Amcrest ProHD 1080P

Were you connected to the local LAN ? That is the only way I managed get the streaming working and even then it might fail sometimes.
Using remote connection, Vera always falls back to frame by frame mode.

If you can access your Vera via SSH, you can confirm from the log that Vera opens stream_tunnel when you start Live View of the camera in the app.

root@MiOS_X:~# grep -i stream_tunnel /var/log/cmh/LuaUPnP.log
04 09/25/17 17:39:17.887 <0x7380e520>

I suppose it could also be a codec issue, I have set my IP2M-841 Main Stream to use H264H, 1080P, frame rate 15, VBR, Quality 6, 8192kbp/s and frame interval 30.
AAC audio is included in the stream.

I never saw zoom controls in UI7, but when I used to have a Vera 2 with UI5, Zoom control were visible and worked.
Having only Amcrest cameras with digital zoom, I haven’t bothered to search a solution.

Thanks - sorry for the delay - I did not realise I had a reply. I will go through your post line by line to check what I am doing wrong! I see you also have a Hikvision - I just added one to my set up to take advantage of the PIR - hence I am back in the forum looking for solutions because, for me at least, it does not work out of the box!

Regards and thanks again for the details

Thanks l8nighter i have got my Amcrest Camera IP2M-841B (Firmware Version 2.420.AC00.17.R, Build Date: 2017-03-22) to partly work with my veraplus controller (Firmware version1.7.3232) using your pdf information, i can take a screenshot, go to my preset camera locations, streaming doesn’t work atm i see video in emulation mode (see screenshot).if i progress any further i will post info here. thanks again for your very helpful information.

All,

This was a very helpful thread - thank you gary and l8nighter for helping other with this same issue.

I unfortunately am still having issues - followed l8nighters very helpful PDF guide - was able to add the camera with no issue. I am running UI5, btw - have an older vera lite and didn’t want to upgrade/have a number of ‘embedded’ zwave (Aeon microswitches) that I don’t want to have to open to repair/rebuild the network.

  1. The new device seems to be setup correctly wrt ip/username/pw. However I get a “camera requires a valid username and password” instead of a picture. I CAN get a static picture out of /cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi?, however I get a prompt for a login everytime (even on a refresh).

Am I falling victim to the change Amcrest made in recent software with the “digest” login as opposed to the standard login?

Or Is this a UI5 issue?

Any help appreciated, thank you!

I seem to recall HTTP Digest support was not added until UI7 but I could be mistaken and cannot check as I upgraded my old Vera 2 to Vera Edge.
Even with the UI7 I initially got “camera requires a valid username and password” and it was clearly due to the HTTP Digest Authentication.

I also had some username and password issue on UI7 after adding another Amcrest bullet via CreateDevice LUUP-command as that seems to be the only way to get a HTTP Digest enabled Amcrest camera added to Vera with UI7.

Setting the username and password via Vera Web UI would not fix the problem but setting via LUUP-commands did the trick for me.
Try setting the camera user and password with these LUUP-commands, substituting proper values for the VERA_IPADDRESS, CAMERA-DEVICE-ID, USERNAME and PASSWORD and pasting the URL to the web browser.

http://VERA_IPADDRESS:3480/data_request?id=variableset&DeviceNum=CAMERA-DEVICE-ID&Variable=username&Value=USERNAME
http://VERA_IPADDRESS:3480/data_request?id=variableset&DeviceNum=CAMERA-DEVICE-ID&Variable=password&Value=PASSWORD

If your issue is indeed UI5 and lack of HTTP Digest Authentication support then the only easy option is to find older firmware for the camera that still uses basic authentication.
Naturally such camera should not be connected directly to public Internet via port forwarding or similar due to security concerns.

Basically any firmware from 2016 would probably work but all spring 2017 firmwares have HTTP Digest authentication enabled.

For IP2M-841 this firmware still works with basic authentication:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/amcrest-files/Firmware/Amcrest_IPC-AWXX_Eng_N_V2.420.AC00.16.R.20160909.bin

Amcrest also lists International Firmware at the bottom of the firmware page (Firmware Upgrade | Amcrest Technologies)
There you can still find an old version from 2016 for IP3M-943. For the US models older download link points to 2017 firmwares.

I’m running UK firmware on some of my IP2M-841s and IP3M-943 I purchased from Amazon.com, so it doesn’t look like Amcrest hardware is region specific.
I bought few cameras from the States as those were no longer available here in Europe (amazon.co.uk or amazon.de) for a while.

Anyways here is a link to the the IP3M-943 UK model firmware from 2016 :
https://s3.amazonaws.com/amcrest-files/Firmware/International/Amcrest_IPC-ACKXXX_Eng_P_AMCREST_V2.420.AC00.26.R.20160901.bin

Any update on this?

For me the live stream doesn’t work in the browser. In the app it says continuous stream and seems to work.

I have the latest firmware and used the method of GaryTTirn. I would really like to have a visual in the browser. In AltUI on openLuup to be precise.

I believe currently live streaming via browser using Vera UI requires support for flv-streams which Amcrest cameras don’t support.
I fiddled around with the MJPEG stream from the Amcrest (http:///cgi-bin/mjpg/video.cgi?channel=0&subtype=1) but it won’t work with Vera.

