Dahua Direct camera setup

Dahua Direct connects a Dahua camera to CleverCam with no hub and no other hardware on site. The camera dials out to CleverCam over its own auto-register connection, and that single connection carries everything: detections, photos, event clips, live view and the camera's status.

The camera does the first detection, and CleverCam verifies it before anything reaches you — a detection CleverCam's own model will not confirm is dropped rather than raised.

Dahua cameras only

This only works on Dahua cameras that support auto-register. A Hikvision or other-brand camera cannot join a Dahua Direct hub — use Hikvision Direct for Hikvision, and a CCU or CleverMail for other brands.

A Dahua recorder (XVR or NVR) can connect the same way, bringing every camera on it — including analog cameras, which have no connection of their own. That works differently enough to have its own section below.

What you need

• A Dahua camera that can reach the internet (no port forwarding and no fixed IP required).
• A working DNS server in the camera's network settings. The server address is a name, and the camera looks it up every time it connects. A camera on DHCP normally has one already; a camera given a fixed IP by hand often does not.
• The camera's admin login.
• Access to the camera's own web interface on site, once, to enter three values.

1. Create the hub

In Hubs → Hubs, click Add Dahua Direct — or, on the site itself, open Hardware, click Add hub and pick the Dahua Direct tile, which also links the new hub to that site. Under How do the cameras connect? leave Each camera itself selected (choose Through a recorder (XVR / NVR) for a recorder — see below). Confirm the billing agreement — Dahua Direct is billed per camera channel, with a minimum of one.

CleverCam creates the hub and opens its camera picker — the same panel you reach later from the hub (see Where to find the camera picker). Keep it open for the next steps.

2. Save the device login

Under Device login, enter the admin username and password of the cameras and click Save login. CleverCam logs in to every device on this hub with it, so cameras that connect by themselves need the same login.

The password is never shown again once saved — not in CleverOps and not in CleverAlert. To change only the username, leave the password field blank and the saved password is kept.

3. Point each camera at CleverCam

On each camera, open its own web interface and go to Setting → Network → Auto Register. Switch it on and enter the values from How to connect a camera in the picker:

Field	Value
Server address	shown in the picker
Port	shown in the picker
Device ID	a different one for each camera — the picker suggests free ones, such as a1b2c3d4-cam1, a1b2c3d4-cam2

The Device ID is per camera

Never give two cameras the same Device ID. A shared Device ID causes repeated failed logins, and the camera locks its own admin account within about a minute — after which nothing can reach it until the lock clears. Use the ones the picker lists: they start with the hub's serial, which is how CleverCam knows which hub a camera belongs to.

Save. The camera connects within a few seconds and appears in the picker.

Older firmware cannot register by name

The server address is a name, not an IP address, so that CleverCam can move the service to another server without anyone visiting the site. Most cameras take it. Some older firmware does not: it either refuses the name when you save, or accepts it and then never connects. If the camera has not appeared a minute after saving, enter the fallback IP address shown in the picker as the server address instead. The same applies to a recorder.

4. Choose the cameras to monitor

Each camera that connects is listed in the picker with its model, serial number, network address, its own name (the title set on the camera) and whether it is Online. It is not monitored until you add it:

1. Tick the camera. Fields appear for its name in CleverCam, its group, and what it detects — People or People and vehicles. Select every camera not monitored yet ticks them all.
2. Click Add in the bar at the bottom.

CleverCam starts monitoring within a minute. Nothing needs doing on the camera. A site with no camera group yet gets one called Cameras.

To stop monitoring a camera, click Remove next to it in the picker — or delete the camera anywhere else in CleverOps or CleverAlert, as normal. Either way the camera is deleted with its settings; it stays connected and can be added again.

Refresh asks every device on the hub to report again at once. The picker also updates by itself every few seconds while it is open.

Only a site admin, a company admin of a control room serving the site, or a super admin can add or remove cameras or change the login. Everyone else sees the list without the controls.

