Security Camera Ssf Files
Last week I had a rough day. Well, not really rough… mostly it just made me embarrassed to be a technologist. My role in this debacle was kind of fun.
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I spent most of a day trying to get a video file off of a Samsung SDR-3100N DVR that’s hooked up to the security cameras at my condo. I managed to get the files off, and convert them into a usable format, but it was pretty painful. Here’s a writeup, just in case someone else has to deal with this mess.
Techpro Security Products brand DVRs have a long list of pragmatic features and none of them are more useful than the ability to view your security camera footage from anywhere in the world. This is accomplished when the DVR and the network where it has been installed have been set up to correctly work together. Security Camera Ssf Files Psychology Of Winning Pdf Free Download Lo 1.1b Flaming Cliffs Setup Doom 3 Full Download Torrent Uncharted 2 Pc Download Torrent Tpb Pirate Yemekteyiz Program 2009 Izle: Full Version Software Drivers Yamaha 01x Logic Games Download Malwarebytes Anti-malware 1.61.0.1400 Full Version Free.
Background
We’ve been using this Samsung SDR-3100N for years, but we haven’t ever had to access the video. Security cameras are a bit like disaster recovery. You don’t know if they work until you really need the video. Last week we needed the video.
Last week a couple of police officers knocked on our door. We learned that some jerkfaces broke into a bunch of bars near my house… on Christmas. It seems that they drove their vehicles past my condo’s security cameras, and the police wanted the video footage to aid in their investigation.
While they patiently watched, I attempted to access the video. The mobile app didn’t work. I grabbed a laptop. The Wifi access point didn’t work. I plugged into the switch with an Ethernet cable. The DHCP on the security camera’s network didn’t work. Plugging the laptop directly into the DVR and sniffed ARP traffic. There wasn’t any. It seems that entropy had set in and broken every piece of technology attached to the security cameras.
Not wanting to waste their time, I promised to send them the video files. We exchanged contact info, and my pretend forensics work began.
Using the DVR as intended
If you just want to get video off of your DVR, skip over this section. It was unsuccessful.
Attempt 1: The web interface
I unhooked the security DVR, plugged it into my working home network, and fired it up. It seemed OK. It booted with a harsh beep noise, and a green LED. I saw it get an IP address. It’s alive!
The mobile app connected and was able to see live video, but it could not find any previously recorded video.
The mobile app was pretty light in administrative features, so I could not investigate the root cause. But, it’s supposed to have a web interface. So, I typed its IP address into Chrome and gave it a poke. It demanded that I access it with IE or Safari (although the JavaScript it loaded seems to indicate that Firefox is also acceptable). I fired up Safari, and gave it another poke. A login page! And beyond that… a message that I need to install Microsoft Silverlight :(
But here’s the kicker, it wanted me to install an unsigned Silverlight binary delivered from the DVR itself.
I downloaded a signed Silverlight binary from Microsoft, but it still complained that I needed to install its fishy Silverlight binary. It turns out that Safari’s security settings disables Silverlight on all website by default. I enabled it for all websites by toggling ‘unsafe mode’, and gave it one more try.
This got me one step further. I was greeted by two loading spinners that displayed no content. This is where I stopped. I didn’t feel like reverse engineering their ancient web app. There has to be a more sensible way.
Attempt 2: Updating the firmware
Maybe the software is just too old for modern browsers. If that’s the case there has to be a firmware update, right? Nope. The Samsung support webpage does not even have a listing for this DVR, which they sold until 2013.
Poking around a bunch of forums didn’t turn up much either. As far as I can tell, they’ve never released any firmware updates for this product… ever. I couldn’t even find a mention of firmware updates in the paper instruction manual.
Attempt 3: Plug it into a monitor
The security DVR had spent its whole life in headless mode: it was never connected to a monitor. But it certainly has that capability. You can plug it into either a BNC composite display, or a VGA monitor to watch live feeds directly. This is perfect if you want to role-play one of those action movie scenes where a ninja knocks out security cameras one at a time while the security guard’s panic increases from dropped doughnut to spilled coffee. However, this option is not perfect for me. I have 0 display devices capable either VGA or BNC composite. But I do have a TV that can display RCA composite video. Rather than walk a block to buy an adapter, I hacked this up… and it worked!
