Many Hikvision users ask how to access the camera’s web interface when they are connected directly to the PoE ports on the NVR. Not allowing direct web access to your cameras behind the NVR is by design.
Moreover, the NVR does allow you to configure many options for each connected camera, but some essential features are only accessible via connecting to the camera itself (such as audio codec options).
Hikvision has introduced a feature called Virtual Host. Activating this feature turns your NVR into a “host” for the cameras allowing you to connect to them via a browser. Essentially, the NVR forwards all traffic received from your browser to the appropriate camera you’re trying to connect to, eliminating the biggest problem of plug and play functionality.
So, the “virtual host” allows you to access each camera via the web browser. In this article, we will show how to enable and how to use the virtual host on a Hikvision NVR.
Enabling Virtual Host on Hikvision NVR
Step 1. Login to the web page of the NVR by the IP address of your NVR followed by the HTTP post (as shown in the picture below). Your IP address may be different from the one pictured.
Note: If you do not know the LAN IP of your NVR, download Hikvision’s tool SADP here. It scans your network for any Hikvision devices that are connected and allow you to see and/or change their network settings, including the internal IP.
Step 2. Go to Configuration > Network > Advanced Settings> Other and Enable Virtual Host. When you click ‘Save’ your NVR will reboot.
Step 3. Navigate to the Camera Management window (Configuration > System > Camera Management). You’ll notice that the connect tab links to each camera directly.
Step 4. If you click the link, you’ll be redirected to the camera’s page, where you can access the camera and do extra settings that can’t be done directly via the NVR.
How to make the Virtual Host operate over the Internet (WAN)?
The above method works fine when you are on the same network as the NVR and cameras. You may have noticed that the cameras become accessible via the IP address of the NVR followed by a port number (65001 for camera 1, 65002 for camera 2, etc).
It is possible to set up port forwarding rules within the router which will allow you access to the camera settings when off the local network. You will need to forward the required port range to the IP address of the NVR.
For example, if the IP address of a 16 channel NVR is 192.168.1.200 then you would port forward the port range of 65001 – 65016 to the IP address 192.168.1.200.
Externally you would connect to your NVR through a web browser via its external IP address or DDNS address with the addition of the port number of the camera you wish to connect. For example http://ipaddress:portnumber or myhost.ddnsdomain.com:650XX.
