Posts made by Nick_26792935116

I am running the latest current version (8.17.8) for macOS which in some respects works fine (on MacMini M2Pro with macOS 15.1 Sequoia), although it is very slow to start up, but the main issue is that it always crashes on quitting the app. Any chance of a new version to fix this? I assume you are getting a report every time this happens so your developers must be able to work out what is causing it.

And this is STILL an Intel code version - when will an Apple Silicon version be released? It is FOUR YEARS now since the M1 was introduced which is surely enough time to port the application across to be native on Apple Silicon chips. The iOS app is obviously compiled for Apple Silicon - why not the macOS application as well? This is the ONLY application of the vast number I use on my Mac that is not Apple Silicon native.

user_846994761957606 I had the same problem - this board has a ridiculous limitation on how often you can post (only once every 24 HOURS!) which is undoubtedly more inconvenient for legitimate posters than serving any purpose to stop illegitimate ones.

@wisemanjaw This is obviously an important issue in these modern scary times. It seems to me that we have to take quite a bit on trust. There are three scenarios I have come up with:

1. Do not connect your cameras and other connected devices to the internet - set up a VLAN for them which cannot get to the internet. Or alternatively block every individual device in the router (based on its MAC address) if it has that functionality.
2. Allow the devices to connect to the internet in which case you can access them from anywhere using their UIDs, which is undoubtedly very convenient. Ensure that the username and password are BOTH changed from the default settings and the default "admin" user is disabled. The safety of this scenario depends on trusting that Reolink do not surreptitiously upload the username and password you have set to their "DDNS" or relay system and then make use of them. Hopefully this is not the case.
3. Do not change the default settings for username and password (much harder for this to happen now for newer devices that the EU has mandated that this should happen automatically when the camera is first set up) and then your cameras are less secure but this still depends on someone finding out the UID. This could however be achieved through randomly trying UIDs, although hard to target any individual this way.

It is pretty certain that the access to 129.146.110.167 would be for the purposes of registering the IP address which corresponds to the UID.

@joseph_1979 That's not correct, I'm afraid.

The issue is that in countries which don't have as much light in the winter (such as the UK) the standard panel does not generate enough power to keep the camera charged all the time, particularly through the whole night in the darkest part of the year. I have used a panel which has twice the output of the standard panel successfully, and although it may be, as you say, that the maximum charging current is limited, the larger panel will generate that maximum current very much more of the time.

This is the same as having more solar panels on a house solar PV system than an inverter is rated for - as an example if you have 10kWp of solar panels but only a 6kW inverter, you will not get 10kW out of it, but you will get 6kW very much more of the time.

So oversizing the solar panel on a camera is definitely worth doing when the amount of light is limited.

The new app works really well on my Mac mini M2. I am very impressed at how quickly it launches and starts showing all the feeds - wish the desktop app were anything like as good as this is.

The only issue is that I did manage somehow to get the window to rotate as if it was running on a phone and I had rotated it. The way I got it back to the correct orientation was to choose the smaller window size in Settings... for the app, then when it relaunched it was the correct orientation again.

Why can't you buy the HomeHub by itself? I have a site with a Doorbell PoE which is crying out for a HomeHub, and once there is a HomeHub there it will be easy to add further cameras to it.

@joseph_1979 I have installed Wireshark on the Synology box but unfortunately I cannot work out how to capture the FTP traffic.

@joseph_1979 Yes, FW is at version v3.0.0.3215_2401262241

I have seen a couple of transfers be successful now, but it is totally random. It will work sometimes but then stop working with exactly the same settings. I do think there must be a bug in the FTP function which is causing the transactions to fail some of the time but not all the time.

Having to wait 30 minutes between posts is seriously doing my head in! I cannot wait any longer right now - I have other things to do so I will not be able to come straight back to you.

@joseph_1979 There is no PC involved - just the doorbell camera straight to the Synology box over the internet. I get an error "450 Unkown error" when I use the Test function from the camera. Also of interest is that the camera has no problem creating date-organised folders on the FTP server (ie 2024 with 03 inside it and 06 inside that). The .txt file inside the last folder is zero bytes, though. The FTP log records the creation of the folders, and the user logging in successfully for the FTP transfer, but there is no record of the text file being written.

I have tried disabling SSL (ie switching off FTPS) but it makes no difference.

I have also tried changing the transport mode as there are suggestions this might help elsewhere on the web, but no joy. I am beginning to think that the FTP function is simply broken. It is frustrating because the folders get created OK, so this is working, but it just does not seem possible to transfer a file.

