You don’t need another machine running 24/7 since Camect runs on its own hardware.
But you may still have a reason to run both Camect and Blue Iris (I use both).
It's its own self contained unit...
Blue iris and camect can bring it in via rtsp...(mine is hooked up via rtsp)
Strange. I connected mine to my original doorbell (have to use a resistor) and it works just fine. The electronic chime that came with it is on the 3rd floor in my wife's office. Though I have an electronic door bell unit from home depot, not a mechanical one so I don't know how that plays out.
Yes, you can do this with the older PoE and WiFi doorbell versions. The new battery doorbell version does not support this without the Home Hub.
Speculation on my part, but the resistor is essentially putting a partial short across the power leads going to the Reolink. The resistance allows enough power to go to the Reolink to prevent it from shutting off but I suspect your digital chime will still sound with the voltage drop caused by the resistor. It's unlikely a mechanical chime would be as forgiving.
My backdoor reolink is the battery operated one (I couldn't get a network wire into the brick there, only standard 2 wire doorbell would fit due to it being two course and the way it would have to come up from the basement) and works fine with my Camect.
My digital chime still uses a 16v transformer so not sure. Typically if the resistor isn't in there the chime only comes on momentarily. (this applies to both units)
I assume you mean the WiFi one--neither of the older gen Reolink doorbells have batteries which is why they don't support mechanical chimes. In order for the mechanical chime to sound, the wires going to the doorbell need to be shorted which completes the 16-24 VAC circuit going to the mechanical chime. These wires also provide power to the doorbell so shorting them effectively removes the power to the doorbell. And without a battery to keep the doorbell powered on, it shuts down and reboots when the button is released.
The new gen unit does have a battery. It runs off the battery and the 16-24VAC going to the doorbell is used to charge the battery. Pressing the doorbell button shorts the voltage going to the doorbell which completes the circuit going to the mechanical chime. But since the doorbell is running on battery power it doesn't affect it other than temporarily interrupting the voltage going to its charging circuit.
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Right I have the wifi one on the back door, and the poe on the front door. I have a split circuit to the single digital chime (right not mechanical) and it works fine for that. Been very happy overall. I don't have the battery one... Both mine were bought in feb so I'm not sure where that places them...
I started setting up the Home Hub and doorbell and initial setup was quick and relatively painless. The stream URLs reference the IP address of the Home Hub and the hub serves the stream from the doorbell.
The URLs look like this (192.168.11.198 is the Home Hub's IP address and Preview_NN is the camera number):
rtsp://admin:password@192.168.11.198/Preview_01_main
rtsp://admin:password@192.168.11.198/Preview_01_sub
Both streams display correctly in VLC but that's where the good news ends. Adding the doorbell to Blue Iris causes BI to hang and eventually display a "Lost connection to service" message before ultimately crashing. The only way to get BI running again is to disable RTSP/ONVIF on the Reolink Home Hub. I've tried rebooting the computer Blue Iris is running on, rebooting the Reolink Home Hub all to no avail.
The RTSP and ONVIF port numbers are correct and match those in the Home Hub settings. I'm running the latest version of Blue Iris (5.9.9.11) and the latest firmware on the Home Hub (v3.3.0.352_24092629) and the Battery Doorbell (v3.0.0.4125_24101008).
My BI camera settings look like this:
I've also tried using the Find/Inspect... button to discover the camera. It finds the Reolink hub and populates the main stream profile field but nothing is displayed when I save the settings and BI hangs, errors out, and eventually crashes as with the Generic/ONVIF settings.
I opened a support ticket with Reolink and will report back with their suggestions. I haven't mounted the doorbell so can't yet speak to how well it works, but unless support can help getting this to work with BI it's likely going back.
I would suggest you also check BI support forums as well.
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I haven't posted on the BI forums but did search and there was nothing related to the new battery doorbell and Home Hub. I'll wait to see what Reolink support has to say. I suspect their going to point me in the BI direction and BI is going to point me in the opposite direction.
Can you add onviv straight from the doorbell? (you should, this is how I do both my battery and my poe ones) format should be onvif://username:password@address:8000/server_URL
I don't have BI so can't offer much beyond that.
rtsp should be rtsp://admin:password@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx by itself...
Unfortunately, no. This generation doorbell doesn't support RTSP/ONVIF directly. The hub maintains its own 5GHz and 2.4GHz WiFi AP. The doorbell (and up to 7 other Reolink devices) connects to the hub via the hub's wireless network and the hub serves the stream. Each camera on the hub essentially uses the same RSTP URL with the exception of the channel/camera number.
