Dauha / Empire Traffic

orangetang

orangetang

Young grasshopper
Dec 24, 2024
31
10
Canada
I do use DMSS and SmartPSS Lite to connect to these cameras over the web, but I suppose I'm not expecting to see traffic logged when I'm not using the service. Do the Empire/Dahua NVRs upload my camera footage to an external server or is this just traffic moving from the cameras to the NVR? It's odd to me that the trends here fall into the 'smart' recording being the motion these cameras are detecting as events, IE, vehicles and people during daylight hours. Example being the two spikes where my cursor is would be my daughters birthday party in backyard, followed by me cleaning up for an hour after everyone left. Is there something I should be disabling? I do have wireguard setup to this network so in theory I could just connect to my router remotely and then stream video to these apps over the 'local' tunneled network rather than through the application web service.

Essentially, why is there traffic here if neither my wife or I are streaming this?
NVR - Dahua Empire.jpg
 
Did you use the serial number or QR code to add them to DMSS/SmartPSS?

If so P2P is running. the NVR P2p pings Dahua P2P servers continuously to say hello and insure they know how to connect to DMSS/SmartPSS

No they dont stream your video across the servers

I think what you see there is you streaming the video to your DMSS/SmartPSS remotely from the NVR
 
  • Like
Reactions: Mark_M and VorlonFrog
bigredfish said:
Did you use the serial number or QR code to add them to DMSS/SmartPSS?

If so P2P is running. the NVR P2p pings Dahua P2P servers continuously to say hello and insure they know how to connect to DMSS/SmartPSS

No they dont stream your video across the servers

I think what you see there is you streaming the video to your DMSS/SmartPSS remotely from the NVR
Click to expand...
P2P is running, I believe DMSS was added by SN and SmartPSS is local IP.

Neither application is generally open or looked at - so neither DMSS or SmartPSS should be pulling data to a phone or PC more than once or twice a month if we have something to review or save.

The screenshot is a snapshot of 1 week of activity totally 36.4 BG of upload and it seems to be only for the 'smart' video from motion or detection which is even more strange. If this is ONLY the network traffic between cameras and NVR it might make sense since they're all currently set to VBR x 30 fps x Best Quality which is 1280-11520 Kb/s, so with less movement and detection the bitrate SHOULD at night and when there is less movement between frames.

I could change it to CBR and see if the traffic flow instead flatlines, but that won't really tell me if this is local or web traffic. Surely I can figure that out in the UniFi interface but haven't figured it out yet.
 
Last edited:
Mine clearly do not on an older 5216-16P-4K2SE

Just the handshake and occasional hi res photo attached to an email
 
Here’s what I see

Dahua P2P, at least on older NVRs, does not stream data/video through a dahua server. It acts as P2P was designed. Point to point. The P2P server simply acts as traffic cop

Unfortunately I can’t upload images but I see repeated regular handshakes with Dahua P2P servers from 350 bytes to 2-3 Kb

When I remotely view live or playback video from a remote NVR, I see direct P2P data between my phone and the known IP of the remote NVR. (Even though I’m using P2P, I still see the remote NVR IP on m my firewall log.)
One minute viewing was about 90-100MB of downloaded data from the remote NVR IP

The OP is seeing handshakes mostly, possibly some download video data and/or email.

Unless signed into the dahua account in DMSS, I don’t think any video data is being sent to Dahuas servers. And I’m not even sure that it does then
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns
bigredfish said:
Unfortunately I can’t upload images but I see repeated regular handshakes with Dahua P2P servers from 350 bytes to 2-3 Kb
Click to expand...
My attached images also don't work, however if I click the "insert image (Ctrl + P)" button above this dialogue box, it allows it to be attached.

I'm still not 100% certain what is going on. It seems the cumulative traffic is being stored regardless if it's LAN or WAN traffic on that first screenshot. I need to dig deeper to be certain, but judging by the smaller amounts of data displayed in 'insights', it might just be packets, but we're still talking about 5.05 GB per week, w
 
Insignificant compared to viewing 1 minute of remote video.

Its keeping in touch with the Dahua P2P server for discovery. Its not transmitting video to Dahua servers.
 
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns
bigredfish said:
Here’s what I see

Dahua P2P, at least on older NVRs, does not stream data/video through a dahua server. It acts as P2P was designed. Point to point. The P2P server simply acts as traffic cop

Unfortunately I can’t upload images but I see repeated regular handshakes with Dahua P2P servers from 350 bytes to 2-3 Kb

When I remotely view live or playback video from a remote NVR, I see direct P2P data between my phone and the known IP of the remote NVR. (Even though I’m using P2P, I still see the remote NVR IP on m my firewall log.)
One minute viewing was about 90-100MB of downloaded data from the remote NVR IP

The OP is seeing handshakes mostly, possibly some download video data and/or email.

Unless signed into the dahua account in DMSS, I don’t think any video data is being sent to Dahuas servers. And I’m not even sure that it does then
Click to expand...

In my case there were 3 types of traffic.
  • first one were short request in short time intervals to keep P2P mapping on the router (using UDP packet type),
  • second looked like very frequent short informing some cloud server that NVR is alive and accessible over P2P (over HTTPs),
  • third one were big (very often >1MB) requests where NVR sent some data over HTTP with multimedia data inside... there very not frequent (more like executed by events on cameras). those created peaks on router bandwidth diagram
 
  • Like
Reactions: bigredfish
I wonder if #3 is a snapshot for use in sending an alert?
 
If I could just upload pics :mad:

I have an isolated event from 4:39 am this morning. Raccoon crossed tripwire in backyard. It’s set to send me an alert which it did. No email

Because the app wasn’t open I don’t get a snapshot or video clip unless I click the alert and ask for it. Then it downloads it from the NVR

I see it (NVR) reaching out to the P2P server but all small bytes
 
  • Like
Reactions: looney2ns
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom