So, hopefully your marketing department can pull at peoples' heart strings enough to make up for the order of magnitude difference in price. End users will get a fun learning experience and customized product if they don't buy from you, and 3rd-party wholesalers will undercut you quickly and viciously. It will be cheaper for users to create their own version of your product unless you have some very complex or precise supporting hardware. If you choose them for their hackability, your core processors will probably have minimal development boards available for less than $2.50 each if you're using anything less powerful than a Cortex-M4 ARM core.Īnd now you have a huge part of your value proposition - the easy-to-use and user-configurable software - available for free. On the other hand, they also open themselves to people just making their own versions of the product for much less. It's untrustworthy (proprietary software from a Chinese company how sure are you it doesn't have backdoors?), written insecurely (probably out of negligence rather than intent but again who knows), buggy in general, has mediocre motion detection (not sure I could do better on their hardware but I'd love to try), and has mediocre H.264 encoding (likewise). The vendors' own firmware is pretty lacking. I'd love to put open source firmware on a decent outdoor IP camera. I really wish they would just open it up. Hikvision (and I think Dahua) seems to want to prevent people from modifying their firmware as far as I can tell it's for these reasons. * They're concerned about copycat hardware vendors.

* They want to sell the same product at different prices in different regions. Except when the business model was to sell the hardware at breakeven and make it up with the monthly subscription, and people are buying subsidized hardware and skipping out on the subscription fees.

Camera firmware hacks