Would setting Power Mode (or maybe even Operating Mode?) to something else do something? I’m not sure what power mode it’s referring to, but I wonder if you could change it from wireless to wired. Same thing, gotta watch out for the battery hit.
And side note, if anyone is wondering how to get stuff out from the /API10/getClips call, you can go to http://your.ip.address.here/vod/ and get a directory listing. In there, there’s .jpg previews and .ts videos, as well as .m3u8 playlists, and .meta metadata showing the duration of the clip, and which mode (?) it was recorded in. I still haven’t worked out how to get the current frame as a JPEG (e.g. snapshot), but I’m still picking through the tangled mess that is the Swann app.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to post to any parameter within deviceInfo. Interestingly
‘Power Mode’ doesn’t appear to change state between charging and battery mode, it always returns ‘1’.
Found a few other post calls in the swann API that I’ve found to work with the intcam:
API10/getUpgradeStatus
API10/upgradeFirmware
API10/deleteClips
API10/factoryReset
API10/formatStorage
API10/resetSettings
API10/reboot
I had a quick look at traffic directly to/from the camera. The device flicks to live mode when it receives a TCP msg from port 5973 on server 44.226.x.x (xxxxxx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com) to port 56522 on the camera.
Update from me:
I can get the below working but only while the cameras are active in the app, as soon as I close the app they seem to go to sleep and not be woken up by any requests I’m familiar with.
I managed to get the POST going through from postman. It looks like I can only change the INT cam live video quality to 1, 2 or 3 it won’t accept 4.
Can also get the stream to run in VLC but with the same issue of only working whilst the app is running
Yes, I’ve found the same thing re: video quality restricted to levels 1-3.
Intcam seems pretty much restricted to maximum 5 minute sessions of live streaming. You can post a keep alive request that will keep the camera streaming for up to 5 minutes regardless of whether the app is open. But I guess thats kind of pointless when you have to use the app to wake the camera.
I don’t know if there is a way to mimic the TCP msg that wakes the camera?
Interestingly, I’ve found that my OUTCAM might have a 5 minute limit as well (EDIT: Definitely does!). I’ve had the camera open most of the day watching for a package, and I think it stops until I restart the stream again, but I’ve only got a tiny plant in one corner of the image that moves in the wind, so it’s hard to tell if it’s frozen or the wind has just stopped.
The /API10/keepAlive endpoint results in a 404 error for me, so I can’t even try that.
Side note, I got my INTCAMs yesterday, but they’re on the older firmware and I can’t pair them to the new Swann app, and you can’t sign in to the old Swann app to pair / update them because they shut down the servers. I’ve contacted support, but they haven’t provided any solutions yet.
Interestingly, the INTCAM on the older firmware versions (prior to August 2020, I’d imagine) has FTP enabled, and if you log in with the username root and the password twipc you can get access to the (Unix) OS running on the camera. I believe they did away with that after the firmware upgrade, in part because there was a widely reported security vulnerability that let people view other peoples’ cameras.
So if anyone is interested in the contents of the Unix OS running on older INTCAMs, hit me up before Swann get back to me
EDIT: So yeah the camera does have a 5 minute timeout which I never noticed before. The refresh button in the Swann app seems to just reconnect to the RTSP stream, so maybe there’s a way to just re-send an OPTIONS call or something to the camera to get it to wake up?
Are you able to get an RTSP feed off the intcams without having to pair? Wonder if the old firmware had the 5 minute live view limitation or 720p video quality restriction.
Also found the FCC approval documentation which includes some interesting internal photos of the intcam:
Yep, that’s where I got the root username and password from.
I haven’t tried connecting to RTSP, but the hotspot is only active for 2-3 minutes before it stops, and so far I’ve had no luck joining it to my home network because wpa_supplicant.conf is read-only, so it wouldn’t work as a long term or even short term solution. I might be able to edit a config file to enable SSH, but I haven’t got that far yet.
I also wonder if the 5 minute timeout is an RTSP feature, because when I google RTSP timeout, there’s a few people reporting similar issues with completely different cameras from other brands. This SO post has an idea: https://stackoverflow.com/a/39818378/2301484
Basically if you send a GET_PARAMETERS call before the timeout, it may continue to function.
I have battery / wifi Swann Cameras, I can view the RTSP stream when the camera is “woke” by opening the Swann app.
Cant for the life of me figure out a way to wake the camera without opening the app?
@Grayda I saw a few posts from you regarding this, also on reddit. Did you get anywhere with a way to wake a sleeping camera?
Unfortunately I didn’t make any further attempts. If you set up Fiddler2 on a PC and set your phone’s proxy server to your PC, you might have some luck.
I haven’t tried that yet, but I sorta gave up because the places I wanted cameras were either not near an outlet (and the battery drain would have made recording impossible) or easily serviced by just plugging a webcam into my Home Assistant machine
