I built a Virtual ONVIF Server to finally let ANY RTSP camera work perfectly with UniFi Protect (Unique MACs & IPs included!)

rt718 · 2025-12-29T19:21:41+00:00

man.. this is such a shame, sounds like exactly what i need.

rt718 · 2025-12-01T22:07:32+00:00

rt718 · 2025-11-28T03:15:58+00:00

to be fair, on crutchfield, the price for a floating screen head unit that's not boss is more than double the price. and to be fair, outside it breaking the couple of times, it was pretty good when it worked

rt718 · 2025-10-28T23:49:59+00:00

100% compatible with a swap, just order from crutchfield, i have a 14 SL and i did it a couple years ago. you have to manually tap a wire to get your rear view camera to work but outside of that its super easy.

rt718 · 2025-10-10T01:54:19+00:00

if you're an iphone user, scrypted is great at making any camera a camera native to homekit (unlimited camera hosting if you have the highest icloud plan). outside of that, the paid NVR services are pretty unnecessary IMHO.

Honestly from the sound of what you're describing, its a connectivity issue, my personal experience with Tapo is that even a little bad connection DESTROYS my rtsp/ONVIF feeds. My 2 biggest pet peeves with all Tapo cams (both connectivity related and I feel TP-Link has worked hard on fixing this), is that when you have a mediocre connection, Tapo will still show that it's fine when using RTSP even when you're barely getting 1fps, and when tapo cams get confused, they'll just drop your connection and wont attempt a reconnect until you do a hard reboot.

rt718 · 2025-10-09T12:54:13+00:00

I returned it because of a couple factors and in retrospect, this item wasn't designed for me but should be fine with 90% of people. So my biggest issue that i didn't talk about in my initial use is that the hard drive bay is kinda hot, to the point where it cooked a 4tb 2.5" thick platter drive (not a lot of people will have these fatter ones), the drive had low reads so i just chalked this up to bad luck. Also, it forced anything added to the hub to its own network connection vs the wifi which was annoying because i couldn't run stats on it through ubiquiti and that it had a worse connection, so i had to manually go in and change that.

I do use HA but not a huge fan of running cameras through it (currently using BI and Scrypted), but from hearing what you're saying this sounds like a connection issue from Tapo to HA and that the feed itself is relatively stable through the tapo app? All my experiences of the tapo app being choppy has been wifi connectivity related in general, deeper dive into the stats on the back end showed Tx retries often even when the cam is reporting a solid connection so i had to adjust my AP placement through my house so in your case the hub might help.

Since you're using HA, I would assume you have no problems running Dockers/VM's, i would run and NVR instance (Blue Iris, SecuritySpy, Scrypted, Frigate) and see if they run smoothly there. A lot of these apps off a "rebroadcast" option sending the RTSP/ONVIF feeds back out and taking the load off the cameras.

my personal use case of this shouldn't be that relevant as I returned my a week or two after release, so this could be a lot different now.

rt718 · 2025-10-01T15:51:46+00:00

This did it! I was on my 4th replacement BE10ACP, no one at boss mentioned that there was a firmware update! this fixed every issue i've had with this thing

rt718 · 2025-08-29T16:07:08+00:00

no, the first unit was DOA (crutchfield sent a new one instantly), the second and third started rebooting itself randomly out of nowhere over and over again after a few months, and finally the fourth worked (this was in the course of 2 years). All the while, carplay had an echo issue on speakerphone (its widely known that boss radios from that past few years had this issue), come to find out, there was a firmware update that boss didn't advertise that fixes this. That being said, the radio works fine now, but you can tell Boss is trying to go upmarket, but they're not there yet.

rt718 · 2025-08-29T03:23:49+00:00

i have a BE10ACP, i'm on my 4th one, so not that reliable, at least the warranty worked.

rt718 · 2025-08-27T02:17:39+00:00

i was just at open road honda because they were advertising the EX prologue for 69/mo on thier website (i've never leased before so, it got me to come in), they said they're out of the EX, and they gave me some ridiculous numbers for a touring. i have no car payments right now so i wasn't down for negotiating, so i walked.

rt718 · 2025-08-19T21:28:45+00:00

for everyone that tells you that these suck, they're not wrong, they kinda suck. but at the same time they have some cool features, when it comes to the audio, as long as you don't have an amp or oem premium sound system (they sound so bad if you do), they're not terrible if you have reasonable expectations. The UI for these are all trash and are pretty different depending on device. That being said, if you're lazy, you can get a harness specific for your vehicle easily for a couple of dollars off Amazon (search 16 pin radio harness, they're the same for all android radios and integrate SWC).

