Alexa Suddenly Stopped with Unifi
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@Monocle - Robert, thanks for your reply. I can appreciate the situation with Amazon. Glad to hear you still want to improve Monocle anyway. It’s a neat solution.
I also understand your thoughts regarding transcoding. That’s a tall order.
For proof of concept, supply chain issues aside, the G3-Flex is a relatively inexpensive 1080P POE model that represents the basic Protect feature set well. It will work with your UDM-Pro for live view and RTSP even without a hard-drive.
Please note that with UniFi, there are two ways to do RTSP. The first is where the cameras are stand-alone and have not been adopted to a Protect NVR. In that case, you log into each camera’s web UI to configure its RTSP capability.
The second is where you adopt the cameras to Protect, and then RTSP is delivered as a service of the NVR, not the cameras. That’s how most people use it, and is where we are running into a problem now as per this thread.
Again, what seems to have introduced the problem is that Ubiquiti has recently added a second (albeit empty) audio track to the stream coming from the NVR. I haven’t tested to see if that’s also the case with cameras in stand-along mode.
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@Monocle , All,
So just to pile on…
I have an UNVR.
Updated to 2.01 on June 3rd. Noticed a week ago my Alexa cam commands weren’t working.
I did the obligatory restart of the monocle program on my Win7PC. Did a reboot. No change.Finally had a chance to look at it. And finally checked the Monocle forum.
My VLC shortcuts in my PC are all still working well. They are OG, and have lived through many Protect updates and switching from UCKGen2+ to the UNVR w/o touching them.
My FireTV Cube(s) , I side loaded an android UI Protect app on there about a year ago, and it’s still working well. (The sticks just don’t have the HP to run the app well, need the Cube. Yes , even the 4K won’t run it well). I’ve changed all my 4Ksticks over to Cubes during the holiday sales, it works pretty good with the side loaded UI Protect app. Far better solution than buying a bunch of their ViewPorts.
But after tinkering , and finding this thread, yup, in the same boat, my Alexa access to the cams via Monocle are for-caca.
Robert, thanks for you post. Sorry to hear of the struggle. It certain answers the question why we haven’t seen a change to a paid version. I feel your frustrations.
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@Monocle First off, thanks for the hard work you’ve put into Monocle/Monocle Gateway. It’s been rock solid with my Protect & Hikvision cams up until this latest amazon snafu.
Since Monocle Gateway stopped working with my Echo Shows, I’ve been using Scrypted plus the necessary plugins to get it working with my cameras & the Echo Shows. It’s nice that it works, but there is a lot that I miss about Monocle, mainly that the streams include audio which I have to turn down every time I start a stream, and, unfortunately, the streams crap out pretty often. Monocle could stay streaming on my Shows for days, which was great for a passive monitoring system.
All that is to say, you might want to reach out to the developer of Scrypted, koush, to potentially bounce ideas off of each other about your projects. He’s extremely active on the Scrypted discord, if you’re interested.
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@pineapplebigshot I would have to agree. The overall solution was GREAT and I especially loved the gateway and HOW it actually operated, nice out of the box thinking. I have some friends that work at AWS, perhaps they can shed some light on what and why. I am thinking that Amazon is just pushing for their line of cams and are eventually going to lock all the others out. They want the home consumer, not the Prosumer or corporate.
Just my 2 cents…
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Hi All
Been monitoring this thread but unable to reply as the forum sign up process was broken but now working.
As with others I have the same same issue post the Protect update and I have done a bit of tinkering based on what lots of other have said and can agree with others that I believe the issue is with the additional audio stream “upgraded” by Unifi.
The additional Opus audio stream is now the second channel in the stream with AAC being bumped to the 3rd channel within the stream.
I confirmed this by using several docker containers “datarhei/restreamer” & “aler9/rtsp-simple-server”.
Essentially you configure an input video stream in re streamer which is the direct RSTP URL for protect, re-streamer then asks which audio channel to use (select AAC).
Once the “input” stream is configured you then select and output stream (in this case the simple-rstp-server) configuration is fairly straightforward.
Test by connecting VLC to the streamer provided by simple-rstp-server.
Once tested add/modify the cameras in your account on the monocle website to use the URLs that connect to to the simple-rstp-server (instead on the URLs that connect directly to the protect device)
Cameras can then be displayed in the same way on your Show devices.
