@rafale said in Alternatives to Monocle?:

Not sure why you would need a raspberry pi. I have been using this service for months without a proxy/gateway. Is it not working for you as just a skill? I don’t have a reolink camera so I can’t comment so much on if it does require a pi, maybe the question was rather whether or not you should have invested in a less picky camera?

What are you using then if not the Monocle gateway, BI one or something.

Working now thank you

@pat

Just bumping to say completely back to normal again. Echo Show 10 works fine now…

@Monocle said in can't login or reset password:

@petec

I know it’s been a while, but I was finally able to track down the cause if these issues and put fixes in place.

Account Activation Password Reset

Please try again.

Thanks, Robert

thank you roberts! finally been able to login after resetting my password 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!

@Mins95

Based on the log, it appears that the gateway is failing to communicate with the IP camera; it’s failing to get a response when issuing the DESCRIBE request but rather resulting in a 404 (not found) error. I wonder if the container is not able to route to the camera’s IP address. The gateway address is defined as “192.168.1.254” so that should be the router on your local network. But maybe the container is not attempting to route via the gateway. I wonder if adding the configuration to limit the allowed IP addresses for the container network would help. See this example:
https://github.com/sarunas-zilinskas/docker-compose-macvlan/blob/master/docker-compose.yml#L31

If the monocle gateway instance is configured as 192.168.1.253, then the ip_range: "192.168.1.253/32" would only permit the single address to the IP range for the container.

Maybe worth a try. Maybe also connecting to a shell in the monocle-gateway instance and see if you can ping the address of the IP camera.

@vmsman
Thanks again, great job! The video is very helpful to me, I will try to implement your solution.

I have the Echo Hub too and had such a hard time getting my cameras online. I use local IPs for the cameras basic authentication and I run the gateway with API’s and as a service. Once I did that I got everything to run.

@vmsman how can i find you there?

@Monocle thanks again Robert.

@Monocle is there any update on this? I know others cameras can do this like blink.

@dirk

Just a quick update, the following commands have been added to the install.sh script in the upcoming 0.0.4 release to address this issue.

# Set group ownership and permissions of config directory chgrp -f -R monocle /etc/monocle chmod -f -R g+rw /etc/monocle

When the install script runs, it does create a monocle system user account (a user account with no logon capabilities) as well as a monocle group. So the commands above simply set the group ownership to the monocle group and file permissions to allow read and write access to the monocle group.

Thanks, Robert

@autodrivel

Absolutely!

You can do that here:
https://forum.monoclecam.com/category/7/ip-cameras-nvr

Thanks, Robert

How To Install Monocle Gateway on a Synology NAS as a Docker Container

How To Install Monocle Gateway on a Synology NAS as a Docker Container
Article:
https://monoclecam.com/monocle-gateway/install/synology

@cmjanus

Typically @tunnel works fine on most Reolink cameras. However, you can try @proxy to see if it helps. @proxy along with @hangup would ensure clean sessions on each Alexa request. @hangup does not have any impact when using @tunnel.

@czandor It might be possible to accomplish stopping the feed using 1-2 Alexa routines

@Edgargg88

Glad to hear it was that simple!

@Monocle

first: thanks for testing. Amazon is not a good HW supporter, so i think it will be a other CAM model if the “wansview” doesnt work anymore.
But in the first step, i try with ffserver to build a rtsp server but i think the raspi is to slow for this, when it only works with reencode.

Thanks and regards
Dave