Just tried to post this and was denied because it has not been 1800 seconds since my last post - half an hour! Why are there such ridiculous constraints on using this board - it is almost unusable. Maybe that is the idea?

@joseph_1979 The user on the Synology box for the FTP transfers has full read/write access to the share, permission to use the FTP application, and no quota limiting it.

I can't write any more here without triggering the unsuitable content filter - why, I have absolutely no clue.

@joseph_1979 Thanks - hopefully I will be able to post this, although getting through the various filters has been problematic. I have a Doorbell PoE camera which I have set up to sync to a Synology box using FTP. The camera connects to the Synology and can write a file to it, so no apparent problems with authetication, but the file has zero bytes in it. Any ideas what might be causing this?

I have tried and tried to alter my text here but I cannot find wording that meets the "respectful guidelines". I totally don't know what it could possibly be that is wrong with my wording, but basically the FTP function does not seem to work. I tried to explain what I have done but the website does not permit me to do so.

@joseph_1979 Latest version I have just downloaded and installed is v3.0.0.3215_2401262241.

@joseph_1979 The password is only one element of authentication, so if you can also have a setup where the username is different than expected it adds very substantially to the level of security. Also people are not good at using unique passwords (I know, they should do, but we live in the real world!) so having a different username helps to avoid that problem.

It may be true that most SMTP servers require the email address, but believe me that is not ALL servers! As I say, it is a very good added degree of security to have a different username than the email address.

This is an issue that is very frustrating. Some email servers require a login ID that is not the same as the email address, so for example your email address might be in the normal form (I can't quote an example as this board doesn't permit "links") but your login ID might be "user", or even something unrelated such as "loginID".

However the Reolink built-in email client only supports the following fields:

Sender Name (not functional as such, just displays as the name of the person sending the email)
Sender Address (this is used in two ways, for the address from which the email has been sent AND as the login ID for the mail server)
Password (the password for the mail server account)
Recipient Address 1, 2 & 3 (great to have three addresses)

To be compatible with all mail servers there needs to be another field, which is UserID, or LoginID, whatever name is chosen for it. This would be the ID which is sent to the email server when the email is sent if authentication is required (as it should be in most cases for security reasons and to avoid your server being used for spam). Without this you can ONLY send emails via servers which use the email address as the login ID, which is most definitely not all of the servers which people use.

I can imagine that Reolink think it is simpler and maybe less confusing to not have this separate field, but the tradeoff is that the client just doesn't work with many servers, which is in my view not a good tradeoff!

Quite apart from anything else, it is a definite security plus to have a different login ID than the email address, as many bad actors who try to gain access to your mailbox, or send spam, will default to trying to log in using your email address as the login ID.

Having a different loginID makes it MUCH less likely that someone will be able to do either of these bad things, unless of course you succumb to a phishing attack. But you are much less susceptible to a simple trial and error attack by a bad actor.

So having a different loginID is actually a really good thing, and I don't think that Reolink should prevent their users from using mail servers which are like this, as they do.

My E1 Outdoor (hardware IPC_523SD8) has firmware version 3.1.0.989_22081906 but when I check for updates in the firmware update function I am told I have the latest version. Why am I getting this message if there is a later version?

Yes, I also have 18.13.1, auto-updated from 8.8.5 (I think that's what happened) and although there are a number of ways in which this version is a big step forward, it is also rather buggy.

For example, sometimes when I launch it the window shows a live view of the last camera I looked at, but all the cameras say "not connected" (including the one you are viewing) and you can't switch to a different camera. Re-launching the software sometimes fixes that but it is a lottery whether it will work correctly or not.

Also when you try to add a camera it often shows the camera in the list but when you try to add it a dialog appears saying "Failed to add device. This device already exists", even though it is not in the sidebar and doesn't get added.

Another issue is that the application almost invariably crashes when you quit.

Finally the application consumes a vast amount of CPU (currently saturating over one whole core on my M2 Pro Mac mini) and shockingly it is still only compiled for Intel chips, three whole years after Apple Silicon was first released.

Maybe Reolink only have one person working on this software and there is a limit to what he can do? It's a shame, because the UI is not at all bad if it worked properly.

I have one of these cameras which has Firmware version 19071502, but the firmware download page only has firmware for hardware version IPC-51316M, which is presumably an older version of the product than IPC_51516M5M. Why is there no listing for the firmware for the newer hardware version?

Your firmware listings are very hard to follow - there is only one firmware download for each model number, even though there are sometimes multiple hardware versions. Why can't you have a page which shows all the hardware versions for each model number, which tells you what the latest firmware version is, and provides a way to download the latest firmware?