Obviously this is not a long term solution (and add some lag) but proved effective in validating the second audio channel is the issue as re-streamer is dropping that channel when out putting to simple-rstp-server.
@Monocle Would it be possible/easy to add additional tags so when using @proxy the channel with the stream can be selected something like “v0:a1” (first video channel and second audio channel, (assuming starting from zero) as I believe that would solve the issue?
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As a side note you can also view the stream directly from re-streamer by launching bing on the alexa and navigating to the URL provided by re streamer for HTTP viewing. However the URL is really long so it doing this bookmark the site once added!
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Yes … I think something like this could be possible while using Monocle Gateway.
@ Everyone
I have ordered a G3 Flex and G4 Pro camera to test with and try to find a workable solution. It should be here in the next week or so.
Thanks, Robert
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Thanks Robert that’s amazing, if I can assist in anyway please let me know.
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@RS said in Alexa Suddenly Stopped with Unifi:
Hi All
Been monitoring this thread but unable to reply as the forum sign up process was broken but now working.
As with others I have the same same issue post the Protect update and I have done a bit of tinkering based on what lots of other have said and can agree with others that I believe the issue is with the additional audio stream “upgraded” by Unifi.
The additional Opus audio stream is now the second channel in the stream with AAC being bumped to the 3rd channel within the stream.
I confirmed this by using several docker containers “datarhei/restreamer” & “aler9/rtsp-simple-server”.
Essentially you configure an input video stream in re streamer which is the direct RSTP URL for protect, re-streamer then asks which audio channel to use (select AAC).
Once the “input” stream is configured you then select and output stream (in this case the simple-rstp-server) configuration is fairly straightforward.
Test by connecting VLC to the streamer provided by simple-rstp-server.
Once tested add/modify the cameras in your account on the monocle website to use the URLs that connect to to the simple-rstp-server (instead on the URLs that connect directly to the protect device)
Cameras can then be displayed in the same way on your Show devices.
Obviously this is not a long term solution (and add some lag) but proved effective in validating the second audio channel is the issue as re-streamer is dropping that channel when out putting to simple-rstp-server.
Good to know, I might try this tomorrow if I get some time. Is this a one of step or so you need those containers running? I am using unraid so will see how far I can get.
FYI I have access to G4 Pro, G4, G3 Flex and G3 Instant if need to test.
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Hi
For this to work the containers need to remain running.
Although I stress this is not a great solution it adds at least 30 secs lag.
I did it just as a diagnostic process not really as a solution even if only temporary.
If using re streamer I would would suggest just viewing it directly via the bing browser for now until @Monocle can hopefully provide and update. However this means forgoing the voice commands.
Full kudos and gratitude to @Monocle for his/there commitment to purchasing the cameras etc to try and provide a solution.
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Yes , Much thanks for @Monocle for purchasing the UI cams… I’ve been using Monocle GW for a few years now. Sorry to hear of the issues. Been waiting for something to try. I’m just using the canned GW on a win7 machine. I have an assortment of G3 cams on a UNVR that runs the latest release FW and Protect. So I’m up for trying any setting changes in my Monocle setup in the portal for testing. I use VLC for select streams on my PCs. Still working fine The Monocle GW was/is a great game changer for my Amazon show devices.
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Ditto, Alexa has stopped after an update.
I have two cloud keys, one updated, the other not and updated is broken, while older is working great.
Couldn’t add the relevant sections of the logs due to the over eager spam filter, but in summary I find that after an update (due to dual audio), the @noaudio has stopped working as expected, before (within the working logs), it stripped any description of the audio channel (no “m=audio …” descriptor in headers forwarded to Alexa within client response). Meanwhile the nonworking stream still has one of the two audio streams remaining (seems the code only removed the first one).In summary, seems Unifi has introduced a second stream, and Monocle is having issues filtering it out.
As I couldn’t add logs directly due to spam filter, here is the pastebin:
pastebin.pl/view/40882d18 -
Unifi Camera Update …
Please see : https://forum.monoclecam.com/topic/1242/unifi-camera-update -
@Monocle I have and Thank YOU Robert. Grabbing image as I write this
D
