Foscam vs. Amcrest with Smartthings

Hello all,

Just picked up a 1080P Foscam indoor camera and a UHD 2K Amcrest camera to try out and I plan on only keeping one of them to hopefully use with smartthings and add on more later.

I was wondering what people’s opinions are between using Foscam vs Amcrest with Smartthings? I would also like to hear feedback about the two different cameras in general. I plan on the cameras recording to my NAS drive and not use cloud storage.

Don’t mean to bump this but does anyone have any opinions between these two companies and Smartthings compatibility?

There are community device handlers from each and I believe they both do about the same things. Can livestream,change IR status, enable/disable motion detection, etc. The thing ST can’t do with either is directly tell them when to record. You’ll have to set that up via the camera themselves or some other software like Blue Iris.

If you want full camera integration check this out

Thank you for your replies. I looked at the Netgear Arlo solution but it is not capable of recording locally to a NAS drive or anywhere else, only to the netgear/arlo cloud servers.

I was hoping people that have the Foscam and Amcrest cameras in use with Smartthings would be able to comment on their experience using them so far.

I talk about my setup here WiFi Cameras that work with SmartThings but allow local storage?

Mine is a simple setup with 2 Amcrest and 1 Foscam cameras that are connected to Blue Iris recording on a local PC. The cameras trigger on motion but I also have an additional trigger when a door contact opens and mode is Away using the CoRE app.

Thanks for your reply.

Question about using Blue Iris. How does this integrate with smartthings? Will ST still be able to take snapshots and such using the cameras? Can ST trigger camera records using door/window sensors? I am a bit confused how a setup like this will work with ST.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

There is a smart app that changes the Blue Iris profiles based on Smartthings mode. Then there is another that receives motion alerts from Blue Iris to trigger a virtual motion sensor in ST.Blue Iris manages when to take pictures and/or video based on the profile it is in.

Ok, will any of the videos and/or pictures show in ST?

Nope. ST can do still pics with the Foscam and Amcrest device handlers floating around.

Are you referring to the @RBoy device handler? The RBoy smart app has a window for live video feed but I can’t get it to work with my Foscam C1.

That’s the one I use. Livestreaming works intermittently with my C1.

Can you share what parameters you used to configure the smart app? Nothing I have tried works.

I can see the stream through VLC. I use the following parameters for VLC:

            Rtsp://myUser:myPass@11.0.0.160:554/videoMain

I can also connect to the admin console using http://11.0.0.166:88

In you app, I have the following parameters:

            Name: Garage Camera
            IP: 11.0.0.160
            Camera Port: 88
            Username: myUser
            Password: myPass
            RTSP Port: 554
            Enable this if the camera is HD: checked
            Enable MJPEG: checked

When I hit the “Play” button on the live stream it says “Connecting” and then fails with the following message: “Camera cannot be found. We are trying to connect.”

I have confirmed that the RTSP port is set to 554 in the camera’s web interface.

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Try turning off mjpeg. The C1 doesn’t do mjpeg streaming. Also start by testing on your local network so you can rule out signal strength.

I started fiddling with the Amcrest IP3M-941 and I am not really impressed with their web portals and such, I am also a bit confused how the camera seems to report to their servers even without being registered and I am wondering if there is a way to turn that off, but anyway…

I also picked up a QNAP TS-451+ that I would like to use for my recordings and hopefully run the surveillance software on the QNAP as well. I see a lot of people use Blue Iris and it integrates with ST but that is not capable of running off the QNAP.

Anyone have a recommendation to use the Amcrest with the QNAP with or without ST?

I can get the stream to work but get a error for the motion detection.