ActionTile/Smartthing Support!

The only issue using Tinycam and ActionTiles that I have seen is that the Wyze camera feeds tend to “freeze”, meaning they are not showing the live view feed. The only solution I have found is refreshing the Actiontiles page and they then begin to show the live feed again.

Does anyone else have this issue, and if so, did you find a more elegant solution?

  1. Does the feed also freeze inside the tinyCam Monitor App itself?
  2. Try some of the optional parameters to the tinyCam webserver to possibly lower the workload on the ActionTiles browser. You can have tinyCam send a lower-resolution image, compressed image, and lower frame-rate. e.g.,
    1. http://192.168.0.3:8083/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=2&fps=1&compression=80&resolution=320x240
  3. Try using the "still image" config option on the Media Tile so that you can input a Refresh Rate of perhaps 30 or 60 minutes? A refresh of the Media Tile might be sufficient for it to unfreeze and re-establish streaming, instead of having to reload the entire Panel.
Let me know what you find!

Our own Forum Topic on this is: https://support.actiontiles.com/communities/12/topics/3441-tinycam-pro-android-app-web-server-stream-rtsp-and-wyze-cam-to-actiontiles

Terry,

Thanks for the response! Will provide some additional information.

  1. The feed in TinyCam is not freezing. That feed is continually showing as live.
  2. I attempted to change the parameters for the tile in the browser as you suggested. This did not rectify the problem. Although these options are very nice to adjust to optimize the image in action tiles.
  3. Your suggestion of using "still image" as the option on the media tile with a refresh rate has corrected the issue from what I can tell at this time. I also like this solution a lot more than refreshing the whole panel. I am just confused as to why this option appears to work as showing a live feed. I understand how the video stream option would produce a tile with a live feed of the camera; however, isn't the still image not suppose to display a video feed? Setting the media tile to still image appears to display a live feed (the time indicator from the Wyze camera is functioning and indicating the view is live, even without a refresh rate). How does the still image media option function to be able to show a live camera feed?

An alternate solution (if you are using Fully Kiosk) is to enable “Auto Reload” in the Fully settings. I have mine set to 600 seconds (10 min), so anytime I look at my panel, it’s less than 10 minutes “old”. This usually keeps the camera tiles and the rest of the panel pretty current.

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I am using Fully Kiosk browser as well and have tried the auto reload settings to fix the issue as well. It seemed to also work except for the occasions when the browser would reload the page and instead of displaying the tiles it would display the panel selection page.

Is there a setting to prevent the panel selection page from showing up as if the user went back to change the panel?

As long as your “Start URL” in Fully settings is set to your panel’s full URL, not just app.actiontiles.com, then it should reload correctly every time. If you decide to create a new panel, you will need to update the Start URL in Fully.

I have seen occasionally when it tries to reload, it will say “you are not authorized to view this content” (or something like that). If that happens, change your start URL to www.google.com, save it, close Fully. Then reopen Fully, and set the start URL back to your panel.

J,

Thanks for the information. Inputting the full URL for the panel of choice makes sense. I believe I have only been using the app.actiontiles.com URL. Will definitely make this change tonight and do some testing.

I think with the suggestions from Terry and yourself, I should be able to get the camera feeds functioning perfectly.

Thanks!

"isn’t the still image not suppose to display a video feed?"
We wrap both still images, gifs, and mpeg streams in the same HTML tag: . The only difference is that the "Still Image" adds the option for a periodic refresh; handy for cameras that offer JPG snapshots that can be pulled every 5 seconds or so, or for weather / weather radar / traffic maps that are updated every 30 or 60 minutes.

But if a video stream is periodically freezing, then using the still image + refresh option (with a value of 3600 seconds for an hourly re-connect to the stream source…) might solve the problem. This is less resource intensive and less obtrusive than reloading the entire app / Panel.

Now that IFTTT support is available, its simple to automate the Wyze camera using Virtual Switches. I created a vSwitch called Present, and use Smartthings presence to toggle it when i leave or return. in IFTTT, I use the switch trigger to enable/disable the motion sensing. These cameras are AWESOME! I do wish IFTTT supported a Mode Trigger though. Now to see if i can get ActionTiles to function properly, and I think we have a winner

Does tinycam feed comes from LAN or from internet? Are we looking at 100kbs up from cam to cloud and 100kbs down to tinycam?

tinyCam Monitor Pro’s web server runs on your LAN (unless you subscribe to their optional “tinyCam Cloud service”, or you use port-forwarding on your router or a VPN).

So no extra internet bandwidth is involved.

Running the tinyCam webserver on the same Tablet that you use for viewing (same tablet as ActionTiles, for example) will help minimize LAN traffic too, but at the expense of using up CPU/GPU cycles on the Tablet.

There’s an alpha version of tinyCam that can run on rPi, but not many results yet. Running on Windows in an Android emulator adds complexity as BlueStacks and others use NAT for their network connection… makes it difficult to reach the web server.

 

Thank you Terry for your answer, it’s very well explained.

 

What about the feed from the cameras to tinycam tho? To my knowledge, they won’t route on lan and will need to get thru Internet won’t they? If they do, while I have an unlimited internet package, we still look at 200kbs (100up/100down to tinycam) per cam, which means somewhere around 1mbs in my case.

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"What about the feed from the cameras to tinycam tho? To my knowledge, they won’t route on lan and will need to get thru Internet won’t they?"
Correct. Wyze Cam's do not provide any "local access" (RTSP, ONVIF, MJPEG, etc.) at this time. It is a popular feature request.

Bump…eagerly waiting on Smartthings support. Just provide the basics of access to the Smartthings cloud…the online developer community can help with the device handler(s)!

But I wouldn’t be surprised if Samsung drags their feet supporting this. Samsung has a long history of “not made here” attitude.

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1 year later. there is still no way to easly integrate wyze stream into actiontiles/sharptools (need other software some as tinycam). these tile apps seem to use MJPEG streams and not able to use RTSP directly.
is there an issue with wyzecam that holds it from supporting MJPEG to? is this in the works? is it planned?
thanks

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It’s unfortunate that a new standard video streaming protocol (for direct from camera to browser) has not evolved.

MJPEG is highly inefficient (frame by frame compression only - no use of information between key frames) and does not support audio. This makes it nearly useless for anything except low resolution.

I suspect that efficient compression takes more processing power than is typically onboard cameras - and perhaps the load is shared by the Cloud; but RTSP streaming seems to contradict this.

So why don’t browsers which can embed various HTML5 video containers include RTSP as a supported format? Or if not RTSP - then why can’t camera and browser makers agree on 1 or 2 of the dozens of choices?

There’s apparently much more complexity to this than we can guess. Whether it is solely a technical matter or one of business strategy, etc. is a part of the mystery.

Can you tell me what you used as the refresh rate when you set the media tile to be a still image? Also when you changed from video stream to still imagine did you adjust the camera URL at all?

I’m experiencing the same issue you were having and I’m trying to find a way to resolve it.

is there any update to this? direct integration with action tiles, smart things and similar tools is a very-near necessity at this point.

The band-aid patchwork systems are clunky and break constantly, and at least in my situation, this has me re-evaluating Wyze as my main smart home product.

I suppose alternatively, Wyze could create their own dashboard system that can be run on a tablet.

Welcome back @KGG. This isn’t a #wishlist or #roadmap topic that Wyze is tracking. I would recommend checking those categories for what you’re asking about. :slight_smile:

Search Wishlist (enter your search word/s after #wishlist in the search box)
Search Roadmap (enter your search word/s after #roadmap in the search box)

Please read through How to Use the Wishlist and How to Read the Roadmap.