I prefer to keep my system completely locked down and am using Tinycam for the software. By locked down, I disable any outside communication from the camera to outside of my router via the router’s firewall.
All of my monitoring is live and if I want to record I use the Tinycam software to do that.
If I setup the camera (Wysecam v2) all is well unless it either looses connection to the router (signal) or is powered off/on.
In those cases it requires that I open up the camera to the internet until it reinitializes. After that, until the next signal loss/power problem, it will work fine. I’ve run it non-stop for at least 48 hours this way.
Is there any way to keep from having to have the camera contact the internet in these scenarios?
This would make sense since you’re not directly streaming the feed from the camera itself. Rather, you’re actually streaming from the Wzye cloud service as the middle man between you and your cam. All tinyCam does for wyze is essentially login to the service and you get your feed that way.
Regardless, it would still record to a micro sd card while it’s offline but from your post, that doesn’t seem like something you are interested in doing. I know rtsp would allow for the offline local behavior to work as you wish, and it’s kn the roadmap. Also, MaxDrive is also coming out which may or may not work in offline mode (depending on how they choose to interface). MaxDrive, if you don’t know yet, will essentially
backup video from cams and store them in a central local location. It will rely on adding your own hard drive.
Appreciate the reply but it does work without a local sd card and without access to the internet AFTER the camera & Tinycam make an initial connection. The problem is that if the camera loses connection to the router (or power) that it needs internet access before it will work again.
For example, I have had the camera running with tinycam for the past 8 hours without any internet connection.
There must be an initial heartbeat/validation that occurs which precludes the camera from working until that is completed.
This is interesting that it works without internet unless it just uses the cloud to authenticate and then grab a token to setup a p2p connection locally between your cam and TCpro. In either case, I think the heartbeat will be your culprit. Just curious though, aren’t these cams on your Wifi anyway?
They are all - the tablet with tinycam - and the cameras on my wifi. These are all on a dedicated router separate from the rest of my network.
Just to be sure that it would run - after initial authentication - without internet and wasn’t just bypassing my router firewall settings I have actually disconnected the router from the cable modem and had it continue to run.
As @SirDom mentioned, you’re not actually establishing a local connection to your cameras with tinycam. Tinycam is using Wyze’s API to reach out to a Wyze service that is doin NAT/PAT (network address translation/port address translation) “stuff” to get you the stream.
I’m not a network expert by any means, but here’s what’s going on from my understanding. Basically your cameras reach out to Wyze services and say “hey I’m here at this address and port”. Periodically, the services will also reach out to the cam and say “are you still there?” Tinycam is using a Wyze API to log into the Wyze service on the internet, says “hey where’s this cam”, the service says “you can find it here”, and it punches a tunnel for tinycam to communicate with the cam. If the tunnel is interrupted (your router, cam, or app go down), you need the internet to link them up again.
That makes sense - is there a way to limit the interaction to just the NAT/PAT interaction as I would prefer to not have video sent to their cloud nor any other unnecessary traffic…this comes out of concerns for both traffic volume and more importantly security.