Friday, March 6, 2015

ELEC new wireless talk camera

ELEC has recently come out with a new wireless camera that allows you to talk out of it.  Considering it is only $40 it is far cheaper than any other competition with that feature so I thought I would try it out.  Unfortunately I was in for a big disappointment.

I was initially pretty disappointed that it lacks an RJ45 port to configure it with, i'm guessing it uses bluetooth or it's own wifi hotspot for initial configuration, either way it requires you to download their app onto your phone for initial configuration.  This is the first camera I have seen that does not have an ethernet port, a big shortcoming in many ways in my opinion.

The web interface for it is viewing only, no configuration changes, which means I need to use my phone for any administrative changes which I do not like.

Their software has a spot for a static IP address, but when I tried to put one in it would not save.  After contacting their support I was told it only supports DHCP.  Another huge shortcoming.  Granted you could put a static reservation in your router for it, so I could live with this if I had to.

Support for elec on the web does not exist yet, so if you get one you will be relying on blog posts like this one, your own whit, or on their support support@eleccctv.com which sometimes responds and sometimes does not.  If they do respond you have to ask only one simple little question at a time, they don't seem to be able to actually read emails.

I had a momentary spark of hope when I attempted adding it to my XProtect system as a generic OnVif device and it was actually recognised.  Unfortunately, XProtect completely loses connection with it if the microphone is enabled (I have covered that issue in my post about dlink products), and still loses connection for a couple of seconds every 30 seconds or so even with the microphone disabled.  I'm not sure who's fault that is just yet. (see below for fix)

Unless I get some more of these issues figured out I will not be buying another Model: EL -Wini001 720P wifi security camera.

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Edit: Using wireshark I was able to get the url for the video feed as rtsp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/live0.264?user=admin&passwd=Password

Using that I setup a Universal driver in XProtect with:
Codec: H264
Streaming Mode: RTP (UDP)
Keep alive: Default
Connection URI: live0.264
RTSP port: 554

So far I have not lost connection to the camera, as long as the microphone is disabled in XProtect.  Wireshark indicates that the audio is G.711 PCMU, however I have not gotten that to work yet.  At least this camera is not a total loss anymore, if I could get the audio to work I think I would even call it a decent camera.  At 1280 x 720 the video quality is definitely far superior to what the dlinks offer.

The connection URI seems to be live0.264 or live1.264 depending on which of the two feeds the camera offers you want to tap into.

UPDATE:
It looks like I was able to get the OnVif to work for this camera.  For some reason changing some things in the config resets the cameras protocol from RTP/UDP to RTP/RTSP/HTTP/TCP.  Simply changing that setting back again to RTP/UDP fixes the issue and the camera works great.