TP-Link TAPO Doorbell Camera D225 / Blue Iris

[eyeball]

Greetings. Posting this as information/FYI.

BI Version: 5.9.9.65

I just managed to get the Tapo D225 (Firmware 1.1.19) working with BI.

The standard settings for "Tapo" (From BI "Make" Dropdown) don't work for the D225 and cause BI to crash. Restarting BI would immediately crash again. The only thing that would allow me to restart BI is to delete the newly added doorbell camera from the registry.

The generic RTSP doesn't work either and supplying "/stream1" in Main causes BI to crash also.

What ended up working is supplying "/stream2" in Main designation along with "Generic/ONVIF" and Model: *RTSP H.264/H.265/MJPG/MPEG4".




I didn't try increasing the receive buffer for /stream1 - that may have made a difference, not sure, or it could be that there's some kind of H.265 incompatibility with BI and Tapo D225's H.265 decoding...but I'm only guessing.

I did try /stream1 outside of BI and the Tapo app in the VLC media player, and it worked fine...here's the /stream1 Codec info from VLC:



Here's the /stream2 Codec:




H265 (/stream1) vs H264 (stream2) ... /stream2 is of course lower resolution, but I'm glad to get it working in any resolution. Out of curiosity, does anyone know where the problem is with /stream1? Maybe it has to do with video hardware acceleration (mine is set to "Intel" in general BI settings->Cameras tab)...?

As an aside, I do have a few Tapo bullet cameras, model C320WS, and they all work fine with "Tapo" selected from the "Make" dropdown and /stream1 specified. Both the D225 and the C320WS have 2k resolution configured in the Tapo app.

Using the VLC player, the code for the C320WS "/stream1" shows this:




Since the D225 Doorbell camera uses H265 for /stream1 while the older (?) C320WS uses H264 for /stream1, perhaps the issues lies with how BI handles H265? Or maybe there are settings in BI for H265 that I didn't set properly?

Anyone have any insight on this - it's not that big of a deal, just a curiosity, and I'm glad to have it working in BI even on the lower resolution.

Cheers!

 

[Vansmak]

@eyeball Did you ever find a solution for this? I just replaced my Amcrest AD410 with the D225 and have been very impressed with the wider FOV and image quality. However I'm struggling to keep BlueIris connected to the camera. It keep dropping connection randomly. Hoping to find a solution so I don't have to return it.

 

[Bruce_H]

@eyeball Did you ever find a solution for this? I just replaced my Amcrest AD410 with the D225 and have been very impressed with the wider FOV and image quality. However I'm struggling to keep BlueIris connected to the camera. It keep dropping connection randomly. Hoping to find a solution so I don't have to return it.

Could you let us know what version of BI you are using?

 

[eyeball]

Hey @Vansmak - unfortunately I don't have an answer.

I started using several of the Tapo C460 battery cameras in remote places around my property. Since those will not work with BI, I started using the Tapo app, and just moved the doorbell cameras (D225) over to the Tapo app too.

The Tapo app isn't as convenient as BI (which I still use for all of my other cameras), but it does provide some handy utilities such as being able to answer the door via the phone (the "doorbell" rings on the phone). There's also Amazon echo integration that (if you use Amazon Fire Stick for your TV) will display the doorbell cameras on the TV when someone rings the doorbell, kind of handy.

I'd rather have everything on BI, but having a separate, independent camera system alongside BI is useful too (redundancy).

You might reach out to BI support & see if you can get some help there.

Good luck - be sure to post any updates here or in another thread - those Tapo D225 doorbell cameras are nice; worth getting it to work with BI smoothly.

 

[Vansmak]

Could you let us know what version of BI you are using?

I'm on the latest stable release: 6.0.9.17