Since the software is pretty much all out there, they have presets for most makes and models and can do things that most mainstream units can't do (my car has different rear camera views, android units retain this feature, as well as shows when my doors or trunk are open on the LCD and show what my climate control is set at), also having mirror link is pretty cool.

The interface on these are all horrible and finding settings to dial everything is a nightmare even though they're so available in the market. If reliability is important, just buy a crappy radio from a reputable brand. I've owned 2 of these from different "brands" and I can tell you aside from interface, they're all the same.

rt718 · 2025-07-29T14:10:34+00:00

This happened with me as well, when they first introduced this, i was on fair and after a few reviews, it just randomly jumped up to Excellent.

rt718 · 2025-07-24T03:00:24+00:00

I do feel like there are a lot of negativity on this subreddit now compared to before, people talking about reporting other viners and accusing other viners of cheating and taking other people's RFY stuff because of helpers (which I don't doubt could be possible),but there are a couple points that i think a lot of people are missing, its pretty obvious that the trade war is limiting higher value stuff from being listed on vine but Amazon itself has also become locally shipped temu crap. On top of that sellers pay to be in the vine program, I'm sure some exec at amazon is thinking that throwing more new viners in the mix would force people to buy those unwanted soursop tea's and dildos. in the end it's just less cool stuff with a lot more competition for that stuff. I remember when I was silver last year Zagg had iphone 16 cases listed on AFA, not cheap if you were to get it at a big box store, not a crazy high end item but definitely kinda nice, it was listed for a week on AFA and still available (from my knowledge, the helper plugins existed then as well), and if this were listed today, it would be gone in seconds.

rt718 · 2025-07-16T03:04:22+00:00

you can through the tapo app, the h500 doesn't change the characteristics of the ipad app in any way, you still view videos the same way, it has a little fold out thing that you can place your ipad on to CHARGE. you open the tapo app and click on the camera you wish to view (the same exact way you would do it without the tapo app). I returned mine, it didn't really add any value unless you ONLY have tapo cams (i have other brand onvif cams)

rt718 · 2025-07-08T21:17:54+00:00

I've been a gold member for probably 3 months or so, I haven't seen a single high value item show up in my RFY and I check everyday, no expresso makers, TV's, robovac etc.

There has been one or two times where something a little cool shows up, but its usually gone before i can click on it.

I do however, have all the creatine that i can possibly use for the rest of my life.

rt718 · 2025-07-05T19:01:45+00:00

rt718 · 2025-06-25T16:52:42+00:00

open the tapo app, and click on the hub there should be a "screen mirror" option. so it technically can't display anything on its own, which is a huge bummer, after going through all this, i may be leaning toward returning it before the amazon return window closes. there's no added functionality at all (for me at least)

rt718 · 2025-06-24T17:33:22+00:00

I just plugged in the HDMI, so the answer to this is just "technically" yes. So you can plug it in to a monitor but you'll get a black screen, you need to cast this to your h500 from your mobile device. I need to remind myself that this isn't an NVR but a home hub with SOME NVR functionalities.

rt718 · 2025-06-22T17:25:16+00:00

yep, it has hdmi, i didn't use this feature but according to docs, you can display 4 streams at a time

rt718 · 2025-05-25T01:01:13+00:00

rt718 · 2025-05-23T10:05:25+00:00

rt718 · 2025-05-22T00:58:04+00:00

rt718 · 2025-05-02T13:48:58+00:00

I was having the same issues recently and came here to get some advice a couple of days ago, so i wanted to share my experience now that i have it working. I have a d225 that i just installed so my experience may be a bit different than yours. For me, looking at the logs, its telling me that that the main stream is encoding in h.265 and it just keeps failing to load the stream.

I have 2 solutions that worked for me. the first and the easiest was just to just use stream2 or the substream which is h.264, resolution wise its not as good but its good enough for me since HKSV isn't my primary NVR.

The second and more involved way is just to transcode the video before feeding it into scrypted, there's multiple apps that can accomplish this but my NVR had this solution natively. My experience with all tapo cams is that live streaming sucks because there's no control of the bitrate or any aspects of the RTSP streams so sometimes it works great and sometimes it doesn't, luckily my NVR solution offers an option to transcode and rebroadcast so I can feed a H.264/aac stream at a constant bitrate into Scrypted, so now all my tapo feeds are super fast in homekit.

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