Hi all,
I just recently picked up a Fire TV stick and have been working on replicating a really nice feature we have on our Kodi PC that pops up IP camera floating window overlays (for monitoring the kids' rooms and outdoor cams) when we're e.g. watching a movie. We're considering using the FireTV stick to run our TV and manage streams, and having active IP camera monitoring and overlays would be a huge +. I recently came across tinyCam and kudos to the developers for being really forward thinking in the features they've put in to the software (!) particularly in their preconfigured plugins for Tasker.
I wanted to start a thread here to see if anyone else is doing anything similar (IP camera floating windows on a TV used for recreation/streaming), and share ideas and limitations, etc.
So even though Amazon's Fire OS it's hobbled in a few ways compared to a pure Android implementation, here's what I've been able to do so far with the Fire TV stick so far:
-1. Install tinyCam (easy--available in the App store for the Fire TV stick)
2. point tinyCam to my BlueIris webserver (easy thanks to BI being one of tinyCam's 'camera' options... helpful hint: when you select the BlueIris camera type in tinyCam, you can set which camera you're specifically viewing in tinyCam's 'advanced' options as detailed in this thread)
3. get Tasker running (slightly more difficult, requires patching a Tasker APK with Play Services Patcherand then sideloading the apk using e.g. ES File Explorer)
4. configure tasker (straightforward thanks to the tinyCam videos and tutorials out there--those guys rock!--but tedious b/c Fire OS isn't built around the touchscreen interface; you'll need to use something like Mouse Toggle so you have a point-and-click cursor inside Fire TV)
At this point, Tasker will show 30 second video floating windows from tinyCam on our big TV whenever motion is detected on one of our cameras (and play an alert sound, which Tasker can be easily configured to do). These windows can be resized and repositioned, and tinyCam will remember those sizes and positions. Nice!
Everything is working as intended so far, but I still need to do a bit of work to get tinyCam and Tasker to both stay active in the background and do their thing while we're e.g. watching a video stream or Kodi movie on the Fire TV stick. I know the stick is pretty limited on resources and restrictive on how much processing it lets background apps do, so *hopefully* this isn't too tall a task?
In any case I'll post an update when I have a chance to do a little more work on this in the next couple days, and would be happy to read anyone else's thoughts or experiences that have a similar goal of doing something like this on their Fire OS.
I just recently picked up a Fire TV stick and have been working on replicating a really nice feature we have on our Kodi PC that pops up IP camera floating window overlays (for monitoring the kids' rooms and outdoor cams) when we're e.g. watching a movie. We're considering using the FireTV stick to run our TV and manage streams, and having active IP camera monitoring and overlays would be a huge +. I recently came across tinyCam and kudos to the developers for being really forward thinking in the features they've put in to the software (!) particularly in their preconfigured plugins for Tasker.
I wanted to start a thread here to see if anyone else is doing anything similar (IP camera floating windows on a TV used for recreation/streaming), and share ideas and limitations, etc.
So even though Amazon's Fire OS it's hobbled in a few ways compared to a pure Android implementation, here's what I've been able to do so far with the Fire TV stick so far:
-1. Install tinyCam (easy--available in the App store for the Fire TV stick)
2. point tinyCam to my BlueIris webserver (easy thanks to BI being one of tinyCam's 'camera' options... helpful hint: when you select the BlueIris camera type in tinyCam, you can set which camera you're specifically viewing in tinyCam's 'advanced' options as detailed in this thread)
3. get Tasker running (slightly more difficult, requires patching a Tasker APK with Play Services Patcherand then sideloading the apk using e.g. ES File Explorer)
4. configure tasker (straightforward thanks to the tinyCam videos and tutorials out there--those guys rock!--but tedious b/c Fire OS isn't built around the touchscreen interface; you'll need to use something like Mouse Toggle so you have a point-and-click cursor inside Fire TV)
At this point, Tasker will show 30 second video floating windows from tinyCam on our big TV whenever motion is detected on one of our cameras (and play an alert sound, which Tasker can be easily configured to do). These windows can be resized and repositioned, and tinyCam will remember those sizes and positions. Nice!
Everything is working as intended so far, but I still need to do a bit of work to get tinyCam and Tasker to both stay active in the background and do their thing while we're e.g. watching a video stream or Kodi movie on the Fire TV stick. I know the stick is pretty limited on resources and restrictive on how much processing it lets background apps do, so *hopefully* this isn't too tall a task?
In any case I'll post an update when I have a chance to do a little more work on this in the next couple days, and would be happy to read anyone else's thoughts or experiences that have a similar goal of doing something like this on their Fire OS.
. This basically means you have to be actively running the app (i.e. TinyCam is fullscreen on your TV) for it to detect motion and show video or image popups and play alert sounds. I've read that this is because FireOS/FireTV, being very resource limited, is pretty harsh about killing off resource intensive background apps. 