Home security camera systems that offer ONLY offline DVR, wired cameras on a LAN — with the capability to port forward video streams to a mobile app — are non-existent. Every single “security” company offering “security” cameras all require to connect to their companies’ cloud servers — even if their product is wired to your LAN and an offline DVR storage. I hate it. But I had to get something, so I picked up Night Owl Protect from Costco back in Summer 2023.
The iOS app is fine. The MacOS app is fine. I hate how it has no web browser app (hate it). But the Windows app, which I presumed would work better than Apple, doesn’t work. Below are the relevant details:
- Issue: Video playback boxes for both live and recorded video are black frames
- OS Version: Windows 11 Pro 24H2 26100.2605
- CMS Version: 1.0.22.T.20230912
- Night Owl Protect Model: DVR-FTD4-8_1.2.4
Analysis
Wireshark PCAP
DNS query is made to ota.no-protect.com. VirusTotal shows that this a domain associated with Night Owl in order to manage devices and your account via the browser. However, no way to view video. This DNS request responds with .kota.kalayservice.com. This refers to Kalay Developer Console (KDC)”which is a tool from TUTK that provides smart device development tools, records, and documentation.” Kalay is developed by TUTK (ThroughTek Co) to be a platform for iOT devices and cloud video management.
During the authentication phase, the application calls out to all-c-master-NightOwl.iotcplatform.com. It is owned by ThroughTek and used for the remote access of AV streams. It is used for “punching” through NAT via the iotcplatform library in order to make it “user friendly” (hate it).
iotcplatform, kalay, and ThroughTek are all part of the same Taiwanese (probably Chinese) company umbrella of ThroughTek Co, Ltd. IOTCPlatform is the networking infrastructure. Kalay is the P2P software infrastructure.
Funny side note: Night Owl SP, LLC was sold in 2020 to SFP Holding, Inc. Then in 2021, BlackRock acquired a majority interest in Summit.
I’m pretty sure I found a useful error RTSP packet. Namely an invalid sample rate of 90000 for H265 codec.
I think the application is having a hard time running the h.265 codec, namely because there’s another RTP packet seemingly trying to enforce h.264. (Also, don’t mind the user and password in the RTSP URI. It’s only for that local client with a specific token. It’s not for the actual stream.)
I was able to test the RTSP stream on VLC on my linux desktop. Turns out Night Owl uses the default RTSP credentials of admin:admin. And if the streamer has multiple cameras, make sure to specify channel=. You can also specify if you want video and/or audio by using stream=1 or 0 and audio=1 or 0.
Anyways, I did check the specs on my Windows machine, and the CPU is an Intel Celeron N5095. According to Intel, it does support HEVC/h.265 via its Quick Sync Video capability. Though, there are those who have had mixed luck with the codec.
Initial Conclusion
I’m with you @Flintsone61. I feel ya.
Could be H.265/HEVC related since it was working on my Windows machine, but now it’s not. Unsure. I’ll be taking a look at the application logs in part two. I did find they store credentials in plaintext, which is fun…