One can define those flv-streams via the same Streams-variable that enables RTSP streams like this :

flv,http,/cgi-bin/mjpg/video.cgi?channel=0&subtype=1;flv_low,http,/cgi-bin/mjpg/video.cgi?channel=0&subtype=1;rtsp,rtsp,/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0;rtsp_low,rtsp,/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1

After adding the flv anf flv_low parts, Vera will open the flash based stream player in the web UI when live but since the HTTP stream from Amcrest is MJPEG, the flash based player cannot play it.
Those flv and flv_low parts need to be removed to get frame by frame streaming back.

I suppose Vera web UI could support the native H.264 RTSP streams via web UI if they implemented a RTSP to WebRTC proxy in the Vera and had HTML5 web UI that can play those webRTC streams. Naturally the used browser should support displaying H.264 via WebRTC as Vera lacks the CPU power to transcode H.264 to something else.

Since openluup allows for much more powerful hardware, I would imagine adding that kind of RTSP to WebRTC proxy with optional transcoding functionality could be implemented into openluup and AltUI. I suppose giving a hint to the openluup and ALTUI develops might be enough :slight_smile:

There seems to be some discussion around the subject of streaming RTSP via web pages 7 ways to stream RTSP on the page | Flashphoner Streaming & Calls for Web

Hi again Gary and RHCPNG,

I continue to have no luck with getting a still image to display w/in Vera using UI5. I can get it to display beautifully (1080p!) using the RTSP link and VLC.
Tried to roll the camera firmware back to an older one, the camera would not accept it. Tried to manually send the UN/PW via commands Gary suggested, that did not work.

I’m basically out of ideas on this one. Can’t find anything on google either …

I’ve used a separate app for now (ipcamviewer) for remote viewing, thinking about instituting Blue Iris as I add cameras - I have a server running 24/7 that can handle the load.

Disappointed i haven’t been able to make this work - really wanted to be able to keep everything on one app, but … what Vera can do with the cameras is pretty limited anyway, so I’m not sure it’s something worth spending a ton of time on …

If anyone has any other suggestions, I’m all ears…

[quote=“ny2pit, post:48, topic:193000”]I continue to have no luck with getting a still image to display w/in Vera using UI5. I can get it to display beautifully (1080p!) using the RTSP link and VLC.
Tried to roll the camera firmware back to an older one, the camera would not accept it. Tried to manually send the UN/PW via commands Gary suggested, that did not work. [/quote]

I’m afraid the combination of new firmware with HTTP Digest authentication and UI5 will never work.
According to the Vera release notes, the support for HTTP Digest Authentication was only added to UI7.
http://support.getvera.com/customer/portal/articles/2078473-ui7-▾-version-7-0-10-1-7-649-1-7-1320-▾-july-30-2015
Imp. Critical Add support for digest authentication in REQ_Image and other camera functions

If the camera hardware is so new that it won’t accept the older firmware that still uses HTTP basic authentication, then I think the only option to get camera integrated to Vera is to upgrade Vera hardware to get UI7 and HTTP Digest authentication support.

Alternative solution is to look at setting up a VPN to your home as this provides you direct access to your home IP network from just about anywhere and you can then use all those apps vendors provide to connect to cameras or any other device you may have. VPN connection is an option if you get public IP address from your ISP. Amcrest cameras provide a DDNS service that makes it possible to use VPN with dynamic, changing public IP which is great as a static IP from the ISP could be either not available at all or expensive.

OpenVPN (https://openvpn.net/) SSL based VPN or StrongSwan (https://www.strongswan.org/) IPSec VPN solutions come to mind first, I’m using StrongSwan myself for my needs.

However, setting up VPNs do require quite a bit of technical knowledge and also require certain features from the home’s internet router as it would probably be the device terminating the VPN connection.
Some router vendors like Netgear do have support for OpenVPN in their software on some of their models and setting that up is not as complex as StrongSwan.

It was a long while, but now I have adapted a python script originally made for Dahua enabling Motion Detection events to be pushed to into Vera as Motion Sensor events. Sadly the script needs to run on external computer as it is based on python and it needs local connection to both Vera and cameras, so it may not be suitable for everybody.

Script is in the github.

Hi Everyone, I know this is a very old post but today I discovered that all of my Amcrest camera’s were saying Invalid Credentials in Vera for some reason. I then remembered I went into the web interface of each Amcrest and under Storage, Destination, Path, I unchecked Snapshot saving to the SD Card because I only wanted videos being saved to the SD card. As soon as I re-checked all of these boxes under Snapshot for SD Card, Scheduled, Motion Detect, and Alarm, everything is working in the Vera again. I can’t explain why this would be but in case this helps anyone else I thought I would post my findings here.

I also had similar issue where Vera would start reporting “Invalid Credentials” for cameras that used to work just fine. After some testing I came to the conclusion that it must be the image size that is throwing Vera off as I had been replacing old HD cameras with newer 4Mpix and higher. I had also been adding more cameras to Vera, so it would have to load more images.

I set the quality of generic snapshots to lowest value (1) on all cameras and to me that seems to help.

I still get snapshot take due to alarms/events at highest quality (6) as there is separate setting for that.

I don’t use Vera that much for checking the cameras anymore as I setup a VPN connection to my home and I can check the live stream from all the cameras directly using the Amcrest app.