[bradknowles]

The issue here is that HikVision is a Chinese company, and they have been widely known to supply equipment to the government to aid in the suppression of the Uighur people. Same with Dahua.

The next problem is that both these companies operate under a very wide array of brands, hundreds if not thousands of names, some of which you might recognize and may have thought that they were separate. Lorex is one such brand. Many more can be found at https://securitycamcenter.com/hikvision-oem-list/ and https://securitycamcenter.com/dahua-oem-list/ among others.

Next, you have the other companies like Wyze that take Dahua hardware and put their own firmware on it.

So, if you want to use hardware from a company that is not compromised like HikVision or Dahua, the options get much more limited. At that point, you might want to start looking at building your own on top of the Raspberry Pi plus their camera options.

Personally, I'm still looking for someone who has decided to commercialize cameras based on the Raspberry Pi, so that I can buy a whole stack of them at once and I don't have to build them all myself.

[voakbasda]

As an embedded engineer, I wonder if it would be possible for me to become a VAR for one of those Chinese companies, such that I could get enough of their hardware specs to do a full-featured clean room implementation of the firmware that then could be released as open source. I don’t want to make hardware, but I could build out a Yocto-based distribution. Or has someone already done this?

[bradknowles]

I think that is basically what Wyze has done, only they haven't released their firmware.

There are open source versions of firmware for Wyze/Dahua cameras, but I believe they include major components that are just black boxes from the OEM. I don't know how much of that you would be able to reverse Engineer in a clean room.

[spacexsucks]

Thank you for those links. I tried avoiding Danua and Hikvision. I went with Amcrest, only to find it on the Danua list. :(

Luckily i only spent $150 for 3 cameras

[bradknowles]

Yeah, when I saw Amcrest on the list, I figured out that something like that might have happened.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!