tinyCam on Genymotion for Wyze cam stock firmware

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Disclaimer: By no means this is the only way to do it or the best solution, just sharing experience. Not a stockholder of any product/company mentioned here :slight_smile:

Background:

  • Hassbian 99.3 on Lenovo T420 with Ubuntu 18.04
  • Love Wyze cam (2 v1+3 v2), all latest stock firmware, RTSP firmware not stable enough with my setup
  • tinyCam server on older Samsung tablet (Nougat) to stream IP cam to HA
  • older wifi router

After adding more Wyze cams lately, the tablet had hard time keeping up.
Decided to test running tinyCam in android emulator on Ubuntu, steps I did:

  • create free genymotion account and license
  • install genymotion and virtualbox from apt-get (not the latest)
  • test different android templates provided and virtualbox settings
  • set Network Mode of the Virtual Device to bridge mode (necessary?)
  • install GAPP after android started and set static ‘wifi’ IP
  • install, setup, and run tinyCam Pro server in genymotion android
  • pointed HA camera config to genymotion tinyCam server
  - platform: mjpeg
    name: wyze
    mjpeg_url: http://[tinyCamIP]:8083/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=1&fps=0

Findings after overnight running (5 Wyze + 1 Amcrest IPM-HX1):

  • server on virtual Google Nexus 4 (Kitkat) was holding up well, no melt-down :sweat_smile:
  • virtual device uses a big chunk of CPU, watch out for cooling issue
  • server crashed, once or twice initial setup, stable overnight
  • occasional stream problem solved with restarting virtual device
  • virtual device can be auto-started after logon/reboot, mostly

Things to try next:

  • optimize resources and stability of the virtual device
  • restart control of virtual device (tasker/switch in HA, cron job)
  • other stream enhancements, sound, motion detection, recording, etc.

Again, there is nothing wrong with other solutions, i.e. MotionEye, etc., just a test case here. So far, this seems promising, until there is actual integration of Wyze or tinyCam in HA :wink:

Have fun.

Good instructions for setting up Wyze Cam in tinyCam

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Brill, I moved house and finally sorted adding the Wyze/TinyCam into the front end today. I was wondering since HA has the Steam function and when adding it via the MPEG platform it doesn’t add any supported features. Can you activate supported features such as streaming or recording to this platform?

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The MJPEG and STREAM are 2 separate integrations.

Wyze/TinyCam sample configuration:

stream:

camera:
  - platform: mjpeg
    name: wyze
    mjpeg_url: http://[tinyCamIP]:8083/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=1&fps=0&compression=50&resolution=640x360
    still_image_url: http://[tinyCamIP]:8083/axis-cgi/jpg/image.cgi?camera=1&resolution=640x360

The stream service camera.record and streaming in lovelace (camera_view: live) works fine with the Wyze/TinyCam, regardless of using Genymotion or Android directly.
The extra parameters used in mjpeg url (fps, compression, resolution) are optional.