Right – after many hours I finally got email notifications for motion detection working. I’m going to share my notes on how to get this working because it’s not obvious, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot online on setting this up using a Hikvision NVR.
If you can’t get the browser plugin working then you’re not going to be able to get motion detection working in the NVR’s Web UI. The reason for this is you HAVE to draw/define an area on the screen to get motion detection to work. If you just click “Enable Motion Detection” it does nothing. I incorrectly presumed that if you didn’t define an area, it would use the whole screen by default – it doesn’t.
So, the problem I had was I could not get the plugin to work either on Chrome or IE11. From what I’ve read online, I think this may be a downfall of the Hikvision plugin itself.
To get Motion Detection working, I had to set this up on the cameras directly. You can do this by using the I-VMS software. Right-click the camera feed and select “Remote Configuration”. You should then be able to setup motion detection and if you set the alert linkage to “Audio” or “Display on Monitor” then you should be able to confirm it is working (i.e. your NVR will beep, or it display green boxes around any motion it detects)
Now you’ve confirmed motion detection is working, you can configure the email notification. There isn’t a “Test Email” option on the NVR UI, but there is if you use “Remote Configuration” again. When I tried the “Test Email” option I got a network/settings error. This is because it can’t resolve the smtp.gmail.com server. You therefore have 2 options :
1) Instead of using smtp.gmail.com, use the IP Address (ping smtp.gmail.com to get the IP)
2) Set the Preferred DNS setting (under Network) to 8.8.8.8. Note – I was using DHCP which meant this DNS box was disabled, however I was able to switch it off, enter the value and then switch it back on again and it still seems to work
If anyone else has issues getting motion detection working on their Hikvision NVR, I hope this helps!