Tech support not what it use to be?

[cw-kid]

Why has tech support gone right down hill these days? They not training the kiddies properly?

Not just Vera support, seems all the support desks I contact these days don’t know what they are saying or doing…

Case in point I bought a cheap indoor Ezviz PTZ camera on Black Friday…

Sent their support desk an email asking them what are the Rtsp streams for this cam? And can I send Http requests to the Cam to turn on or off the privacy mode via my HA system?

Response back from them was no this cam doesn’t support http requests or rtsp.

When in actual fact after the camera arrived I worked out it does support standard Hikvision rtsp URL streams natively for main and sub h.264 and via jumping through some hoops via their Ezivz IFTTT service its is possible via web hooks to send a HTTPS request via IFTTT to instruct the cam to turn on or off the privacy mode.

Not local I know but better than nothing and at least a solution.

So I emailed their support desk back with a FYI stating the above and telling them next time someone asks them the same questions I just did, these are the actual answers.

And don’t get me started on Nintendo UK support, I’ve had to contact this week, robbing swines they are, after I’ve paid for a subscription service for my daughter that has never worked and they now refuse to fix it or refund for it.

[reneboer]

IMO we are starting to see the negative effects of working from home for a longer time. I see the same in my company and we have long history of working from home part-time so the technology is not the issue for us. Don’t get me wrong, it has to be done as nothing is as important as someones health. However, after some time you are no longer as effective.

Cheers Rene

[valentina]

Hello @cw-kid
We appreciate your feedback. We must inform you that some third-party software use the same ISAPI APIs and you might be able to send HTTP requests to the camera. For some cameras, such as our VistaCam1200 doorbell camera we are currently not authorized to provide instructions to use such software since the purpose is to handle the camera in one single platform (Vera).
Please let me know if you have an opened ticket number with us and we will provide some further useful information.

[rigpapa]

@reneboer

IMO we are starting to see the negative effects of working from home for a longer time.

This may be part of it, but I would not discount the morale implications having to support a product that is effectively abandoned within their company, and a giant learning curve on a new product that is rolling out at glacial speed, yet also with an ongoing barrage of errors. That alone is probably not a great motivator. The Covid situation and its effects then only add to emotion stress, lack of direct peer support and reduced engagement, etc. And customers aren’t happy, so I’m sure many of the conversations are just soul-sucking. I truly feel for them. Customer service is truly the most difficult job in any company.

[cw-kid]

@valentina

some third-party software use the same ISAPI APIs and you might be able to send HTTP requests to the camera

I think only the proper Hikvision cameras support the ISAPI and HTTP commands, which I have used myself on my outdoor Hikvision cameras with Vera for things like enabling or disabling motion detection. This works well from either Vera scenes or virtual devices by sending an os.execute curl command etc to the camera.

These cheaper Ezviz cameras which are manufactured by Hikvision are obviously more consumer focused budget cameras with limited features.

There is an Ezviz API documented here but I have no idea what it all means, perhaps some of the devs could explain. Looks to be a cloud based API rather than a direct local IP connection to the camera.

For example I would like to be able to send commands to this Ezviz PTZ camera to control the PTZ movement, but I don’t think its possible just by sending a curl command to it. Port 80 rejects any requests. And the management port 8000 doesn’t seem to help me either.

Only the RTSP port 554 is accessible directly for a live video stream and these Ezviz cams don’t even support HTTP MJPEG or JPG Snapshot it seems.

Thanks