Best posts made by joseph_1979

@brian-nielsen_442682315796643 We have requested the support team to inform dev team that a lot of customers are asking for the doorbell to do an outbound voip call to the smartphone with possible actions as is being done by other brands. Other than this we need the full profile T support with full duplex audio.

Customers want clearer pictures and able to read text or numbers within reasonable range. They are also requesting higher fps especially at night time. And yes customers are looking also for HDR implementation. All this comes at a higher processing power and very powerful sensor. Can someone from Reolink development team update us on when these shall be made available to its customer?

@melroy UID is like your ID number which is a unique identifier pointing to a number of profiles in various institutions. If you go to the hospital they will ask you for the ID and by entering this ID they will get all your health information.

When you power up your camera, it does some DNS queries to get the IP addresses (A record) of the P2P servers (provided by Amazon and Azure) and registers with the P2P servers using its UID (we are assuming here that UID is enabled). At regular intervals the camera sends packets to the P2P servers which shall include the UID (encrypted). The application on the P2P server decrypts the packet and extracts the UID. The application extracts the private IP and Public IP (BroadBand IP:Port) of the packet and populates them in the respective record associated with UID. If the camera changes IP then the record pointed out by the UID is updated accordingly. The credentials you created are not forwarded to the P2P servers. Well if you can emulate the P2P protocol and know the encryption method/phrase then you would be able to get the private and public IP of a particular UID. But so far there have been no such breaches and still you need the credentials to get access to the camera. Therefore it is imperative to follow the policies associated with passwords such as create a strong password and change it at regular intervals. At this point we see that there is a P2P socket between the camera and the P2P server. For your perusal the camera sends the alerts to the domain pushx.reolink.com. The application server will then forward the push message request to FCM (Android) or APNS (IoS) which shall push the message to your smartphone. Token provided by FCM to your smartphone on registration is forwarded to Reolink pushx application server. This token is included in the request made by this application server to the FCM to push the alert on your smartphone.

Now let's take a look from the client side. When you run the Reolink client, it will send a DNS query to 16 P2P servers (p2p1, p2p3, etc) and the response is the A record containing the IP address of the P2P server. Any P2P server which is not yet assigned will get the A record with the loop IP (127.0.0.1). For each working P2P server, the client requests the Public IP (the Relay P2P server with which the camera is connected) and Private IPs of the camera using destination port 9999. So if we have 8 working P2P servers and 8 cameras, then the client will send 64 requests over UDP. When the client receives the replies, it will first start to open communication with each camera using the private IP over TCP. Here the credentials are included in the request. If the camera replies then communication continues with the media being sent over UDP. Note that at this point the communication is directly between the client and the camera. At the same time the client also sends the request using the public IP. This public IP is not the public IP on your BB router but rather the IP of the AWS/Azure Relay P2P server to which the camera has been registered. But if communication using the private IP fails then the client establishes connectivity with this Relay P2P server. Recall that the camera has already a p2p socket with thus server. Communication is over UDP. In my opinion, this has been adopted because a number of ISPs restrict users to connect directly to other devices. Technically this is not P2P as there is the Relay server in the middle. So in this case the encrypted packets flow from the client to the Relay server and from the Relay server to the camera and vice versa. In this case the encrypted credentials are sent to the camera through this Relay P2P server. And here comes a question....if there are 1000 12Mbps@25fps and using high def H.265 and the cameras are being accessed remotely using the public IP, then on the P2P relay servers we need a bandwidth of 17Gbps .......... which is really massive.....This explains the delay between viewing using private/local IP (cameras and client on same network) and public IP (other). And I do not think that neither Amazon nor Azure will give unlimited bandwidth.

Now the question being posed is 'Do we trust this setup?' Do you trust passing the bank information when buying over the internet? Do you trust ATM machines which are connected over BB? Do you trust your voice calls over 3G (A5/2 encryption)? etc etc.............. so you have the answer.

No matter how much security you have...there is always a way to get through. Even Alcatraz was a prison where nobody can escape...but they escaped. Nevertheless we need to do our best to protect and be secured.

Apologise for the lengthy answer...but this is high level...can go to the low level...ha ha these are rather simple protocols with the most complicated being within the Telco NEs.

@reolinkshayla They are all excellent products. I have one question though. Do the new E1 ODs have the same gear mechanism as the previous models? Thanks.

Update: support told me that they have different gearing mechanism and hopefully the problem of deviation is something of the past.

