Media and Thermostats

Thank you for the help. I got this working by the way

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Hi @josh
bringing this thread form the dead :slight_smile:
from your experience how resource heavy is putting a tinycam with webserver/low bandwidth turned on on a fire HD for example?
I am planning to put tinycam with sharptools on a fire HD 8 (latest gen) for the sole purpose of using sharptools to control my home automation and I still need everything to work fast and nice when I click on a light switch tile for example. I dont wont things to hang…
I also noticed that there is ‘snapshot image’ url in tiny cam that I assume can be used along with a tile refresh of for example evey 20 seconds and maybe this can also help to reduce load?
thanks for your answer.

There’s lots of factors at play, so it’s hard to say for sure. In general, we don’t recommend running TinyCam as a transcoder on a Fire tablet which is also being used to display dashboards as they are fairly resource limited devices.

That being said, there are things you could do to minimize the resource impact. As you noted, you might try using image snapshots that are refreshed periodically. Even refreshing every few seconds should be significantly lower load than an MJPEG stream.

If I remember correctly, TinyCam uses an Axis Camera compatible API, but I don’t recall if they support all the parameters. For example, Axis supports parameters like:

Parameter Values Description
resolution 1280x1024, 1280x720, 640x480, 640x360, 320x240, 240x180, etc. Specify the resolution of the returned image.
camera 1, 2, 3, 4 Select which camera you want to use
compression 0-100 Adjusts the compression level of the image. Higher values correspond to higher compression, i.e. lower quality and smaller image size.
fps 0, 5, 15, etc Frames per second.

So you could build a URL like:

http://{tiny.cam.address:port}/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=1&compression=60&fps=10

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thanks for the elaborate answer

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Josh, Is there a more in depth walk through for setting up wyze cam via tinycam in sharptools? I know there are newer threads that speak of it. I tried using the URL format you described here, but I do not know where to input my own information.

Can you clarify what you’ve tried so far and where you’re getting stuck?

Have you already setup the Wyze Cam in TinyCam? And do you already have the TinyCam webserver running? When the webserver is running in TinyCam, it should show the IP Address and port in the left navigation drawer of the TinyCam app:

From there, you’ll want to use the URL format mentioned above.

So the format:

http://{tiny.cam.address:port}/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera={id}

Becomes the following (based on my screenshot):

http://192.168.1.102:8083/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=1

Note that if you have different settings configured in TinyCam → Settings → Web Server, you may need to adjust accordingly. The default format assumes non HTTPS and either no Admin account set at all or the Guest Account enabled with an empty username and password.

Since the ‘Use HTTPS’ uses a self generated HTTPS cert, it won’t work properly in modern browsers anyway, so this should generally remain unchecked.

You can enable a username and password, but you’ll need to include it in the URL. For example:

http://192.168.1.102:8083/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?user=admin&pwd=mypassword

:warning: On Chrome 85 and newer, you will need to allow mixed content / insecure content.

Josh,
sorry for the delayed response, I just barely had the chance to sit down.
I eliminated my login and password and used that format and it works!
If I want the camera as a live stream do I enable autorefresh or leave it off?
And if i get the nvidia shield to be the server, how many cameras can be loaded and running?

If you’re using an MJPEG stream, then it’s a live stream and the Autorefresh option is not required. That being said, some people still keep autorefresh on, but at an extended duration - for example every 30 minutes or even every few hours - just to make sure the stream refreshes itself in case the stream dies.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Background Streaming / Battery Life

on my chrome browser on my pc the cameras are working but for some odd reason the cameras aren’t showing up on my tablet that’s running fully kiosk browser. Not sure what happened but it was working on the weekend.

I have Wyze cameras running on Tinycam pro thats constantly on thru Nvidia Shield. So i’m not sure what the issue is.

I did the fix on my chrome browser on my PC and chrome on my android tablet worked but for some reason it isn’t showing on Fully Kiosk Browser

Can you share some more details about your setup? Maybe share an example URL that you’re using for your media tile?

I would also try accessing that same URL directly from the browser on your tablet (eg. Silk on Amazon Fire) to make sure that the tablet can access those media resources.

Hi @josh is it possible to add a Nest camera and Ubiquiti camera to Sharptools?

Thanks in advance

@Iram_Chavira , welcome to the community. See the post below for how to add Nest camera to the dashboard.

What Ubiquiti cameras do you have? I don’t personally have any experience with Ubiquiti camera, so I am not sure if any of their cameras supports MJPEG streaming format, which is supported by the web browser. So if the camera supports RTSP, but not MJPEG, you will need something like Blue Iris or TinyCam Pro to proxy and encode the video streams to MJPEG, so they can be displayed in the dashboard.

Hi James for your quick response, I can’t access the link it tells me that page doesn’t exist

For the Ubiquiti cameras we have UVC-G4-Pro, G3-Flex,Protect G3 PRO, is there a guide to use Blue Iris or TinyCam Pro?

Thanks

I’ve updated the link in James’ post. Give it a try now. :grinning:

A post was split to a new topic: Wyze Cam in Safari Browser

Hi, Is there an output for motioneye that would work with sharptools media tile?

I’ve seen other people use motioneye. Does this documentation help?

https://motion-project.github.io/motion_config.html#OptDetail_Stream

Thanks. I don’t think I have enough knowledge to make heads or tails of it.

From what I gather, the streams from MotionEye are available at a URL in the format:

http://{IP}:{port}/{camid}/stream

Presumably where {IP} and {port} are the IP and port that your MotionEye instance are running at and {camid} is the motioneye camera ID.

If you open up a URL in that format in your browser, do you see your stream? If not, can you tell use more about your motioneye installation and how you have it configured?