Dahua cams, now all plugin free?

[lost]

Hello,

I already purchased Dahua cams (from aliexpress) and used to appreciate their feature/price ratio + impressive night sensitivity for the ones I used to select (mostly the ones that are branded as "Starlight") as I only target externals for my cams.

Only remaining problem was they were all relying on external plugins (loaded from the cam at first use) that no more works for Firefox&others since removal of NPAPI. Another issue is the same kind of plugin for one caméra (or even FW version => need to upgrade all cams) was not always working for another one: Always need to remove the plugin manually to have the right one reloaded... on top of needing IE (so a windows machine) after FF>52 NPAPI removal, with IE now EOL as well. I do not touch setup every day, but this was a problem.

Some cams had FW upgrades to solve this issue, but looks most of mine were targeted for chineses market and they are cheaper but do not receive any FW upgrades: This is the case of my IPC-HDW4233C-A sticked to FW 2.622.0000000.9.R. This one looks like 4231 international version (with maybe a bit less low light sensitivity than mine: same sensor?). These are references that can be found only on Dahua chinese web site (and not from US one for instance).

Just received (after almost 3 months instead of expected 3 weeks due to a COVID surge where Dahua factory is located, according to seller) a new version of another reference, also sold abroad (but in the 200€ price range instead of 80 directly from China), IPC-HUM4231: A very small cam, without IR but even more low light sensitivity than 4233, that exhibits the same features:
-FTP (+NAS) uploads.
-Hightly configurable motion detection (zones, sentivity, thresholds), I don't use videos on this side but snapshots (their count per 10s timeframe is used as a weighting mechanism in my alarm system to reject false positive in my system, something that can't be done using video).
-Advanced features on capture side like tripwire (virtual lines crossing, less false positive prone than usual motion setups) and face detect (not recognition, but maximizes the chance to get snapshots with someone that may be identified).
-RTSP and snapshots as well that fits into domoticz setup.

And a few other features I don't use myself.

GOOD NEWS:
On the last received cam, everything looks the same in the web configuration interface but not more plugin needed: Every setup can now be accessed in current Firefox running from my Debian 10 Linux desktop!
No more crappy plugin & need to keep an obsolete browser somewhere in case a full configuration must be done again in the future.
As well (did not experiment with this for now because my other cams do only support FTP), on snapshot/video upload side, SFTP (the SSH based replacement for old unsecured FTP, with lots of compatibility issues on server side, dual port use that is a headache to use in a firewalled setup...) is now available on top of SSH that could already be activated on older devices (but only access to a very limited shell/command subset).

That's IMO great: Looks newest Dahua cams are now on par with AXIS cams (first brand that headed the standard HTML5 way to get rid of plugin headache) for a fraction of the price.

Just take care, as usual, to firewall cams from direct external access: With these ones it's still possible as they are not smartphone app configurable only (=> external access mandatory). So IP parameters can be set (no DNS, bad gateway IP, on top of integrated cam FW) to enforce this on top of router setup.

I have my own DNS relay and looking for logs, any camera brand I own try to access outside even if all external features (P2P for external live view from smartphone app, FW auto-upgrade...) are disabled. Dahuas are no exception, they try to resolve 2 chinese domain names every 10s when I setup my own DNS IP for check. As cams accept 0.0.0.0 as a DNS IP, I recommend to set this to avoid DNS log fill.