Hacking the Xenta IP-11IR-H264-PT IP camera from Ebuyer part one - Foscam firmware

A while ago I bought an IP camera from Ebuyer.com here in the UK because it was on offer and seemed too cheap to be true.  The camera is branded Xenta and the part code is IP-11IR-H264-PT.  It's still for sale quite cheaply here:

http://goo.gl/e7u6q

Although a bit more than I paid now.

It turns out this camera is a re-badged Foscam FI8608W, the main circuit board inside the camera even has this part code on it:

http://foscam.us/products/foscam-fi8608w-wireless-ip-camera.html

You can upgrade the firmware on the Xenta branded camera to the latest Foscam firmware.  I've put the firmware I found here:

http://goo.gl/sDV0E

That was the newest version I could find and given that the FI8608W is a discontinued product, I doubt there'll ever be another update. 

The bad news is that the web interface in this firmware still requires an Active-X plugin to view the video.

So despite the EBuyer page specifically listing Linux as a "supported OS" it absolutely is not.  I would also assume it wont work on a Mac either.  I have even spoken to EBuyer tech support about this but they haven't edited the page.

In the next post, I will describe how I built my own very simple web interface to drive the camera from any web browser with no need for any stupid plug-ins or platform dependencies.