Setup TP-Link NC-250 on Synology Surveillance Station

It is pretty easy to setup the NC-250 IP Camera on Synology Surveillance Station. Basically we don’t really need to do any hacking other than add the camera into surveillance station with a couple of quick setting.

The first thing we need is to make sure we know the IP address of the TP-Link NC-250. But before that, it would be better if you install the IP camera using TP-Link phone app so that it can connect to your router, and then you get the IP address of the camera from DHCP list or from the setting page in the phone app.

Because TP-Link NC-250 IP camera is not officially recognized as compatible camera in Synology Surveillance Station, so we have to choose [User Define] brand.

Put “8080” as your port number and this is fixed by TP-Link firmware, the source path is “/stream/video/mjpeg”, default username is “admin”, default password is “admin”, but the key thing is you can’t put the actual password here, TP-Link firmware recognize only base64 encoded password, so go to https://www.base64encode.org/, and encode it to base64 format. Example, password “admin” would be converted to “YWRtaW4=”, passsword “qwerty123” would converted to “cXdlcnR5MTIz”. Put the encoded password at the password field. Click “Test Connection”, you would see your IP camera video screen if everything is correct.

But anyway, I still can’t get the video setting correctly to work dynamically like other brand, so everything would follow the default IP camera setting.

Reply or comment below if you need my help.

TP-Link NC 250

The real problem with D-Link is it is very expensive, as compare with TP-link newly launched IP camera in the market. Overall TP-Link launched a couple of IP camera models in the market, the price is about 40% cheaper than D-Link IP cameras by comparison on the same specification.

Recently I bought the latest version of TP-Link IP camera (NC-250) model. Overall this IP camera comes with a LAN port connection, and it is 720p HD with 30 FPS. I review this product from a few perspectives, the first one definitely would be comparing the price.

Price

The price of TP-Link NC 250 is definitely cheaper than any D-Link HD models, a normal D-Link DCS-2132L IP camera sold at around MYR 450 would has the same specification like the NC-250. But both of them still lost to Xiao Mi IP camera (night vision) that you can get at around RM100.

Technology

Both of them support night vision, with 30 frames per second. DCS-2132L only cover around 57.8 degree angle, but NC-250 can cover up to 64 degree horizontally.

Installation

It tooks me 30 seconds to setup the NC-250. Basically I can set it up without installing software on my PC. The only thing I need to do is to plug the IP camera to my router using LAN cable for the first time, and open the TP-Link camera app and set it up from there using their installation wizard.

Responsiveness

It is pretty straight forward to do more advanced stuff with NC-250 web GUI, the IP camera admin page definitely more responsive than D-link one. Although the cam view mode can’t be used in Chrome browser, but if you want to view the IP-camera you still can set NC-250 up with TP-Link Cloud at http://www.tplinkcloud.com, where they use Flash instead of Java Component for their cam view mode.

But if you are accessing the IP-camera using local IP access using Chrome browser ,then you would see something like below,

So the solution is to use Firefox or IE browser if you want to access the admin page. Currently TP-Link cloud do not support changing the IP-camera setting like what D-Link’s mydlink.com does. So see below, nothing much you can do with TP-Link cloud now either than changing the camera name or removing the camera, that’s it! (But I believe they will upgrade those functionality soon)

Comparison

I am making some quality comparison between XiaoMi IP camera (nigh vision) with TP-Link NC-250, below are the results.

Above is the screen shot taken from XiaoMi IP Camera (night vision), basically it comes with 111 degree horizontally, you can see clearly when the light is on. But it is doing badly during completely darkness. Barely to see anything.

NC-250 definitely can’t compete with XiaoMi IP Camera in term of viewing angle, but it has a better quality at night with 6 infrared led.

Conclusion

TP-Link NC250 definitely not a perfect IP camera, but the good thing is it is 50% cheaper than what D-Link can offer, although it can’t really beat XiaoMi IP camera other than perform better at night, it does offered LAN port to improve the bandwidth quality if you are setting it up at farther location.

Next post I will show you guys how to set it up on Synology Disk Station.