viewing DVR remotely

[Jester73440]

Helping my brother with this, he has a speco dsd8 DVR and can not view it unless he is on his wifi (or within his network) I have confirmed that the ports are open( port 80 5445 & 5446), we have also tried alternative ports. He uses an xfinity router/gateway but we have tried bridging this and just using a linksys router set up to see if it was xfinity's gateway blocking it. He has been fighting with this for months and even exchanged his dvr for a new one to see if that was the problem.

I posted this on some CCTV forums too,but for the past two decades these forums have been the most helpful tech forums i've ever used!

Any help will be much apperciated
-Steve

 

[DistraughtSysop]

If you use an online port checker tool, does it show those ports as being open for your brother's public IP? If they are open then you're most of the way there and it's most likely something rather simple that's keeping it from working.

How are the cameras viewed? Is it done through a program, or just from a browser? Is there a mobile app for the DVR?

 

[Jester73440]

If you use an online port checker tool, does it show those ports as being open for your brother's public IP? If they are open then you're most of the way there and it's most likely something rather simple that's keeping it from working.

How are the cameras viewed? Is it done through a program, or just from a browser? Is there a mobile app for the DVR?

Ya i used canyouseeme.com and one other site can't recall. To check the ports and it showed open. He uses software on the desktop and an app on the phone. I believe you can view via a browser too but not sure how to do it. Do i put the dvr's ip address in the browser?

 

[DistraughtSysop]

Okay, open ports are good.

You can usually access the cameras with a browser even when they provide software for it. Typically, each camera will have its own IP, so you would enter the IP into a browser's address bar followed by a colon with the port number being used. For example:

http://192.168.1.100:5445

Sometimes you use the DVR's IP and each camera is on its own port, and sometimes you'll need to use https instead of http, so it'll depend on your particular model.

To access it over the internet, you would just use your public IP. I would suggest setting up dynamic DNS so that you can use an easy to remember domain name instead of the IP - the domain name will also stay the same if your public IP changes. I use noip.com but there are several sites that provide dynamic DNS for free.

For the app, I would double check the settings. I recently had a client on a DVR system that was having the same problem - every test I ran worked and I was able to get to the cameras, but the client couldn't. It turns out that his mobile app had the wrong device model selected under the settings. It was as simple as having "DVR-A" selected when it should have been "DVR-A1." Everything else - IP address, port numbers, etc. - was correct.