Hubs set up before 2026-09-22

Cameras added earlier have a Device ID that ends in their camera's number (a1b2c3d4-9330). They keep working as they are, show in the picker as monitored, and each keeps logging in with its own camera's login rather than the hub's. Such a camera cannot be re-added from the picker once its camera is deleted: give it a new Device ID from the picker's list, and add it again.

Where to find the camera picker

• CleverOps: on the site's Hardware tab, the Dahua Direct hub's + Add Camera button — or the hub's Edit dialog, under Cameras.
• CleverAlert: Add camera, then the Dahua Direct hub — or the hub's page, Cameras on this device.

5. Turn on recording (for event clips)

On each camera, go to Setting → Storage → Schedule and make sure recording is enabled. The camera records to its own memory card, and CleverCam pulls a short clip from it around each event.

Without this, events still arrive with a photo, but no clip. The camera's Device health shows No SD card or Recording: Stopped when this is the case.

How a camera detects

Cameras do not all report detections the same way, and CleverCam handles each:

• Cameras that send their own smart events with a picture (most current Dahua models): the camera's person or vehicle event arrives with its own photo, and CleverCam verifies that photo.
• Cameras that only raise an alarm: some models, for example the IPC-HDW2449T, IPC-HDW2439 and IPC-HDW2230, detect people but send no picture with it. For these CleverCam looks at the camera itself, the same way it does for a recorder: the camera's own person/vehicle alarm, or plain motion if the camera has no smart detection, triggers one frame from the camera, which CleverCam's model checks. CleverCam works out which kind each camera is on its own. Nothing needs setting.

A late frame is not a false alarm. When the camera says it saw a person and the first frame shows nobody, the person may already have walked out of view. CleverCam takes two more frames, about 0.6 seconds apart, before calling it a miss, and looks again as soon as the camera repeats its alarm. If the camera has an SD card, CleverCam then also pulls the few seconds of recording around the alarm and checks every other frame, so a fast walker the live frames missed is still caught. Without an SD card only the extra frames are available.

Recorders (XVR / NVR)

A recorder connects once, and every camera on the hub is one of its channels. This is the only way to bring analog cameras onto Dahua Direct, and it means one Device ID for the whole site instead of one per camera.

Setting it up

1. In Hubs → Hubs, click Add Dahua Direct (or use the site's Add hub → Dahua Direct) and choose Through a recorder (XVR / NVR).
2. In the camera picker, save the recorder's admin login under Device login.
3. On the recorder (not the cameras), open Network → Auto Register — some recorders call it Register — switch it on, and enter the server address, port and the single Device ID from How to connect a recorder. It ends in -rec.
4. The recorder appears in the picker with every channel it has. Each channel shows the name the recorder gives it, whether a camera is on it — Camera connected, Camera not connected or No camera — and whether it is Analog or an IP camera, with the IP camera's address and model. Tick the channels to monitor (Select every channel with a camera ticks them all), name them, and click Add.

The recorder connects and lists its channels as soon as its login is saved, before any camera is added. Cameras added or removed later are picked up within a minute, without touching the recorder again. A camera plugged into the recorder later appears after Refresh, or by itself within half an hour.

A camera that connects by itself can join a recorder's hub too, with its own Device ID from the picker's list. It is listed under Cameras connecting by themselves.

How detection works on a recorder

A recorder sends no picture with what it detects, and most recorders do not classify their IP channels at all. So CleverCam looks at the channel itself: whenever the recorder reports motion on a camera, CleverCam takes one frame of that channel and runs its own check on it. Only a person CleverCam's own model confirms is raised; everything else is dropped.

• People and vehicles are detected on every channel this way, for the classes selected on the camera. Parked vehicles do not raise — see Parked vehicles and things that do not move.
• Where the recorder has its own smart motion detection (on an XVR, its analog channels), a human or vehicle it reports triggers the same look.
• Nothing is fetched while a camera is disarmed — no frames cross the site's internet connection, and chime mode counts as active.
• A camera whose motion keeps turning out to be nothing (a tree in the wind) is looked at less often: every 10 seconds at first, stretching to every 30 seconds while armed and every 60 in chime mode.

