How to manually upgrade your Synology Surveillance System firmware
Recently, my Home Assistant lost the ability to stream live feeds from my cameras. The cameras attached to my Synology NVR1218 system still appeared fine in Home Assistant but when I clicked on them, they would not stream. They would just error out. Within the network or external, it would not work correctly. I could get snapshots from them but not live streams. From any of the Synology based applications, they would also stream with no problems.
At first, I definitely thought this was a Home Assistant issue. So I went straight to the GitHub repo and began searching for issues with Synology integrations. Thankfully @Centogram and @Brent20 noted the issue was not a Home Assistant one but instead a bug with Synology’s recent firmware update. Once I read it, it made total sense. I had forgotten that while setting up the cameras for the video, I had upgraded the firmware to 8.2.3-5828 which was the latest at the time. This was the upgrade that ended up breaking Home Assistant streaming.
Luckily in the same thread, there was a solution! (Hooray for the HA Community!) A Synology engineer had posted a preview of the next firmware version (8.2.3.5829) which contained the bug fix to resolve the camera streaming issue (really an API endpoint issue). The files could be downloaded from the following site : [No Longer Available] using password SYNO0311.
Awesome! Here was my next big issue. I could not for the life of me figure out how to UPDATE the Synology system with these new files. I couldn’t even really figure out WHICH file to use. I scoured the internet once more and was able to put together the following video which detailed the upgrade process. In short, it ended up being an APPLICATION upgrade on the Synology system rather than a full firmware upgrade.
BTW: The exact file you need to download for the Surveillance Station NVR1218 is the hi3535 version shown below and in the video. I’m pretty sure this is the binary you need for ALL Surveillance Station NVRs.
These are the actual devices I am using with this update.
4 x Foscam IP Cameras – https://amzn.to/2Od4n9E
1 x Synology Server – https://amzn.to/2FpLvBH
2 x 4 TB drives – https://amzn.to/2Y8PF85
1 x Synology camera license Pack – https://amzn.to/2Yb3seH
Thanks also to @Ram Gogada for pointing out that the functionality was broken in the YouTube comment section of my recent video.
Happy Streaming!