What's The Dealio with Amcrest Cameras?

Configuration
1

I had a pair of Amcrest IP cameras that I had working in HA but then had to send them back for repair (firmware issue). I got them back and all set up again but they just will not display in HA.

The first one is running on WiFi so I thought perhaps the performance was not good enough so the second one is working on Ethernet and it too will now show in HA. Granted there were some upgrades to HA while they were out for repair, so what changed?

I saw another thread dealing with a similar issue in which the cameras were not working since v.0.37. I am on v.0.39.3. I deleted the Amcrest items in the deps folder and upgraded HA and the amcrest stuff was reinstalled but it did not correct the issue.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas on how to get this working again? What am I missing? I did not change the configuration file, I just commented out the parts that dealt with the cameras, so nothing has changed there. I do see the cameras in the entity list, however.

1 Like
2

@StormStrikes could you share the error that you are getting?

I’m aware of a live streaming issue on 0.39.x version. The cameras display only 3 or 4 seconds of live streaming and then stop. Downgrading the aiohttp==1.2 makes the deal. I’m currently investigating this problem with and I might ping @pvizeli to talk about it.

However you should see the snapshot fine displayed at the webUI. If you are getting any traceback, could you share with us please?

1 Like
3

I am getting no errors and I do have the cameras set to the snapshot streaming source. I also am not using the all in one installer. I manually installed HA on a server and am running it from there. Everything else is working as it should.

4

Can you share your configuration?

5

configuration.yaml
camera: !include_dir_merge_list cameras/

ipcams.yaml in the cameras folder:

  - platform: amcrest
    name: Garage
    host: my_ip_address
    stream_source: snapshot
    username: myusername
    password: 'mypassword'

The view for the tab:

 garage_cam:
   name: Garage Camera
   entities:
     - camera.garage
6

Try to change your configuration as showed below. This is the configuration that I’m using on my garage camera as well:

- platform: amcrest
  name: Garage
  host: !secret amcrest_garage_host
  username: !secret amcrest_garage_username
  password: !secret amcrest_garage_password
  port: 80
  resolution: low 
  stream_source: mjpeg
7

Gave that a shot and restarted HA, and still no cameras showing up.

8

If you start HASS into debug mode, do you see any errors?

9

No, but that is primarily because I don’t know how to do that :grin:

10

@StormStrikes how about if we try a screen sharing session to troubleshoot this. If you want, we can try a teamviewer to see if we can get this fixed. Please let me know if you like the idea.

11

Id love to do that, but my hours are pretty jacked up. However, I am on my days off now so I can be far more flexible.

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@StormStrikes you can find me at gitter on HA channels and then we can schedule it on our best convenience.

13

Excellent! I will try and do that here soon. If you are up this late (well at least from my time perspective) then I will try and touch base with you after I get off work one night.

14

I just got an Amcrest IP2M-841W, and tried adding it to Home Assistant and ran into this issue with the live feed hanging up after a few seconds. It was doing this on HA version 0.41 and now still on 0.42. Is there any information that might be helpful in getting this problem solved? I’d really like to use my new camera.

15

@shivan thanks for reporting this problem.

There is an issue opened for that https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/issues/6884.

Downgrading to aiohttp==1.2 works however we still trying to understand the case of this problem.

Please post issues, logs or how to reproduce steps on this issue ticket to help us to get to the bottom of this issue.

16

Are there any decent instructions out there on how to do that? Thanks

17

@shivan you can try doing pip3 install aiohttp==1.2 but a lot of the new frontend is using the newer aiohttp version and I would not recommend to downgrade it on your production HA instance.

Do you see any traceback or error after a few seconds when the streaming freezes?

18

Yes, that is exactly what happens. I don’t have the error on hand as I have disabled the camera in HA. I’m actively using the camera and adding it back into HA wrecks the picture quality on the camera.

19

Any updates on a fix for this? Is there any additional information I can give you that would help?

Thanks for your hard work.

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I think the only way to fix that is to make a issue on aiohttp project and offer a debug instance.