Motion detection must be switched on for each channel on the recorder, and recording must be on for event clips. The picture is as large as the recorder's own snapshot setting for that channel. Analog channels on an XVR default to a very small image (352×288), in which a garden table can pass for a person — raise it on the recorder. Set the size for the channel's event snapshots (motion and alarm) as well as its scheduled ones: raising only the scheduled size changes nothing. Expect an analog channel to stop at 704×576 even when it records at a higher resolution — that is still four times the default.

What is different from a camera connecting itself

Detection settings	Not pushed to the recorder — its smart detection table is the owner's own recording setup. The classes you select still decide what is raised.
Live view	Shows the channel's sub stream, at whatever resolution the recorder encodes it.
Internet use	Each look pulls one full frame over the site's connection (150–300 KB for a 1080p channel, about 75 KB for an analog channel at 704×576), only while the camera is armed or in chime mode.

Parked vehicles and things that do not move

"Is there a vehicle in this picture?" is always yes in a car park, so CleverCam keeps a memory of what is already in each camera's view, and only something new raises. This applies to every Dahua Direct camera, connected by itself or through a recorder.

• Parked vehicles are remembered for up to three hours, and every picture CleverCam fetches refreshes that — including the reference snapshot taken on each arm, disarm and every hour, so a car parked overnight stays remembered all night.
• Whatever is in view when CleverCam starts looking is treated as parked. Arming with a vehicle already in the frame does not raise it.
• A vehicle that arrives is new, even in a bay next to a parked one. A vehicle pulling out raises once it has left the spot it was remembered in.
• A vehicle that has gone is forgotten after it has been missing from three pictures over at least fifteen minutes, so the next vehicle into that bay is new.
• A person who stays where they are is raised once, and again only when they move or after a minute.
• An object mistaken for a person — a coat stand, a poster — raises once. Found in exactly the same place three pictures running, it is ignored for an hour at a time from then on.
• The reference snapshots never teach the camera to ignore a person: arming with someone standing in view does not hide a person standing there later.
• Parked vehicles and ignored objects are still shown on the event photo and clip, with a light aqua box — see What an event's photo and clip show. They simply do not raise.

Someone who stays in view

A camera's own alarm fires once and then stays quiet for a while, so on its own a person walking around the site would give a single photo. CleverCam does what a CleverCam hub does instead: after an event (or a chime), it keeps looking at that camera about once a second, and every look that still shows the person or vehicle — moving, not parked — raises another event with its own photo. Three looks in a row without them end it, and the camera waits for its next alarm.

This is capped so a busy area cannot raise without end: at most 8 more events or 40 seconds at a time, then that camera is not followed again for a minute (its own alarms still raise). Someone standing still is raised once, as described under Parked vehicles and things that do not move. Each look pulls one photo over the site's internet connection. The clip of the first event already covers the next 14 seconds; a later event only gets a clip of its own once it falls past that.

What an event's photo and clip show

Every event arrives with a photo, and — when the camera records — a clip of about 20 seconds around it (from 6 seconds before). Both are drawn the same way:

• Whatever raised the event gets the house corner-bracket box: red when armed, green in chime mode.
• Things that were already there — a parked vehicle, or a still "person" CleverCam has learned to ignore — get a light aqua box. They are shown so you can see them; they did not raise the event.
• No labels. When two or more people or vehicles raised the event, each gets a small numbered badge (1, 2 …) with a person or vehicle symbol.
• In the clip, boxes follow smoothly. The whole clip is checked before anything is drawn, so a box glides between detections, stays with the subject when the AI briefly loses it (up to about a second and a half), and fades out once the subject has really gone. A parked vehicle's box stays steady for the whole clip. If the AI only glimpsed the subject once in the whole clip, a brief soft box marks where.
• While someone is in view, the rest of the picture is dimmed slightly so the eye goes to them.
• The clip's clearest moment becomes its poster, drawn the same way, and replaces the event photo when it shows the subject noticeably better.

