Enabling RTSP for Night Owl AHD10

Preconditions

• Latest DVR firmware as of 2019-07-21
• Remote access through web server is enabled
• Internet Explorer (possibly OS X?)
• I used windows in a VM. You need to install an ActiveX plugin when you first connect to the server. Night Owl provides a CMS installer for Windows and OS X but I'm not sure if they also have something available that enables you to connect through safari.
• Usual port-forwarding/NAT config if necessary

Enabling RTSP

Easy way

Depending on the model you may be able to just open the web interface, inspect the HTML for the RTSP checkbox, un-hide it with CSS, then simply check the box and submit the form as-is. If there's no option available to enable the RTSP stream then you can try the backup method.

If the easy way doesn't work

Try calling the functions directly. This may require some web development knowledge but this is the gist of what happens when you submit the web form.

1. Login to web server
2. Open the IE developer console
3. run gDvr.GetAndSetParameter("RTSP", "<a><RtspPort>PORT</RtspPort><enAuthMode>1</enAuthMode><RtspEnable>1</RtspEnable><RtspUserName>USERNAME</RtspUserName><RtspPassword>PASSWORD</RtspPassword></a>", 1, 300)
   • Replace PORT with the desired RTSP port
   • Replace USERNAME/PASSWORD with whatever you want. The password needs to be >6 characters
4. Connect to the RTSP stream with the url rtsp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/ch<num>/<0|1>
   • ch00 is channel 1, ch01 is channel 2, etc.
   • The last part of the path is 0 for the main stream or 1 for the sub stream
   • Example stream URI: rtsp://admin:12345678@192.168.1.150:554/ch00/0
5. Pray

Defaults

• Username: admin
• Password: 12345678
• Might also be 111111, 11111111, 88888888