When I carefully placed this delicate disaster near my TV, I could watch it boot up!
It was a dead end. After many minutes of booting up, it only displayed SAMSUNG across my TV in big letters. Fiddling with the remote control or a USB mouse didn’t do anything.
Security Camera Ssf Files Recovery Software
This is when I flipped form lawful neutral to chaotic neutral. It’s also when I reached for a screwdriver.
Getting at the video files some other way
I opened up the DVR and found a SATA hard disk inside. I plugged it into a USB write-blocker and connected it to my mac. diskutil reported it to be a Linux disk, but neither ext-fuse nor Paragon’s EXTfs driver could mount it. I’m not sure what’s up with that.
But I had another option: Kali linux on the laptop I took to DEFCON. And sure enough, it was able to read the disk. Oddly it had two partitions, both named NATALIE. The big NATALIE partition contained 500GB of video in ssf files all dated 2001. It seems that the real-time clock battery died at some point. The mobile app probably would have worked, if I had paged back to 2001. It’d be nice is the mobile app had told me that.
Anyway, I copied the files to another disk drive, this one formatted with exFAT so I could access them from my macOS laptop. Neither preview nor VLC were able to open the ssf files, but ffprobe displayed a lot of warnings and details about a single h264 video steam.
And ffmpeg was able to copy the stream to a more typical container.
Note the exponential notation on the speed. Aren’t modern disks wonderful?
And this resulting mp4 file works in VLC, but looks terribly corrupted. It seems that all of the video cameras have been smashed into a single h264 video stream, and players get really confused. It looks like compressed P-frames refer to the wrong complete I-frames. After trying a bunch of different video players and editors, Adobe Premier seems to read the video with the least corruption.
I tinkered around with ffmpeg but was unable to coerce it into reshuffling the frames. It didn’t like the idea of extracting a raw P-frame or attaching it to a different I-frame. But, you can remove the corruption by filtering out the confused P-frame references. You can use ffmpeg to pull out the I-frames (aka keyframes).
This yields a bunch of sharp jpg files. This is also where I stopped my analysis.
Conclusion
How To Watch Ssf Files
I was able to access the video, and review footage until I found what I was looking for. I also changed the real-time clock battery in the DVR, so the mobile app should work better now.
But, that was a pretty rough experience. I can’t imagine what a typical non-technical user would do, or even a technical user who didn’t have a day to kill tinkering with a broken-by-design security DVR. Samsung: shame on you.
I’d love to replace this DVR with something better, but all of the options I can find seem to suffer from the same terrible software and lack of updates. Now I understand why magic cloud cameras, like the Nest camera, are so appealing.
Each Network Video Recorder (NVR) or Digital Video Recorder (DVR) manufactured by Lorex includes a built-in security certified hard drive. This type of hard drive is designed specifically for security systems. They can run optimally 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This is not to say that they will store footage for that long, however. The security recorders are programmed to constantly overwrite the oldest footage to free up storage space for the live footage coming in. The calculator below is designed to help you determine the approximate amount of hard drive storage space required for your desired purposes.
- This calculator is based on 24 hours per day recoding.
- Estimated file size is based on H.264 video compression.
Storage Tips
Enter the 'Recording' menu within your NVR or DVR settings to set recording parameters for your cameras. From there you can adjust various camera settings to help you save storage space and extend your record time.
Motion
Set the DVR / NVR to record only when motion is detected.
Scheduled
Record only during selected times during the day.
Frames Per Second
A lower FPS will decrease video smoothness but will save space. Gta san andreas extreme edition 2016 free download for android. Lightroom 4.1 download mac.
Resolution
Choose a lower recording resolution to keep file sizes smaller.
Need More Space?
View Ssf Files
To upgrade the storage capacity of your security recorder you will need to remove the protective metal covering and replace the existing hard drive and / or add a secondary hard drive (if available). Please see the product specifications for the maximum storage capacity for your recorder.
Published on 2017-01-30Last Modified 2017-01-30