Making P2P Work on Q-See Camera and NVRs After Serivce Shutdown

Introduction

Q-See Closed Doors on Jan 31st 2021. Which meant the “Scan N' View” Feature stopped working.

Issue

Q-See Camera (also NVRs) sends HTTP Call Over UDP to it servers at q-seeqcview.com and dms.q-seeplus.com

GET /heartbeat/device/<device id> HTTP/1.1

Since the serves are down those servers are not resolveable.

Discovery

After using tcpdump to perform packet capture and using Wireshark I was able to see network traffice a Q-See Camera was generating.

I found DNS query for “q-seeplus.com”

I realized my Amcrest Camera was making a very similar call to p2p.amcrestview.com

Solution

I added a DNS override entry on my router to point *.q-seeplus.com and q-seeqcview.com to p2p.amcrestview.com

On EdgeRouter
set service dns forwarding options address=/*.q-seeplus.com/p2p.amcrestview.com
set service dns forwarding options address=/q-seeqcview.com/p2p.amcrestview.com

On any router or appliance using DNSmasq like DDWrt
address=/q-seeqcview.com/p2p.amcrestview.com
address=/*.q-seeplus.com/p2p.amcrestview.com

In Unbound, use the local-zone and local-data options. For example:
server: local-data: "*.q-seeplus.com. CNAME p2p.amcrestview.com"
local-data: "q-seeqcview.com. CNAME p2p.amcrestview.com"

In ADGUARD

“Add DNS rewrite” on the Filters > DNS rewrite tab.

Put “*.q-seeplus.com” on the “Enter Domain Name or wildcard” field

Put “p2p.amcrestview.com” on the “Enter IP address or domain name” field

“Add DNS rewrite” on the Filters > DNS rewrite tab.

Put “q-seeqcview.com” on the “Enter Domain Name or wildcard” field

Put “p2p.amcrestview.com” on the “Enter IP address or domain name” field

Once this dns override was in place the Q-See camera was able to resolve the DNS and comple the calls to register itself in Amcrest’s P2P registry.

My Amcrest View Pro Mobile App is now able to view the Camara via P2P discovery.