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Camera Troubleshooting

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Dusty Greif edited this page Aug 20, 2020 · 24 revisions

Live Stream Troubleshooting

Live streams in the homebridge-ring plugin work out of the box for most users, but sometimes require some troubleshooting. They do not require any additional configuration beyond what is required to use the plugin in general. 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. Verify that your Ring subscription is active. The live feeds go through the Ring servers and require an active subscription to function.
  3. Restart the following devices
    • Your phone/tablet/mac that you are trying to view the live stream on
    • Your hombridge server (raspberry pi or whatever you are running it on)
    • Your HomeKit hub. This is an Apple TV, iPad or HomePod that your HomeKit data passes through to get from your network to the cloud.
  4. Ensure that your homebridge server and your HomeKit hub are on the same network.
  5. 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.
  6. 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 probably will not be able to help you. Please note, reinstalling homebridge/hoobs will most likely not fix any issues with this plugin. 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] Stream Prepared for [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.

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.

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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