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Let’s break the concepts down a little bit:

  • Out of the box, the Wyze camera models allow access and management via their app
  • An Alexa Skill has been added to support display of streams on Amazon devices with a screen
  • A Google Assistant connector has been added to support display of streams on Google devices with a screen
  • It is possible to connect your Wyze devices through IFTTT to manage your devices (but not view the stream)
  • There is a firmware update that supports the Real Time Streaming Protocol
  • However there is no native web interface available

This gives us some options for viewing on a different machine:

  • Install an Android emulator (e.g. Bluestacks)
    • View the app on your Windows machine
    • Useful if you want to view the displays on another device
  • Use an IP Camera viewer on your Android device (e.g. TinyCam)
    • Can group all your Wyze cameras with any other cameras together
  • Use your existing Alexa / Echo device
    • Handy if you’ve got one
    • Not sure if you can view multiple streams at the same time
    • Mainly used for a quick view
  • Use your existing Google Assistant device
    • Same as the Alexa - useful if you’ve got one
  • Install the RTSP Firmware and configure a stream for each of your cameras
    • Provides a stream with the address rstp://[name]:[password]@[ipaddress]/live
    • e.g. rtsp://dencam:fancypassword@192.168.1.145/live
    • The stream can be used by any device on your network that support RTSP
    • Many people will stream this through VLC, a popular video player
    • This includes almost every single IP Camera (Internet Protocol Camera) or NVR (Network Video Recorder) software on the market
    • Popular examples of this are:
    • The NVR software will need to be installed on a supported operating system, provided with some storage space, and configured
    • It will then do whatever you want it to, based on what features it has
    • For example, with Netcam Studio, my software of choice, I use the following:
      • Set motion detection zones using individual blocks rather than rectangles
      • Use different motion detection algorithms
      • Capture a timelapse (1 image every 20 seconds)
      • Provide a web interface
      • Allow access of the web interface from outside my network
      • Provide a native Android application
      • Provide a URL (with a secure access token) that can be piped into other streams (I use ActionTiles)
    • Of course there are other features, such as continuous recording, person detection, and license plate detection - but each piece of software has different features

These options have different audiences, and different use cases. Some people do not want the bother of setting up a new piece of software to manage their cameras. What we need is a way to embed the streams in a web page, and this is something that a lot of people on the internet want. My previous Linksys WCV80 IP camera had a native web interface built into the small linux firmware it was running. It may be possible to develop a web browser interface for each camera that goes along with the RTSP firmware update - but Wyze have already said that the RTSP firmware pushes the camera BIOS to the limit of space available.

There is a service - IPCamLive - that will take an externally accessible camera and make it available on the web, but this has a bunch of other issues. First of all, you need to make sure your RTSP feed can be seen by the internet. Secondly, you need to pay for it.

This means there’s a gap in the market. If someone was so inclined, they could write a simple service that provided a web interface which showed local RTSP streams on a local network to local viewers, and then anyone connected to the wifi could load up the url on the hosting machine and see their cameras.

So where does this leave us? Simply put, here are the options:

  1. Use the native Wyze app to manage your cameras
  2. Use an emulator to view the app on another device
  3. Install the RTSP firmware and view the stream in VLC
  4. Install the RTSP firmware and your choice of NVR software and view via web interface

The last option is what I’ve done:
image

Now I’ve done this summary, what have I missed? What other options are there?

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