So URL for camera 1 is:
rtsp://admin:password@192.168.11.198/Preview_01_main
Camera 2 is:
rtsp://admin:password@192.168.11.198/Preview_02_main
etc.
The bottom line is that the new gen Battery Doorbell is very different from the last gen WiFi and PoE Doorbells.
Dumb question. Have you tried just getting it on the main wifi network then using a web browser to get to the camera itself?
I have. The settings show it's connected to my home wifi network and has an IP address of 192.168.11.25. Oddly, the device doesn't show up on a network scan, isn't pingable, or reachable using a web browser. Odder still is that the Home Hub sees it and displays the video stream. Same goes for the Reolink Android and desktop apps.
When the doorbell is connected to the Home Hub's wifi network, its IP address is in the 172.16.25.XX range.
That is really a strange way to have their camers hook up...
Yeah, I agree. My guess is that because it's a battery model, they're limiting what can access and wake the doorbell. I'll be powering it with 24V from the doorbell xformer so having it awake all the time shouldn't be an issue but I'd imagine battery life would suck if it was running under battery power and something was randomly and needlessly accessing it.
TLDR; The new battery doorbell seems poorly suited for use with Blue Iris (and possibly 3rd party NVRs).
Reolink has generally been responsive but after two weeks of back and forths with screen shots, detailed steps on how to reproduce the problem, and Wireshark packet captures with annotated Blue Iris logs, they suggested using only the sub-stream to see if that fixed the issue. Surprisingly it worked, but it also meant that I’d be recording at 1024 X 1024 rather than 2048 X 2048 and at a significantly lower bitrate to boot. After explaining that I didn’t consider this an acceptable solution, support responded they were unable to duplicate the issue on their end and had no further suggestions. They offered to put me in touch with their after sales team for additional feedback.
I played with various BI settings and finally got it running with the main stream by increasing the Blue Iris Receive buffer from 6MB to 12MB. While this fixes the crashing issue, the video is a mess with choppiness, stalling, lag, and other issues regardless of whether the stream is displayed in BI, the Reolink Android app, or the Reolink Windows desktop App. The lag and choppiness make anything near real-time viewing impossible. In one case, it took nearly 30 seconds from the time I walked into view of the doorbell until the Reolink Android app showed me walking on screen.
There are a number of other annoyances that make this device unsuitable for Blue Iris use:
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This doorbell is primarily designed as a battery operated device. As a result, the device goes to sleep after 5 minutes of no detected activity. While that makes sense for a strictly battery powered doorbell, this device also accepts a 24VAC power connection (from a doorbell transformer) to recharge the battery which should eliminate the need to auto sleep. While Blue Iris can mostly get around this issue by sending it RTSP keep alive packets, there are occasional camera “No signal” warnings and the transition from sleep to awake does some funky things to the video exposure that causes motion false alerts in BI. While I’d probably need to live with the former, it might be possible to get around the latter by adjusting BI’s AI settings, I’m not sure I want to bother.
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There’s also some question regarding whether the doorbell can recharge the battery quickly enough when running in an always awake state. I posted on Reolink’s reddit asking if anyone had managed to get the doorbell running with BI. A moderator responded and indicated that the battery was only being supplied a trickle charge and was likely to fully discharge within a couple of days even if connected to power fulltime. I have a 24VAC 40VA transformer supplying power to my existing doorbell and was surprised hear that would be the case so I asked Reolink support to clarify. Their response:
“If you use a 24V AC transformer, it does not mean a trickle charge like the DC power adapter. The 24V AC transformer should charge the camera more quickly than the 24V DC.”
I’m not particularly encouraged by “should charge the camera more quickly than the 24V DC.”
I had high hopes for this doorbell. ONVIF support should make it compatible with 3rd party products and while it’s possible to get it limping along with Blue Iris, for me the problems, limitations, and annoyances far outweigh the functionality and features. With the extended holiday return period I’ve got another 5 weeks or so to decide whether or not to keep it--I’m pretty sure I’ll be returning it.
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Installed A Reolink POE doorbell in April using Blue Iris. Both the main and sub stream work well. Not one issue with the device.
The only camera that is suggested by the folks at IpCamTalk is the Reolink doorbell camera. Their other camera offerings are not endorsed.
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Yeah, that's what makes this particular model so disappointing.
If I want Reolink to HE integration using Blue Iris, then Blue Iris needs to be running on a Windows machine?
Correct, blue iris runs on windows only. And that PC has to be on all the time for blue iris to do its thing.
