on the desktop.
6. Double click the IE.vbs file.

I had to log in and say thank you. It still works.

 

[OakleyFreak]

Have you upgraded camera firmware in these older cams.
I had one amcrest (dahua) that wouldn't load in Firefox
A firmware upgrade fixed it.
Also update Firefox if that's what you try. It works on win 10-11 and my Samsung tablet fine.
All my Amcrest and Dahua

 

[sumguy]

Have you upgraded camera firmware in these older cams.

I didn't think it was possible to upgrade these chinese-market dahua cameras that had english firmware hacked into them prior to sale without risking bricking them. Either that, or there isin't any actual english firmware available for some of these models. Am I wrong about this?

 

[OakleyFreak]

I'm not sure on the Chinese firmware models sorry.

 

[mat200]

I didn't think it was possible to upgrade these chinese-market dahua cameras that had english firmware hacked into them prior to sale without risking bricking them. Either that, or there isin't any actual english firmware available for some of these models. Am I wrong about this?

In general .. the vendors of english hacked firmware Chinese-Market cameras do not want you to attempt to update the firmware ..

my guess, is that it is possible but a pita to update those cameras .. probably can find Chinese version of firmware for some of those .. otherwise .. plan to keep them isolated and on the old firmware ..