V380 Pro Bulb Camera

I use a bulb camera from Amazon for my doorway, because it is very easy to set it up since just goes into the existing bulb socket without any additional wiring, and connects over wifi to my internet. Most of these cameras are based around V380 / V380 Pro platforms, which are typically nice to work with 3rd party software via the ONVIF and RTSP protocols. ONVIF allows good control over the camera besides just streaming, and RTSP allows you to only stream the camera feed to other devices, such as your phone or tablet. But basically the end result is that you can use great software like Synology Surveillance Station to monitor the camera and control it remotely, which is what I do. Or you could also use things like VLC on your computer to just watch the feed. If you really want to play around with it, you can install scrypted on a server and connect the camera to almost anything like Apple HomeKit or Google Home.

Now, this has been working nicely for me for the last few years but suddenly my existing camera went kaput. I tried fixing it with a lot of (over)confidence in my abilities but couldn’t get it to work.

Exhauted, I bought another one off Amazon which was similar but surprisingly it didn’t work with Synology. Scanning it via nmap, I couldn’t see any ports open either that could be onvif or rtsp related.

Searching on the internet, I found that you could put a file named ceshi.ini on an sd card and put it in the camera with the content mentioning things like rtsp=1 and onvif=1 and this should enable it. But it didn’t work.

I was about to send it back to Amazon, but then for some reason decided to try other variants of this and finally the following content in the file worked for me. I put the file on the sd card and rebooted the camera and it finally started working.

[CONST_PARAM]
rtsp_enable=1
onvif_enable=1

Adding this here as a note for my future self because I have a knack of forgetting my own fixes and then running into them later on my own blog :D

https://x.com/shantanugoel/status/1869399305779634377

Lost and Found