Any ideas? Does the stream need to be initialized or "awakened"?

  @TikiTaco I'm having the same poblem. If I'm watching on the tapo app on my iPhone it connects in vlc right away, if I close the app I can't connect.  Firmware 1.3.5.

  @NtroP 

They've quietly REMOVED RTSP.  According to support (see below), the solution, "please buy a different camera".
Also, I disabled auto-firmware update after getting this. It still auto-updated. To make matters worse, we now even get a nag screen telling us something like  "You've watched the camera for over 5 minutes with no input, would you like to continue?". I even bought a solor charger to overcome battery issues. At least give us config options. Can we not manage our own battery life, tp-link?

They've gone out of their way to remove the ability to actually view the camera. This is my 1st and LAST tp-link camera.

"

C425 is a low-power battery camera. For battery-operated machines, it is more difficult for RTSP to realize the functions of wake-up and play live view, so RTSP on battery camera is still in the beta stage. 

The current design is not able to balance the RTSP feature and low power consumption for the time being, we may disable this feature in the future. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We are very sorry to say that the upcoming firmware version 1.3.5 is the last version of the C425 to support RTSP, so if you wish to keep this feature, we recommend that you turn off automatic updates after this update.

However, we still recommend that if you want to use RTSP for monitoring, please use normal no-battery cameras, they are more compatible with RTSP (Keep fetching the live view) and don't have to worry about battery issues.
"