@ymurawski said in UniFi Cams dont work with Alexa:

Hi, i have several Unifi cams and the Unifi Protect app running.

i activated rtsp and edit the link to use it with rtsp and not rtsps
e.g rtsp://192.168.1.1:7447/ZGoIJw4x5h52MWoj

I added this cam to the Online Portal https://portal.monoclecam.com/ and then connected it to Amazon with the monocam skill.

But when i try to view it on my Echo it wont work and says that the camera can not be acessed.

Any ideas ?

i forgot…VLC just works perfectly :)

@realgandy Hello, I am trying to do same but struggling. Can you advise which stream you got working? what your final configs were and any tweaks. screen shots from the gateway would be helpful. thanks in advance.

@dcode

Glad to hear it’s working now!

@rac said in Streaming via Firecube with Gateway:

Hi Robert -
That seems to have worked! I did upgrade to the 0.0.6 Beta, but that didn’t solve it. What did was the @fake-fmtp tag, though.
This was a cheap PTZ camera … is the issue that it’s not passing along a “standard” RTSP format video, or is it just that Alexa is picky?
Thank you again for your help.

Well, we don’t exactly know the precise reason it’s failing because Alexa is a black box with no diagnostics data. However, I suspect that there is something in the SDP that describes the video stream formatting options/specs that Alexa just doesn’t like or does not technically support. So the @fake-fmtp tag simply substitutes some of the SDP data with a known working format and allows Alexa to attempt to play the stream. In some (lucky) cases, Alexa will play the stream just fine and in other cases she still fails.

Thanks, Robert

@Monocle

You’re awesome, thanks for sharing that.

I will spend some time tonight trying to get these things working and let you know if there are any other questions. Hoping not!

EDIT ON 11/18/2022

I was just able to get the camera to stream with a small modification to @Monocle advice.
Sharing in hopes it helps someone else…

I’m using an Echo Show 8 (2nd Gen, 2021 release). I chose not to use the gateway approach and did direct stream as this worked when Robert did troubleshooting. I had no luck with tags, but then started to test tags with the direct link to my IP camera (rtsp://168.168.1.148:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1) and @tunnel worked perfectly. Camera is Amcrest 2496E with Software Version V2.820.00AC000.0.R and Build Date: 2022-03-25.

Cheers, all!

@RichardF

Leave the WAN settings as is per your ISP.

@SchmuFoo (Jan)

Yes, the Alexa devices will only connect via RTSP to port 443.
You can override the SSL hosted port used by Monocle Gateway by overriding the rtsp.ssl.port property in monocle.properties as in the example below where port 8443 is used instead.

#-------------------------------------- # RTSP SERVICE PROPERTIES #-------------------------------------- rtsp.ssl.port=8443

You can also use a proxy server, but not NGINX or APACHE. You will need a TCP proxy server as the cameras use RTPS and not HTTP. You may be able to use something like stunnel, HA Proxy or maybe traefik something that does full TCP proxying. In this case you may have to have a valid SSL certificate at the terminating proxy server using your own domain record.

If terminating your own SSL cert and providing your own DNS hostname, you would also need to update these properties:

#-------------------------------------- # RTSP SERVICE REGISTRATION OVERRIDES #-------------------------------------- #rtsp.register.fqdn= #rtsp.register.host=

Let me know if this is something you decide to pursue if you run into any trouble perhaps I can help.

Thanks, Robert

@jimcking

@fake-fmtp was never originally documented as it was never really intended to be a long term solution … its more of a hack/workaround. Basically when the Alexa device first connects to a camera (or via Monocle Gateway) it receives a stream descriptors(SDP) that describes what streams and formats are available from the camera. Unlike conventional RTSP players like VLC, Alexa is extremely picky and there are some stream formats that she simply will refuse to play. @fake-fmtp will replace the stream format in the descriptor with a known working one (when using Monocle Gateway). Alexa will accept this known working format and attempt to move forward and display the stream. In some cases it works out – on some cases it does not. Its more of a last ditch effort where we lie to Alexa about the stream format to try to get her to play it anyway. As you can see its not a great solution and more of a hack.

Strange that I can’t edit the post.

I’ve tried different RTSP feeds as well. I forgot to mention that this feed does work in VLC.

I had this issue too, though I was running the gateway in a container with macvlan networking. it creates a new IP address to use, and I had forgotten to forward ports to that IP. I attempted to forward TCP 443 that port, but being a macvlan it was on a different subnet and my Orbi wouldn’t allow that.

no matter, I just switched back to host networking for now (which already had port 443 forwarded) and it works

------------------------------------------------- MONOCLE GATEWAY SERVICE (Version: 0.0.4) ------------------------------------------------- [Monocle Starting] [Monocle Connecting] [Monocle Started] [RTSP Server Starting] [RTSP Server Listening] 0.0.0.0:8555 (RTSP) [RTSP Server Listening] 0.0.0.0:443 (RTSP-TLS) [RTSP Proxy Started] (PID=16) [RTSP Server Listening] 0.0.0.0:8554 (PROXY) [RTSP Server Started] [Monocle Connected] [RTSP Server Registered] ------------------------------------------------- MONOCLE RTSP SERVICE - INITIALIZED ------------------------------------------------- FQDN = redacted.mproxy.io HOST = 192.168.1.99 PORT = 443 -------------------------------------------------

topping this as I also looking to install the container on my arm32v7 pi.

I was going to just build my own image on the pi, but noticed that the source build is specially compiled for x64 on alpine linux. not sure if that would be a problem if i otherwise selected the arm32v7 or raspberrypi packages.

I found one of the forks was updated to use a base image of debian buster-slim with intensions of being used on a Pi 4. So I created my own image and tested it

https://hub.docker.com/r/steinauf/monocle-gateway-rpi

I’ll submit a PR to see if this can be added.

@rbull Actually, got it. Had to put in the following tags: @fake-fmtp, @hangup, @noaudio, @proxy