Help Please - TAPO C120 RTSP Configuration

[jester192]

tldr; Will someone please share your config in BI for C120? ALSO, how close to real-time are you getting from your camera feed and the real-world?

For anyone following the fiasco with the Wyze docker bridge scenario (https://github.com/mrlt8/docker-wyze-br ... sions/1437 - https://github.com/mrlt8/docker-wyze-br ... sions/1430), I'm now looking at moving over from my Wyze cameras and getting into something that's truly RTSP supported. (right now I'm running a Windows docker VM & an Ubuntu Server docker VM, it's just bandaids tape) The Wyze docker bridge really is amazing, but it also tends to have about a 97% uptime for my cameras, which is awesome, but murphy tends to kick you in the face and I always seem to be wanting to look at the camera at that 3%. So I'm ok with slowly migrating my 12 Wyze cameras away if I can find something a little more stable. A few folks are suggesting perhaps TAPO cameras may be better. I understand I get what I pay for, and $25 cameras are, well, cheap, so perhaps I'm trading in one cheap Wyze $25 problem for another, but it's worth a shot for a fun little project.

Anyway, Amazon delivered my first two TAPO cameras today, and for the life of me I can't get BI to get them to see them. I've got the camera setup, it's showing in the app, I can ping the camera so I know the networking is good. I've gone into he capp, 'created' the "Camera Account" so the RTSP credentials are setup on the camera. When I scan the IP in BI, it says "RTSP port detected!". I'm taking some queues off TAPO's guide (https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/faq/2680/), but I haven't seemed to crack the code to get BI to see the camera/stream, so hoping someone can share their config here. A screenshot would be awesome, but I'll take anything you're willing to share with me.

Thank you for your help!


ALSO.... one thing I'm always chasing, is as close to a real-world connection as is possible on these cameras. Perhaps with a $25 solution, I'm just not being realistic. But part of what I'm shooting for is when the doorbell rings, can I look at BI which is up on another monitor and get as close to real-time as is possible to see if I need to go to the door, or was it just another one of my wife's daily-Amazon deliveries. What are you all seeing with these TAPO cameras and RTSP? Are you getting near real-time? Or are you getting 2-3 second delay, 30 second delay? What are your results?

Thanks for the info and help!!

[Terry]

This work for me

[jester192]

Thank you.

With your help I was able to get the camera communicating with BI.


What kind of lag/latency are you getting between the camera? What I'm doing is turning on the timestamp of the camera as well as the timestamp from BI. Having the two clocks up shows me the time differential. I do this for my Wyze cameras as well. With this TAPO camera, I'm getting about a 15 second delay/lag time. With my Wyze cameras, I get about a 5 second delay/lag time on average. I'm not sure how picky I can really be with $25 cameras. I am curious if anyone has found any settings to decrease the delay/lag time in BI. Perhaps playing with fps, buffer, or anything like that, I'm open to any findings anyone has had.

Thank you community!

[PaulDaisy]

In my experience Tapos do not allow to change the FPS. They will go 20 FPS in daylight and switch to 10 FPS at night and there is nothing you can do. Mine do not have any lag though, they show the same time stamp as the PoE cameras.

Are yours time synched? Could be that their clocks are off. I don't think they support NTP and they sync to their own cloud, so if firewalled like mine are they will drift eventually. But 15 s seems like too much for that, must be a LAN (unlikely) or BI buffer size (more likely) issue.

[kejasi]

This work for me

This also works for the Tapo C121. I believe 120 vs 121 is simply a different unit color.

[btb604]

the example of the "Network IP Camera Configuration here is what I use also