[Custom Component] Tapo: Cameras Control

I thinking of buying Tapo D210 Video Doorbell Camera, will this integration work? Does anyone own one? From what I can find online it does not support RTSP and ONVIF…

First of all, thanks a lot for this great integration.

I have installed a tapo C520WS, and put as picture entity on the lovelace, aparently everything it os ok, but when I push over it to see the stream, it shows for a moment, but immediately displays this message.

“the video cannot be played, because the file is corrupted”

Captura de pantalla 2024-09-08 a las 20.36.17

It seems like wants to start and show the very first frames but then, cant handle the stream.

Thanks a lot for any help

Problem solved, my fault was that I didn’t put any SD card on the camera. I have another cameras and I don’t need an SD on the camera for streaming, but it seems that the tapo need it.

Hello Juraj. It’s been almost a month since Tapo said they would consider the info you submitted. I don’t see any updates in your update page. Do you think they are ghosting you? What happens if they simply say no!

2 Likes

Bought the Tapo D210, out of the box firmware I could set the password for the DoorBell camera and Tapo Camera Control was able to detect it. Could see all the controls for the Doorbell, but the stream was not working well, keeps switching from idle to unavailable.
But once I upgraded the firmware, the Camera Authentication in Advance setting disappeared and Tapo Camera Control does not work anymore.

Sending the camera back since it does not work with HA. I need a doorbell camera that exposes motion detection from the PIR in HA.

My current setup using a cheap Tuya doorbell camera, but I use an Aqara motion sensor to turn on/off the go2rtc addon in HA. Using the rtsp feed for Frigate and Double Take for facial recognition, so need to switch off the rtsp stream to extend battery life.

I’m getting this error,

Invalid cloud password. Make sure you are entering the password for your cloud account and NOT the password which you created via the camera settings (unless they are the same). You need to enter password which you used with your email when signing into the Tapo app.

See screenshot below. Nothing has changed, I’ve also been able to log into the Tapo app on another device with the same credentials.

image

Read this link. Well-known problem.

History of cloud password error issue

If you scroll to the bottom and read the last 10 entries, you will see that tapo is not jumping to provide the info required for the integration to work with the newer firmware. I mentioned this a few days ago here and my post was removed. Don’t know why. It’s not a criticism. People have to make decisions about hardware. I’ve sent back one and refusing to buy another.

Followed HomeAssistant-Tapo-Control/add_camera_with_new_firmware.md at 9a78e8216af1824512c6f4576caef1d09ac6b6de · JurajNyiri/HomeAssistant-Tapo-Control · GitHub managed to add in HA, but camera feeds does not work.

When I try to click on any buttons it shows:
CleanShot 2024-09-13 at 01.52.28

Try this… in Tapo app - camera settings - advanced settings - camera account: set user and password, this makes the rtsp stream available for example to Onvif, try to add onvif integration and see the stream trhu it.

Edit: port is 554

ONVIF works fine. Just missing a lot of entities that are supported by the custom component.

Before I updated the firmware that option was available in the app. After updating the firmware that option is no longer available. I updated the firmware thinking that I could revert back to previous firmware, but for my D210 I can’t find where to download previous firmwares.

Ok, for Tapo D210 doorbell camera I’ve figured out how to get the stream. I used go2rtc

streams:
  # cloud password without username (this one works)
  camera1_sd: tapo://[email protected]/stream2
  camera1_hd: tapo://[email protected]/stream1

  # admin username and UPPERCASE SHA256 cloud-password hash (this one works too)
  camera2_sd: tapo://admin:[email protected]/stream2
  camera2_hd: tapo://admin:[email protected]/stream1

code for UPPERCASE-SHA256

echo -n "cloud password" | shasum -a 256 | awk '{print toupper($0)}'

This is with latest firmware which does not allow → Tapo app - camera settings - advanced settings - camera account. But I still need to block internet access for the camera.
Maybe can implement into the code for Camera Control?

In Camera Control I still can’t get Motion Detection binary sensor to show.

EDIT: camera streaming still worked with internet access enabled. Let me monitor for a few days. Camera Control itself is intermittent, sometimes switching on/off something works, sometimes doesn’t

LATEST: After a few hours with internet connection enabled, the camera stopped streaming.

I reached out to the support people at TAPO/tp-link and here’s what they said:

“We are sorry that we have not officially announced any cooperation with Home Assistant. We will feedback your suggestions to the relevant departments for optimization. Thank you.”

I wrote back to them that they just lost a customer. I acknowledge all the excellent workarounds on this Forum, but simply don’t have time to resort to the CLI to make these simple devices work in my multiple HA installations.

I’m going to sell my TAPO cameras. And, ultimately, my tp-link LTE 4G routers. When I get time…

Ronan

1 Like

So we can assume that these cameras will no longer work with the Home Assistant, despite the fabulous work of Juraj Nyíri?

There was never an official cooperation with home assistant as stated in the readme. It’s all unofficial. Nothing changes for now, the latest status for the fix of last firmwares is in the readme and linked issue.

To clarify this, they do not need to provide any information, just give me approval to release the code interacting with the cloud I have ready since April / may

2 Likes

I don’t have latest firmware (neither the D210), but saw one pop-up for one of my cameras, and it was saying something like option to disable the Camera Account function. Isn’t in the app an option to enable the Camera Account first?

The option Camera Account was available with the stock firmware of my D210. After I upgraded the firmware, I opened the App and the option was no longer there…

I’ve sold away my D210, but here’s the reply from TP-Link when I asked why Camera Account is no longer available in the app after I upgraded the firmware:

Hello,  

Thank you for contacting TP-Link support.
 
We regret to inform you that the RTSP/Onvif feature on the battery doorbell, initially a beta feature, has been removed from our device.

In order to ensure long battery life, the battery device will be in sleep mode in most cases. It will only be wakened up when motion is detected or watching live view in the Tapo app. The RTSP/Onvif feature requires the camera to wake up all the time, which requires a lot of power and will dramatically shorten the battery life. The power provided by solar panel is not enough to sustain the streaming for RTSP. Therefore, after careful consideration of range requirements and RTSP performance, we have made the decision to remove this feature from the battery cameras. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

If you want to stay plugged in to use RTSP/Onvif feature, it will cause the battery to heat up and reduce battery life. In this case, we recommend that you can use one of our constant powered camera like Tapo D225. 

Thank you for your understanding.

I will search for that and give it a try. Sorry I didnt include everything you asked about but seeing as the vast majority of folks that purchased the camera’s to attempt to integrate them with HA also have issues I wanted to add my voice to that growing crowd. I’m still very new to HA and learning as I go so I’ll have to figure out how to grab the logs and parcel out the bits related to the camera failures. I have read elsewhere that this is expected behavior on the part of Tapo because they are not allowing the battery powered cameras to do stream and refuse to include ONVIF on those models that don’t have a cabled power option. (Again I’ll track down the link but a search of this will turn up the C402 as one TAPO stated does not include ONVIF.)