Dahua / IC Realtime NVR

Get footage off your recorder without the headache

Pulling recorded video off a Dahua or IC Realtime recorder usually means logging into a clunky web interface, guessing channel numbers, fiddling with a slow app, and hoping the export actually covers the time you wanted.

Skip all of it. Tell your AI assistant what you need in plain English and get back a clean, verified MP4.

"Pull the lobby camera from 8 to 9 PM yesterday and save it as an MP4."

What it does

• Plain-English requests — ask for a camera and a time window; the skill finds the footage, downloads it, converts it to a standard MP4, trims it to your window, and confirms the file is real before reporting success.
• Register once, reuse forever — give each recorder a short nickname during setup, then refer to it by name instead of typing IP addresses. (The nickname maps to a recorder; you still pick the camera by channel.)
• Works in the background — built to dispatch a download as a background task so your AI stays responsive and keeps you posted on progress.
• Smart fallbacks — if the fast download path stumbles on stubborn recorder software, it automatically backs off, retries after a wait if the recorder throttled it, and switches to a slower-but-reliable playback method so you still get your clip. If a recorder returns a too-short file, it can also pull the same window over RTSP and keep whichever copy has more footage.
• Verified results — every downloaded MP4 is checked for valid video, resolution, frame rate, and length, so you are not handed a corrupt or empty file. When optional OCR tools (Pillow + tesseract) are present, it can also read the recorder's burned-in on-screen timestamp to confirm the clip really covers the time you asked for.
• Handles multi-part recordings — when a recorder splits your window across several segments, the skill downloads each one and joins them into a single continuous MP4.
• Browser-ready output — clips are written with faststart so they stream and seek instantly in a browser.
• Convenient time shortcuts — quick options for "yesterday," "N days ago," and a specific time-of-day window lower the friction for common "last night" requests.
• Guided setup — onboarding walks you through entering credentials securely (hidden password entry) and can install the required video tools for you, with your confirmation.
• Tidy file organization — choose how clips are saved (flat, per-day, per-camera, per-day-per-camera, or per-camera-per-day), set once during setup.

Brands it works with

Built for Dahua and the many brands that use Dahua's recorder protocol:

• Dahua (DH-NVR4xxx / 5xxx, DH-XVR series, and similar)
• IC Realtime (ICIP-, NVR-, MAX-IP series)
• Lorex — newer models only (older Lorex use a different protocol)
• Amcrest (NV21xx, NV41xx, etc.)
• Honeywell Performance (HEN, HQA series)
• EZVIZ business line
• Other Dahua-based OEM rebrands

Not sure your recorder qualifies? Send the brand, model, and firmware through the contact form and I'll sanity-check it before you buy.

Who it's for

Anyone with a Dahua-family DVR or NVR who regularly needs to export clips by camera and time and would rather ask in plain English than navigate the recorder's interface. Security teams pulling review clips, integrators supporting mixed Dahua/OEM fleets, and developers building an AI workflow around recorded footage.

A note on trimming

Clips are trimmed from the nearest keyframe, so the start is accurate to within about one to three seconds rather than the exact frame. That is ideal for "show me roughly 8 to 9 PM" review work; it is not a frame-exact, evidence-grade export tool.

Audio

Audio is not included — it is dropped during conversion, since recorder audio on these brands is inconsistent and rarely useful for review.

Privacy and safety

The skill only ever contacts the recorders you register. It ships no telemetry, no auto-update, and runs no downloaded code — it just talks to your recorder and runs ffmpeg locally. To protect against recorder account lockouts, it uses a single authentication attempt per method rather than retrying in a loop.

Compatibility

Tested across multiple Dahua-family firmware versions, including older IC Realtime firmware and newer Dahua firmware. There is no fixed model list yet — Dahua-protocol recorders should work, and reports are welcome. Keep your recorder on a local network or VPN rather than exposing it to the public internet.

Also run Hikvision?

If you also have Hikvision recorders, there's a separate Hikvision NVR skill — same idea, built for Hikvision's protocol.