Privacy areas

A privacy area drawn on a camera does two things on Dahua Direct, the same as on a CCU or CleverMail camera:

• It is blurred in every event photo, clip and reference snapshot — including a clip in which the AI found nothing. A clip that cannot be blurred is not attached at all; the event keeps its photo.
• It is an exclusion zone. Anything standing inside a privacy area is not a detection: it is never raised, never remembered as parked, and never shown. CleverCam judges this at the bottom fifth of the object — a person's feet, a vehicle's wheels — and at least half of that must be outside the privacy areas, measured against the area exactly as it was drawn.

So a pedestrian or a passing car on a public road you have covered raises nothing. A person on your property whose head or shoulders merely overlap a privacy area behind them is still raised, and is shown whole — the blur is cut away around them so an operator can see who it is. In a clip, that window opens as they appear and frosts over again as soon as they have gone.

A road in view

Draw a privacy area over the road. A camera that sees an uncovered public road sees new vehicles all day, and each one that passes is genuinely new — cover the road, leave vehicles off for that camera, or aim it away.

Live view is not blurred. It is the camera's own stream passed straight through, so a privacy area does not appear on it.

Device health

CleverCam asks every Dahua Direct camera, and every recorder channel, about its own setup when it connects and then every hour, and shows the answers in CleverOps:

Check	Flags
Motion detection	Problem when it is switched off in the camera. A camera with motion detection off can never raise anything.
Storage	Warning when there is no SD card: events get a photo but no clip, and a detection the live frame missed cannot be rescued from the recording. Problem when the card reports a fault. A full card is normal, since it records over the oldest footage.
Recording	Warning when storage is fitted but recording is stopped, or follows an empty schedule.
Resolution	Warning when the camera streams less than half the pixels its sensor can give, for example 1280×720 on a 4 MP camera. Shows the codec, frame rate and bitrate too.
Clock	Warning when the camera's clock is more than two minutes out, or daylight saving is switched on. Many Dahua cameras ship on the Beijing time zone with network time off and northern-hemisphere daylight saving on, so the picture overlay and any recording are stamped hours wrong.
Detection path	How this camera reports: smart events with a picture, its own smart alarm, or motion only. Warning when it has reported nothing at all for a day while connected.
Firmware	The model and firmware version, for reference.

Where to see it:

• Camera Edit dialog: a Device health panel lists every check, with what is wrong and how to fix it. It says when the camera was last checked, and marks the report as not re-checked if the camera has been offline for a while.
• Site Hardware tab: a red ✖ or amber ⚠ badge on the camera's row when it has a problem or a warning.
• Performance & Reports → Sites → Cameras: such cameras are listed even when they are online, with a Device setup count. See Site Quality: Device setup problems.

Setup puts the settings right

The first check after a camera connects is its setup. CleverCam changes these on the camera itself, reads each one back to confirm the camera took it, and lists what it did at the bottom of the Device health panel (Setup, date: …):

• Motion detection switched on, with the detection area covering the whole scene if it was empty.
• Clock: time zone GMT+02:00 (Harare, Pretoria), network time on (time.google.com), daylight saving off.
• Resolution: the main stream raised to the largest size the sensor gives, with a matching bitrate.
• Recording switched on (by schedule, motion and alarm, all day) when an SD card is fitted.

Setup runs once per camera. It needs the camera to answer: a camera too busy to reply is tried again five minutes later rather than being marked as set up. A recorder's channels are never changed at setup, because that is the owner's own recording setup.

