Setting up the Samsung SDE-5001 DVR for online viewing

With all the recent attention of Samsung catching up as a viable competitor to Apple, the trouble I had today getting their SDE-5001 DVR working for online access really made me wonder whether they had invested much time on any part of building an intuitive design for using this device.   It appears that much of their design team has been focused on the mobile phone business, but their expertise hasn't spilled into other areas of their product lines such as their home security systems.

The SDE-5001 device comes with Dynamic DNS support through their http://www.samsungipolis.com service.  When you register your device at this site, you also create a Product ID.  The URL will then become part of the URL (i.e. http://www.samsungipolis.com/abcdef).    Assuming your device is configured for the Dynamic DNS service, this web service will redirect your browser to the IP address with META HTTP refresh tags(<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://1.2.3.4:80"/>).

One trouble that I encountered was that the stock firmware 1.0.0 when using the iPolis DynDNS had a User ID and password prompt, but you couldn't fill out the password prompt through a web browser much less through the infrared control.   I noticed today that Samsung has released the 1.0.2 firmware that probably fixed this bug (http://www.samsungsv.com/Support/DVRFirmwareUpdate), but there are very few instructions about how to go about doing so.    The first thing you need to do is to verify which firmware to use, since some of Samsung's firmware include material codes.

To upgrade the firmware, it turns out that you have to download the .zip file to a USB drive in the root directory and then insert this device into the DVR.  You then have to go into the System Management section of the DVR and wait 20-30 seconds before a screen shows up.  If the DVR recognizes there is a USB device (USB hard drives may not work), it will indicate a "Upgrade Software" button that you can use.  I tried several times and often got "Upgrade Failed", so I eventually decided to unzip the image and place it on the same drive while switching to a smaller 32GB flash drive.   Eventually after trying different USB sticks and unzipping the firmware files, I got the upgrade to succeed.

There also isn't much documentation about how to setup port forwarding.  If you navigate to the Protocol section, you will also noticed that the protocol type is set to TCP, port 4520, webviewer port 80:

You can also see at the bottom of this picture is "TCP Port 4505-4530, Webviewer Port 80". According to the SDE 5001 User manual (http://www.samsungsv.com/Download/SDE-5001_User_Manual.pdf), what this section really means is:

Multi Browser Support : You can use a Silverlight-compliant web browser to connect to the Web Viewer. Multi browsers are enabled only if the TCP port is set to between 4505 and 4530 with the Web Viewer port of 80. This is a security measure in order to enable Silverlight.

Basically it means that the Samsung DVR really only works with Internet Explorer.  You also appear to need to set TCP ports 4505-4530 open, as well as port 80 to make it work.   It appears that you can choose either TCP or UDP connection mode, so the grayed out parameters seem to apply for whichever mode.

For good measure, I setup TCP port 80/4505-4530 and UDP 8000-8160 port forwarding to support both modes.

Also, if you connect with a non-Safari and non Internet Explorer, you get a blank white screen. If you look at the JavaScript for the page, the reason is that this section of the code has specific checks whether to even render the login page if you're not using Safari or IE. You can bypass by adding the same parameters at the end (i.e. http://[YOUR IP]/cgi-bin/webviewer?ip=0&_port=0) but you still need Silverlight/ActiveX plugins and it still appears to render a blank screen.

There is a mobile app, but the Samsung IPolis appears to be broken for Android Jelly Bean 4.2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.ipolis&hl=en. You can connect and request channels, but no video panels will render. I looked through a bunch of forum comments and people have been complaining that the latest update broke things (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.ipolis&hl=en).  You can use the IP Cam Viewer app for IOS and Android, which is described in this blog post.

Finally, if you're wondering about what RTSP port should be used for the IPolis mobile app, it should be the last port defined in the range (i.e. for port range 4520-4524, use 4524).  


Footnote: there is a major security vulnerability that is still unpatched in the web interface software.  For more details, see http://hustoknow.blogspot.com/2013/11/samsung-dvr-security-vulnerability.html