Alexa Plus & Monocle Gateway
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Has anyone using Alexa Plus noticed problems displaying cameras using Monocle Gateway?
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The new Alexa Plus firmware no longer supports the RTSP player stack and so all third-party local RTSP integrations are broken. Monocle Gateway can’t fix this because the Alexa Plus stack doesn’t even attempt to start an RTSP session anymore.
Basically, for security reasons, Amazon dropped support for local RTSP streaming. That requires all camera streams to use Amazon’s “Smart Home Camera API” (cloud-based, authenticated HTTPS HLS or DASH), not direct RTSP. Therefore, although Monocle Gateway presents RTSP streams, Alexa devices no longer know what to do with the streams that Monocle Gateway presents.
I found a solution called “Scrypted” which may provide a solution. I’ve not had any luck getting it to work probably due to the same issues. Basically, Amazon will control displaying all camera streams on their devices.
My advice is to look for specific camera skills for your cameras to add to Alexa, or do what I do which is to just use TinyCamPro on your Fire TV to display your cameras. Using voice commands to display cameras on Echo Shows is now strictly limited to Amazon skills.
I have created my own voice commands to display my cameras via my Google Chromecast 4k. By not serving your cameras to the cloud, security is greatly improved.