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Camera Troubleshooting

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Dusty Greif edited this page Jan 20, 2024 · 24 revisions

Live streaming may not work for all users. I have done all that I can to make it reliable, but ultimately you should use the Ring app if you want the best experience possible. If you are having live streaming issues, please help yourself to the troubleshooting info below, but do not open an issue or request help as I won't be able to provide any beyond what you find here. In general, live streaming issues are typically related to your unique network setup, and are not something I can help you debug.

Common Problems

  • Home network or Phone on VPN
  • Homebridge server and Home Hubs on different networks
  • Need to reboot devices
  • Ring end-to-end encryption enabled (this is not supported by this plugin)

Live Stream Troubleshooting

Live streams in the homebridge-ring plugin work out of the box for most users, but sometimes require some troubleshooting. The requests and data for the live streams flow through many network devices along their path to screen so problems can pop up anywhere along the way. If you are having issues with your live streams, please follow these steps. You can try live streaming after each step to see if your issue has been fixed.

  1. Make sure you are on the latest version of the homebridge-ring plugin
  2. Restart the following devices
    • Your phone/tablet/mac that you are trying to view the live stream on
    • Your homebridge server (raspberry pi, etc)
    • Your HomeKit Home hub. This is an Apple TV, iPad or HomePod that your HomeKit data passes through to get from your network to the cloud.
  3. Ensure that your homebridge server and your HomeKit hub are on the same network.
  4. Remove the camera from HomeKit via the Home app, then add it back. If you don't see the camera as an option to add back, follow the steps below.
  5. Check your logs in homebridge

If you are still unable to use live streams after these steps, it is most likely an issue with your network or with your ISP. Unfortunately these issues are beyond the scope of this plugin and I will not be able to help you. Please note, reinstalling homebridge/hoobs will most likely not fix any issues with live streaming. It's a drastic move and will probably just be a waste of your time.

Check your logs in homebridge

A proper live stream should look like this:

[Ring] Preparing Live Stream for [Camera Name]
[Ring] Waiting for stream data from [Camera Name]
[Ring] Received stream data from [Camera Name]
[Ring] Streaming active for [Camera Name]
[Ring] Stopped Live Stream for [Camera Name]

If you do not see Preparing Live Stream logged at all, then HomeKit/homebridge are not properly relaying the live stream request to the homebridge-ring plugin. Follow the troubleshooting steps above (particularly rebooting all your devices) which normally fix this issue.

You may also see logs like Ding **** is expired (480). Fetching a new ding and trying video stream again. These are normal and occur when you try to stream shortly after starting another live stream. In these cases, it may take slightly longer for your stream to start, but it should not cause any other issues.

Live Stream Quality

If your live streams are working, but the quality is not fantastic, then it is probably a network related issue in your setup. Here are all the network hops that the video/audio stream go through to get to your phone:

iPhone on WiFi:

Camera -> Router => Ring Servers => Router -> Homebridge Server -> Router -> iPhone

iPhone on LTE or outside network:

Camera -> Router => Ring Servers => Router -> Homebridge Server -> Router -> Home Hub (Apple TV / HomePod) -> Router => iPhone

Where -> indicates a LAN connection and => indicates an internet connection. As you can see, there are a lot of connections, and if any one of those connections is slow, your streaming video will be slow. The homebridge-ring plugin does not alter the video stream in any way, so there is nothing that can be done to improve the video stream performance other than optimizing every one of those connections.

Streams only work at home, but not on LTE

Some users experience issues where live streams work when they are on their home network, but not on LTE. This typically indicates a communication issue between your homebridge server and you Home Hub. Make sure these two devices can openly communicate on your home network. If not, HomeKit has no way to relay the video stream to the outside world. You may still get snapshots and other features to work, but not live streaming. This can also occur if you have your home network routed through a VPN, which may block the video traffic.

Streams work on LTE, but not at home

If streaming works over LTE, but not over the local network, this is almost certainly related to a local network configuration issue. Check the following items carefully:

  • Make sure the phone/device being used is connected to the same network as the Homebridge server
  • Make sure no VPN or other "privacy" apps are in use on the phone/device or the local network as these can interfere with streaming
  • If Homebridge is running on a device with mulitple network adapters, this can cause issues with local streaming and generally requires manual configuration:
    • If the network adapters are connected to different subnets, make sure to configure Homebridge to listen only on the interface connected to the network your phone/device is using. Using Ciao for mDNS instead of the default mDNS advertiser may also be more reliable. See the Homebridge Wiki for more details.
    • If the network adapters are connected to the same subnet/network, for example a Raspberry Pi with both the ethernet and wireless adapters connected to the same home network, this is not a supported configuration as it's not currently possible to explicitly bind the RTP traffic on the local network to a specific interface, only for traffic routed to other networks. Because of this, Linux will effectively pick an interface at random to act as the source of the RTP streams and, if it isn't the interface phone/device expects, the RTP packets will be ignored. If there is only a single network, disable/disconnect all but a single network adapter.

Snapshot Issues

Please see https://github.com/dgreif/ring/wiki/Snapshot-Limitations to understand the limitations of snapshots.

Cannot add Camera from Home

Cameras are no longer registered as external accessories, and instead are provided through the normal homebridge Bridge accessory. Please update to homebridge 1+ and homebridge-ring 8+ to use bridged cameras.

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