I had an issue with unstable WIFI that the Tapo team made a custom firmware to resolve (and it seemed to do the trick nicely). I stayed on that custom firmware until 1.3.4 came out, which included the wifi fix that was in my custom firmware. However, after installing that firmware I am having new issues.

 

1. The camera now routinely sits there with a red (or perhaps amber) light on it. I can connect to it from the app on my phone, so it is not disconnected from the wifi like used to be the case before Tapo fixed that. However, it is still not how it should be, since it previously (once Tapo sorted the wifi connection issues) would have a nice green light on it.

 

2. (more annoying) I use software called Shinobi (people on this forum may have heard of it) to view and record images from several CCTV cameras I have, including the C520WS. This has worked perfectly for me, up until now when it is unable to display the feed from the C520WS camera (all other cameras are still working fine). I use stream 1, with the following URL:

 

'rtsp://username:password1@192.168.1.220:554/stream1'

 

Shinobi throws up errors of this type:

 

[h264 @ 0x559d822960] SEI type 764 size 272 truncated at 256

 

It also complains about the timestamp of the feed.

 

If I change the feed to stream2, the video displays properly. However, that is low resolution and I would like to have the higher resolution feed, since I record it in case something happens and I need to review the video.

 

I saw on Reddit (and also on this forum) that people had similar issues fairly recently with stream1 not working, but stream2 working on a different camera.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tapo/comments/1jq6ogf/people_having_choppylaggy_issues_with_rtsp_after/

 

https://community.tp-link.com/us/smart-home/forum/topic/787850?sortDir=DESC&page=1

 

This was with the C120 camera.

 

I see a suggestion in the Tapo forum to remove the rtsp connection in third party software and then set it up again. I can perhaps try that, but with the stream2 feed working, I don't think the issue is with the Shinobi software or rtsp connection. I did also perform a ffprobe (I am on Linux) and I get this:

 

Stream1:

 

[h264 @ 0x5bd21c3d99c0] SEI type 764 size 34 truncated at 32
    Last message repeated 3 times
Input #0, rtsp, from 'rtsp://username:password01@192.168.1.220:554/stream1':
  Metadata:
    title           : Session streamed by "TP-LINK RTSP Server"
  Duration: N/A, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
  Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (Main), yuvj420p(pc, progressive), 1920x1080, 20 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn
  Stream #0:1: Audio: pcm_alaw, 8000 Hz, mono, s16, 64 kb/s

 

Stream2:

 

Input #0, rtsp, from 'rtsp://username:password@192.168.1.220:554/stream2':
  Metadata:
    title           : Session streamed by "TP-LINK RTSP Server"
  Duration: N/A, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
  Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (Main), yuvj420p(pc, progressive), 640x360, 20 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn
  Stream #0:1: Audio: pcm_alaw, 8000 Hz, mono, s16, 64 kb/s

 

You can see that there is an error message about truncation of SEI with stream1 that is not the case for stream2.

 

I have to admit that I am not expert enough to know exactly what all this means, but the issue of stream1 not working has only started since I updated to the latest firmware, so I do think that there is an issue with the firmware.

 

Anyone have the same issue and can the Tapo team help with this please.

 

Thank you,

 

Nick