Esky C5900 H.264 IP Camera, Internet WiFi Wireless/Wired, Pan Tilt, 2-way audio, Build-in DVR, Moti

The Esky 5900 has a lot of potential and software that kind of works.

Fine (not great) control features, good (not great) video and okay control software.

And the firmware is upgradable! Which is important to me because of the last problem with the 5900.

The biggest problem is you can't use it from the Internet. At least you can right up until the point someone who wants to pwn it takes it over.

From the Esky forum, a small list of security problems:

1: Port 23 is open for telnet with a login of root and no password

2: /mnt/config/login.cgi shows the administrators login and password

3: full busybox installed allowing you to do almost anything you want

4: /mnt/config/system.ini contains the entire configuration of the web setup, including the Wireless networks ssid login and password in the clear.

5: No way to change the root password as it is mounted read only.

6: /mnt/www is rw allowing anyone to modify the web pages since root has no pw.

7: without any authentication you can type http://webcamip/rebootme.htm and it will reboot the camera.

8: Same idea as 6, /mnt/www can store any file allowing it to host files for download without the need of a login/pw.

9: http://webcamip/status.htm does not require authentication

This is my second C5900 camera. I love that it takes a micro SD card (up to 32GB)which allows the camera to record continuously without the need for another device or computer. I can simply log on within Windows IE and watch any recordings that have occurred from any Windows internet enabled device. When on the road, I can watch live video via my Iphone or Android tablet. Plus, I have them set up to email me whenever either camera detects motion and the camera will also send a snapshot of what triggered the motion.

As my title suggests, this camera needs to be updated, both the firmware and embedded web UI to make it function correctly. Plus the latest firmware supposedly has closed the ability for hackers to get into your network. Please log onto Esky's users forum to read about this. The Esky support staff is pretty quick to reply to problems on the forum and offers useful advice.

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I had purchased this 2 weeks ago. Was a bit of a struggle to set it up (I am an IT professional) mainly because manual is not easy to follow and software is bit weird to set up. But camera works as expected. Can access thru wifi and i have registered for dynamic dns service (free) which allows me to access it from outside of my wifi network. Comes with company ddns but i was not in favor of using Somalia's url (http://xxxx.ipcam.so). Can access via Android but with very limited control options. Only big issue i have found so far is that i can't upload images and video both to my FTP server when an alarm is triggered (motion detection). It only uploads images. I have to store video locally. H264 is a plus. Image quality is good with daylight and/or at night (8-10 feet). Overall it's good but leaves room for huge improvements especially on software side. Support never got back to my email queries, website is a mess (everything on the site is 'coming soon'!!

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You will need to upgrade the firmware and also the web UI (interface) right off the bat. It's fairly easy to do, though the web UI is still odd and turns a lot of features off depending on your browser. Most controls only work on Internet Explorer, but if you want to view the videos on your SD Card, you have to use either Firefox, Chrome or Safari. Get used to it, because this is just the beginning of the inexplicable idiosyncrasies of this camera.

You'll almost need a Computer Science degree to get this camera set up. When you finally do get it working, your troubles only just begin. It saves the videos in a .h264 file type. I don't mean it saves them as mp4s which use the h264 codec. No. I mean the filetype is .h264, and won't play natively on QuickTime, Windows Media Player, MPEG Streamclip or VLC. In fact, that filetype isn't recognized on Windows or Mac OSX at all.

After hours and hours of trial and error (because the documentation with this camera is spotty and the forums aren't much better), luckily I found the files would play on MPlayer but not very well. As for Mac, no such luck. I had to use a random shareware video convertor to convert the files into a watchable format on Mac. Seriously, would it hurt the manufacturers to use a file format that's universally known such as mp4 or even avi? For this reason alone I'd recommend everyone to skip this camera. It's not worth the headache. Setup is difficult enough, but couple the file type fiasco and the fact that it will need to be restarted fairly often, I give this camera a big fat thumbs down.

Update: There is a way to view the videos in Internet Explorer. There's a little video playback icon at the bottom of the UI. It allows you to view and delete files from the IE browser. I missed it because the documentation on this camera is next to none. And because it's not well documented, I spent too long looking for workarounds for video playback and even bought a conversion software. So the one star stays.

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This could be a great little camera, except that a couple of the main selling points don't work. I haven't been able to get the email or ftp alerts to work. These should both be no brainers, but no matter what I try, no joy.

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