Sky Camera - Remote Viewing

This page is still under construction 

By now hopefully you've setup your Tapo C325WB and have started capturing your video. But wait - there's still more tricks if you're wanting to share your CCTV with others. The Tapo app has a sharing feature which can be used to give others access and there is way to set your camera up as a Webcam so others can view it on a live stream web page

I'm not going to cover any detail on using the Tapo App for sharing, as it's pretty much explained in app an Tapo guides. Basically you generate a sharing link and share it with others. They will have to install the Tapo App though and to view the camera they need to use the app - which can be a bit limiting.

The other option is to setup your CCTV camera as a web cam and embed it's stream into a web page - think Shetland webcam. It's a bit technical and because of my setup I've only tested parts of it - but it does work and if you set it up send me a link to your Skycam Webcam 👍

Setting the CCTV as a Webcam

The Tapo cameras support the RSTP protocol. This allows a URL to be used to access the stream from your camera. The format of the URL is:

High Quality - rtsp://camera.ip.address:554/stream1

Low Quality - rtsp://camera.ip.address:554/stream2  

To work out the IP address of your camera, open the Tapo App, select your camera, open settings, select device info and you'll see your IP address. In my case the camera is on 192.168.1.111 so the high quality stream is rtsp://192.168.1.111:554/stream1

Now you can't just type this URL into a browser, it needs to be embedded into a plug in. But you can test it by using the VLC player. If you download the VLC player

I did follow the online guides to setting up an account on the camera which should require user ID & password, however for some reason this wasn't required. If you find it is required then the URL would be

rtsp://userid:pswd@camera.ip.address:554/stream2

The benefit of this would be you could use VLC plugin or ActiveX in a web page. This is where I'm a bit stumped as I've not built web pages etc and don't have a domain to publish it on.