Question :

A friend donated a QD520 IP-securitycam to me. It looks great and from what I’m reading, I should be able to get it working with Mac-software, but I when I try to access the device in Safari, it asks for a password (that my friend couldn’t remember), so I can’t login…

There’s no reset button on the QD520, so I will need to reset the password with special software, but it turns out that that software is Windows-only, and I only have Macs…

What can I do ?

Answer :

You are completely right about the Windows-only software… but I managed to port the reset tool to Mac using WineBottler, and using that, you can reset the QD520 and it’s password back to factory settings.

After the reset, the QD520 will be back to these factory settings :

login = admin

password =               [ BLANK / NOTHING / EMPTY ]

IP (static) = 192.168.1.10

interface language = (simplified) Chinese     [ yep, that’s a very uncomfy downside of resetting… unfortunately ]

Here’s how to reset the QD520 :

• connect the QD520 to your network
• use the free LANScan.app (or something similar) to find the QD520’s current IP address [ the LANScan app can be downloaded for FREE from the Mac App Store ]
• download Winebottler here, and use it to run the Windows-only version of the PasswordResetTool you can get here or in this Xmeye Camera Software bundle (or use Winebottler to create a Mac-compatible version of the QD520passwordresettool)
• as the original Windows-version PasswordResetTool needs a Telnet connection to communicate with the QD520 IP-cam, you now have to enable Telnet (or Netcat to be more precise) to it’s IP address on your Mac as follows :
  • on your Mac, go to Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal.app
  • double-click on the icon to run Terminal.app
  • there you will see your username-with-a-dollar-sign-attached-to-it ; immediately after that, typ this :
  • nc xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 23
  • so : N C space QD520-IP-address space 2 3 (in which 23 is the Telnet port number)
  • now you will see an ‘answer’ in the Terminal.app :
    • ????????LocalHost login:
• when you see that text appear, doubleclick on the QD520passwordresettool to run it
• when it’s open, at “Device IP”, fill in the QD520-IP-number, and click the “Reset” button
• when you get the feedback message “Reset OK, Waiting for reboot your device, please!”, click the “OK” button
• that’s it !
• don’t forget to quit both the QD520passwordresettool and the Terminal.app

enjoy 😉

NOTE #1 : as mentioned before, the QD520’s IP address will now be 192.168.1.10 and the interface will be in Chinese unfortunately, however, you will be able login now ! ( using login = admin / password = [empty] )

NOTE #2 : unfortunately, there is no Mac-friendly solution to change the QD520’s settings like IP-address and Password just yet… for that, you will still need to use Internet Explorer for Windows with ActiveX and JAVA Runtime installed… [ we are working on a solution for that, but as ActiveX is not supported on Intel-Macs, that’s an extremely hard nut to crack and might even be too complicated… ]