When a setting is wrong after setup

If a setting is changed back on the camera, or was not something setup could fix, the camera is flagged as described above, and the Device health panel says how to put it right:

• Fix on camera: shown when CleverCam can make the change remotely (motion detection, clock, resolution, recording). One button applies every remotely fixable item. It usually takes under 30 seconds, and the panel shows the outcome under Last fix. If the camera is offline, the fix waits and runs as soon as it reconnects.
• How to fix: the steps to do it by hand on the camera's own web page, under every flagged item. Items CleverCam cannot change remotely, such as fitting an SD card, only have these steps. On a recorder channel only motion detection and the clock can be fixed remotely; everything else is changed on the recorder.

A problem-level item (red ✖, for example motion detection off) means the camera cannot work until it is fixed. The flag clears on the next check after the fix.

What CleverCam sets for you

You do not need to configure detection on the camera. CleverCam pushes these from the camera's settings in CleverAlert or CleverOps, and re-pushes whenever you change them:

• What to detect — people, vehicles, animals. Anything not selected is switched off on the camera itself, so it is never even sent. New cameras detect people only. To add vehicles, open the camera in CleverAlert and switch on Vehicle detection in its Detection card, or in CleverOps open the camera's Edit dialog and set Detection profile to People and vehicles. Parked vehicles do not raise — see Parked vehicles and things that do not move.
• Sensitivity — follows the camera's high-sensitivity setting.
• Snapshot interval — the reference image refreshes on every arm and disarm, and otherwise on the interval you set.

Live view

Live view plays the camera's sub stream over the same auto-register connection, so there is nothing to set up for it. An H.264 sub stream is passed through as the camera sends it. An H.265 sub stream is converted to H.264 on CleverCam's side first, because phones cannot reliably play H.265 live video, and that picture runs at 15 frames a second. You do not need to switch the camera to H.264 for live view.

What is not available

Tamper detection	Not supported. These cameras have no blur, darkness, obstruction or scene-change detector to drive.
Guard tour	Not supported — these are fixed cameras with no pan or tilt. Use the snapshot interval instead.
Siren and strobe	The camera's own siren and strobe cannot be triggered from CleverCam over the auto-register connection. A site that needs remote deterrence needs a CCU.

Troubleshooting

The camera never appears. Check the Device ID starts with the hub's serial exactly as the picker shows it, that no other camera uses the same Device ID, and that Auto Register is enabled and saved. If the camera has been rejecting logins, wait for the admin lock to clear before trying again. If all of that is right, the camera may be unable to use the server name: check it has a DNS server under its network settings, and if it still does not connect, enter the fallback IP address from the picker instead — see the note under step 3.

The camera appears as Needs its login. It connected, but no login is saved on the hub. Save the camera's admin username and password under Device login; it logs in within a minute.

The camera appears as Login refused. It rejected the saved login; the picker says why (wrong username or password, no such user, or the account is locked). Correct the login under Device login. CleverCam tries a refused login again only when the saved login changes or you click Refresh, so it never locks the camera's account by trying over and over. A camera whose password differs from the others on the hub cannot use the hub's login: give it the same password.

Events arrive but no clips. Recording is off on the camera — see step 5.

A detection class you turned off still arrives. CleverCam drops it before raising anything, so you will not be alerted. The camera is re-configured on its next connection.

The camera shows Device Offline. It has stopped dialling in. Check its power and internet; nothing on CleverCam's side needs restarting.

Every camera came back after an internet drop except one or two. Some older firmware registered by name gives up after a failed lookup during an outage and does not try again until it is rebooted. Enter the fallback IP address from the picker as that camera's server address; it reconnects within seconds and stays reliable afterwards.

A camera never raises anything. Open its Edit dialog and read the Device health panel. The usual cause is Motion detection: OFF on the camera. Press Fix on camera, or switch it on in the camera under Event → Video Detection → Motion Detection.

A recorder connected but one camera shows nothing. Open the picker and check which channel that camera sits on, and that the recorder shows Camera connected for it. A camera listed under Cameras no connected device reports names a channel the recorder does not report, or its recorder has not connected since: remove it and add the right channel. Two cameras on the same channel cannot both be served — the first one wins.

A recorder camera never raises anything. Motion detection is off for that channel on the recorder, or the camera is disarmed.