SmartTiles: Video Camera Compatibility

Lag in general. It seems to be about 10 second delay.

[quote=“tgauchat”]
If your connection to the camera is via a LAN connection, then it should be pretty fast, but that depends on the camera hardware more than anything else (possibly the resolution and compression of the camera too).
[/quote]I am only accessing it through my LAN. For remote viewing I use the BlueIris app. The camera is connected via WiFi with 99% signal (-49dBm).

[quote=“tgauchat”]
If you are using port-forwarding, then that introduces a little more delay because it has to bounce around the Internet.
[/quote]Only local access.

[quote=“tgauchat”]
If the connection is via a vendor’s cloud (e.g., Kuna, Nest …?), then it’s even slower.
[/quote]Not using any cloud solution at all.

The wierdest thing just happened. I accessed the same stream through my browser and was testing (turning lights on/off that are visible through the camera) and it all seemed fine.

I fired up SmartTiles on my tablet and stood it up in front of my monitor and I was going to record so that the delay was visible when I cycled the lights. Well, the delay was gone.

I’m going to test it again by walking outside with the tablet in my hand so I can see what SmartTiles is doing.

Wierd… I should have known better. I literally flew to San Francisco last week to see what was going on with a customer and when I arrived they were unable to reproduce the issue…

Aaaaaaand I’m back to lagging video streams. I took my dog outside (while my wife was watching upstairs) and we had already made it back inside and upstairs when she was barely watching us go outside.

I’m going to test outside the kiosk browser I’m using and see if that improves at all. Also, there are a bunch of settings for the browser I’m using and one is to refresh the page every x minutes/seconds. I wonder if refreshing would alleviate some of the lag?

I’ll follow up later with the results of my testing.

Having an issue getting an HTTPS camera showing, I can succesfully bring it up in my browser, my system, FortiCam only does HTTPS & RTSP, either one I cant get it to successfully show. Anyone have any thoughts?

Can you share a sample URL? You can blank out the password for now as just a sample.

RTSP is unlikely to work (most browsers don’t support that natively … yet).

https://172.25.0.101/api?request=FRC_LiveView&id=FrontDoor&view_mode=3&hostName=172.25.0.101&username=Username&password=1234

I see hundreds of people successfully geting 80/http going but noone is doing https/443 but I know that Custom Nest app is doing https so I figured their is some way of doing it, just wish I could get that source code from it and build the app.

The other way around is actually more likely to be troublesome in the future, as ActionTiles will be securely hosted and served using https, and Chrome will complain about mixed content if the video URL is not also https.


If this URL, works fine in its own window (preferably incognito test) and doesn’t load any plug-ins, Flash, etc., then it is very unusual indeed for it to fail inside a Video Tile (unless you have more than 6 video tiles…).

Be sure to use F12 or Ctrl-Shift-I to inspect/debug the dashboard and video tile img html element.

I’ll keep playing around, I just found out about smart tiles a few days ago, hopefully I can get everything going and even contribute some. Appreciate everything you have done for this community Terry! Keep up the great work and I’ll keep you updated on the progress, P.S. this is going on my project here… http://imgur.com/a/ycO2q

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I love your classic intercom mod!

Projects like yours will be a pleasure to share on our Instagram and Pinterest feeds for @ActionTiles!

I’ll update the album with the Tiles showing soon! Thanks for share!

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Ok, using, Patrick Stuart Generic Camera Code, I was able to get RTSP going, but its on its own app in Smartthings, anyway I would be able to add that to Smart Tiles? EDIT: Code here : https://github.com/pstuart

  1. SmartThings doesn’t provide an API to access video streams from their Cloud or Hub. That’s because SmartThings wants to be able to monetize video storage with monthly fees. Not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that unlike other types of devices, ActionTiles can’t use SmartThings as the path to camera devices.

  2. RTSP formatted streams are not currently decoded natively by most browsers; I think latest Android Chromium engine is adding this, but our code will still need edits to handle.

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I have never been able to get my nest/dropcams to work on SmartTiles. See the image below. If I look at the page HTML source and copy and paste the link that is being passed in in to another page the camera displays fine (so I have entered the link in to the SmartApp correctly). Any ideas? This is in Safari on a Mac. Chrome displays a white box and not even the ‘Front Door’ title (probably there but can’t see it as the box is white) and other parts of the screen then get corrupted.

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Having the same problem with Nest.

Does anyone know how to get a axis mjpeg stream to work on smarttiles. I entered the my mjpeg stream and the tile just says connecting. Tested the url and it comes up in a web browser and displays the stream. using http://domainip:port /mjpg/1/video.mjpg to access axis video stream

sorry got this working, must use the internal IP when testing from home, it works fine

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I have a BlueIris installation with a couple of IP cameras. I am using the Generic Video Camera Connect to connect to my IP cameras (rtsp) and that works fine.

However, in SmartTile I am not able to select any IP cameras. How is that?

SmartTiles (nor the upcoming ActionTiles) does not have direct access to SmartThings camera Things (except to trigger the “snapshot” function; because SmartThings has not opened up an API to Community Developers to their camera feeds.

If you have a direct URL that is streamable in a plain web browser page, then you can add this URL as a Video Tile to SmartTiles.

Some more details at this link, and others in the Community may help with more suggestions: Loading...

I have a question for those of you that have an outdoor camera working with SmartTiles. Does your camera allow you to live view and record at the same time? I’m trying to find a camera that can do that and will also display the feed in SmartTiles. None of the product sites I’ve looked at say if their camera can live view and record at the same time, so I’m looking for first hand experience here.

Thanks for your time!

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I am not sure why this format doesn’t work for me… I am using the 932L (B1) and cannot get the URL to pass the username and password, I get the pop up to enter that info every time.

Tried making a guest account without a password to no avail.

Any other ideas?

Really just looking for a cheap camera I can use with SmartTiles and FTP images to a server.

Maybe a OS issue? I am using Safari and Google on a Macbook.

do you have port forwarding setup?

see if you can log in with the IP address but manually enter your login and password?