@islandman63_201848685748477 With the newest release the stretch mode has been removed. So to get the stretch mode you need to go back to the previous version. There have been a lot of requests from members to have the stretch mode back and hopefully we shall see this as an option.

Thanks for the update. Can you please let us know what bugs have been resolved by this release?

@dgordon42_415060065599711 I didn't hear anything from support. They should move away from the push notification and base their design on SIP(S) + SRTP or XMPP + SRTP (used by Whatsapp) as has been implemented by other camera suppliers. Of course this design requires SIP servers which entails the client and cam to be registered. SIP is fun...........have been working on this protocol (and many many other protocols) for a long time.

In security one of the most important factor is contacting the owner. We receive lots of push notifications, messages, alerts on our mobile and we tend to ignore. But if it is a call, we do check who is calling. So they can add a feature for the cam to call in the event a particular event is triggered, say glass sound, alarm sound, etc. The ideas depend on one's immagination.

@user_623346741346376_623346741346376 I disabled any motion on the RLC511WA and have added a 1 sec delay for person and thereafter no false alarms. Since April I haven't seen any firmware update on this model.

@reolink-fiona Hi Fiona, thanks for the invitation. We will certainly assist the members as much as we can.

@terryjensen_510712816316578 I do not think there is a solution now. Previous Windows clients had an option to disable it but in the recent upgrades this feature has been removed. I have notified support to re-introduce it and its up to the customer if the camera drains the battery.

@senzo150_417180774088936 Email Reolink support and they shall provide you with the details. Hereunder is what I came across.

@reolink-daisy Thanks for the information provided. Kindly update us on the progress achieved so far on improving the calling feature? Customers wish to have the doorbell calling their smartphone similar to a normal call without having the application running.

@diegosalerno_560796844831021 Good to hear your positivity on the video doorbell. Indeed the issue of low audio at the doorbell side has been identified some weeks ago and this has been resolved by adding the volume control to the speaker. This shall be available in the next Android release 4.35.0.7. As for the different rings, this merely depends on the application and not Android. Android limits the ring type per application. PMN can have embedded in it the type of ring tone. Recall that this is the first generation of video doorbell and we will definitely see new features in the next releases. Customers are asking for SIP calling and able to integrate it with the existing chime. Any additional ideas are more than welcome.

@user_687419430965498_687419430965498 under alarm detection enable auto tracking. Select all tracking type..person, vehicle and pet...Set tracking method as digital tracking first...horizontal range...set left and right range....schedule ensure all is enabled.

Under sensitivity go to smart detection and set person to 55, vehicle to 50 and pet to 60...or whatever is your preferences.

If you have false alarms there are other parameters to adjust like alarm delay, object size, sensitivity, detection zones etc.

@reolink-daisy Thanks for keeping us updated. Indeed it does need improvements. See my comments on this firmware. Basically three points.

1. Colours washed out
2. fps and bitrate reduced
3. Degradation in WIFI - There is now a 2 to 3s delay to establish communication as compared to previous version. Moreover we only see 1 bar even though it is 2m away from router.

@reolink-fiona Thanks for the update. I had a quick glimpse and noted the following.

1. This update will delete all the configurations done on the installed version and one has to start adding the devices from scratch. Developers should have done this transparent to users.
2. Points 1 to 3 are not applicable to the E1 AI Zoom despite it has auto tracking. Maybe there is the need of a firmware upgrade.
3. Pictures in the already defined presets are not loaded.

Update: These seem to arise when upgrading from 8.10beta.

@reolink-oskar

In order to be in line with your competitors you need to implement actual calling feature based on VOIP or XMPP. The one implemented is merely based on push message notification. And to go the extra mile, implement face recognition. And what about IFTTT, matter and webhook? Not all customers have HA for automation and I see that IFTTT is very basic. You may include the door lock too as competitors did. There are more and more features to add. It depends on one's imagination and creativity. Just read the customers requests here, at Reddit and in facebook and you will have an idea of what they are after.

@ginny They need to learn to keep the previous downloaded version . Despite the myriads of requests, Reolink should save old versions of applications and firmware at their website or at the community.

@ryanoverholtzer_356153850994850 I wish to see this feature too implemented. Yeah they work pretty well on Ring and Wyze.

@user_603674336231435_603674336231435 Maybe shortly we shall have a new client and check this out. Perhaps by that time we get acquainted by the 1:1 aspect ratio :).