CCTV wireless to laptop connection problem

[#1]

Pulling my hair out setting up a CCTV to my laptop and hoping someone can help.

The camera model is an SV3C 960P and the software downloaded from the SV3C site is IP Camera Client. I followed the setup instructions (which are very badly translated from Chinese and scant at best) and have the camera working no problems talking to my phone. The software worked on my laptop for about a week, recording video wirelessly, but today it's failing to connect properly, even though it can see the camera's IP address in it's available camera list and no video link is available. When I type the camera IP address into a browser, it connects to the camera properly and I can see video, just not through the software.

After a bit of research, I discovered that the camera wants to connect to a static IP address, so am guessing that a router disconnect through the night had assigned a different IP, which has caused today's problem. I've now changed the router to always assign the camera to the proper IP address, reinstalled the camera in the software, but the video link is still only available when typing the address directly into a browser.

I've tried contacting the company directly but am having no success getting hold of them. Anyone have any ideas, or experienced anything like this before?

Thanks

[#2]

Have you tried turning the camera off and on again? - just changing the ip setting in the router might not be enough to trigger the camera to make a new dhcp request.

[#3]

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I have tried turning it off, unfortunately it didn't make any difference. At the moment I'm just using it through the phone app, which works well but saves footage as .h264 files, which play fine on my phone but I'm struggling to find a player that will play that format when I transfer the file to my computer.

Wondering whether to try a different software to manage the camera, seeing as everything else seems to work fine, viewing through the ip address on a browser and through the app.

[#4]

You need to download a codec pack such as klite which has loads of different video codecs.

[#5]

Thanks, I'll take a look at that.

[#6]

Or you could just play the recorded files in VLC media player (free download)

[#7]

I have VLC and have followed the instructions to allow it to play h264, the file is playing but the screen is black, not sure what's going on, it's not corrupted as it will play fine through the camera app in my phone. Any ideas? Thanks

[#8]

Personally I'd recommend the K-lite Codec Pack (Full version), it covers pretty much all bases codec-wise:

https://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

[#9]

Trying to run that codec pack is giving me a Windows Defender popup that wont let me run it. Windows Defender is turned off on my pc as I have Norton and the Norton scan of the  file is clean. How do I get past Defender to run the codec exe file?

Edit: Actually, should I even be doing this if Defender is telling me the file may be dangerous? 

[#10]

@twocvbloke is spot on. The K-Lite codec pack covers just about everything..and yes..it's safe. If you having problems installing it, you may need to run it as Administrator.

[#11]

Run as administrator worked, thanks. The file is still playing as a black screen though

Let me quickly run through the process I've followed with you :

The CCTV camera has an sd card in it. I have the Camhi app on my phone, I can play the footage on the sd card through the app on my phone. I can download the footage from the sd card through the Camhi app to my phone. I then copy paste the downloaded footage from my phone to my computer. VLC (after the codecs have been installed) plays the footage, it's not reporting it as corrupt, but the screen is black.

Am I being a muppet and missing something obvious here?

Thanks so much for helping by the way.

[#12]

Try playing the SD card on your PC; if it doesn't work then the camera isn't recording proper h264.

Bypass whatever the phone is doing.

[#13 · Accepted solution]

I've found a way around the problem I had, so thought I would report back, just in case anyone else has this issue in future.

After going around in circles trying to find a player to play the h264 files (and failing miserably), I noticed that there was a download link on the SV3C site itself to a player they recommend you use, called HiPlayer. Also noticed that in the browser settings for the camera ip address, there was a well hidden link to the footage on the SD card itself.

So, instead of downloading to my phone and trying to transfer over to the computer, I downloaded the h264 file directly from the browser and it plays perfectly with HiPlayer. No idea what was going on, but problem solved.

Thanks so much for everyone who took time to reply, really appreciated.

[#14]

@caryn

Glad you got it sorted and thanks for reporting back.  

[#15]

HiPlayer appears to be a dead project.
Try out MPlayer for windows, it still seems to be maintained with recent updates. https://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayerwin/