Blue Iris compatible doorbell/intercom/2 way audio

fenderman said:
dont do 4mp...use 1080p low light sensors..
that is a good price if you can get it to work with blue iris..you also must allow the camera to disable ALL cloud service or contacts with outside servers.
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We use Hisilicon solution here for camera and intercom, and i think Hi3516D+ Sony IMX185 CMOS sensor will be a good choice for "1080p low light sensors...
 
Jessy said:
We use Hisilicon solution here for camera and intercom, and i think Hi3516D+ Sony IMX185 CMOS sensor will be a good choice for "1080p low light sensors...
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I think the residential doorbell intercom/camera market is exploding right now. there is a big hole in what is available and what technology that is economical can deliver in the volumes that the residential market will draw. I like what i see from @Jessy Beward info thus far. I suspect that there are several people here that will assist in the development and feature selection of the present model and next model, just so they can get closer to what many of us want to use now, at a cost that we can afford, without doing the entire thing from scratch ourselves (we do have day jobs).

@Astrokamel , there are more people looking at this. Count on it. The market is huge. It is hard to get a product to market quickly enough to make money before the hardware choices are obsolete, so that sales can drive the next generations of products. I have been messing with the two Ring products and wondering why they are stuck with their initial release, without any real interest in adopting what the market wants in gen two. I have wondered why essentially no mini dome comes with duplex sound with a simple 1W class D amp, so people can role their own.
 
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bug99 said:
I think the residential doorbell intercom/camera market is exploding right now. there is a big hole in what is available and what technology that is economical can deliver in the volumes that the residential market will draw. I like what i see from @Jessy Beward info thus far. I suspect that there are several people here that will assist in the development and feature selection of the present model and next model, just so they can get closer to what many of us want to use now, at a cost that we can afford, without doing the entire thing from scratch ourselves (we do have day jobs).

@Astrokamel , there are more people looking at this. Count on it. The market is huge. It is hard to get a product to market quickly enough to make money before the hardware choices are obsolete, so that sales can drive the next generations of products. I have been messing with the two Ring products and wondering why they are stuck with their initial release, without any real interest in adopting what the market wants in gen two. I have wondered why essentially no mini dome comes with duplex sound with a simple 1W class D amp, so people can role their own.
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I am new comer here. our company mainly focus on industrial products for project use, I think we need to listen to the voice from end user, I wish to collect some end-user recommendations here and feedback to our management. I have emailed to Blue Iris support for a help of Audio integration, do hope we can get a reply soon. Full duplex with echo issue is a problem for some of intercom products, will post here if any update, thanks for your guys attention.
 
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@Jessy: A few points:
  1. To capture the Blue Iris market, two way audio must work.
  2. Unit isn't quite attractive enough for home use.
  3. Need a way to integrate a door chime easily. Either an addon item (like Doorbird/Ring has) or a relay that can be easily connected to.
  4. For MOST residential users, that unlock relay is not useful (the channels). Most will have an IP/Hub based unlock, if anything. A relay is nice for some folks, but not most.
  5. LED illuminate the button. People were confused by my Doorbird until I enabled the button illumation and they are still semi-confused.
  6. Allow for simple integrations via an HTTP API - callbacks via HTTP and also a streaming event connection. Allow for an integration to hook doorbell and any other discrete events.
  7. A native IOS/Android app that can connect directly to the device without third party server assistance. I don't know if you have this now.
If I felt this checked a few more of the boxes above, I would buy one. My Doorbird is getting close to being removed from my house due to irritating issues that they have been unsuccessful in debugging with me.
 
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Nathan said:
@Jessy: A few points:
  1. To capture the Blue Iris market, two way audio must work.
  2. Unit isn't quite attractive enough for home use.
  3. Need a way to integrate a door chime easily. Either an addon item (like Doorbird/Ring has) or a relay that can be easily connected to.
  4. For MOST residential users, that unlock relay is not useful (the channels). Most will have an IP/Hub based unlock, if anything. A relay is nice for some folks, but not most.
  5. LED illuminate the button. People were confused by my Doorbird until I enabled the button illumation and they are still semi-confused.
  6. Allow for simple integrations via an HTTP API - callbacks via HTTP and also a streaming event connection. Allow for an integration to hook doorbell and any other discrete events.
  7. A native IOS/Android app that can connect directly to the device without third party server assistance. I don't know if you have this now.
If I felt this checked a few more of the boxes above, I would buy one. My Doorbird is getting close to being removed from my house due to irritating issues that they have been unsuccessful in debugging with me.
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Hi Nathan, noted with tkx...
 
bdorring said:
there is dbell doorbell which looks interesting and compatable with blueiris. Wi-Fi video doorbell - dbell I did find a thread though in relation to security concerns with the dbell, which has put me off. Hopefully they will address these concerns in the future.
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There is something sketchy about that dbell company. I send a detailed email to them several weeks back. They were a spin off from Kickstarter, but neither my original nor my follow up emails got a response. They were associated with some company called "wirelessinput", but i see nothing about them there. When i go to dbell's site, is see no obvious way to contact them (email, text or phone, not do i see their main business address.

Perhaps they are simply going through restructuring growing pains, but i want to see some front end customer support.

It looks promising if they get it together.
 
@Jessy , adding a bit more to @Nathan points:

  1. agree that two way audio needs to work well, with decent MIC and speaker. IT also needs to have app level control over volume and disable.
  2. agree that appearance could be nicer, but don't sweat that for now. just get the features to work well.
  3. needs to integrate with existing and common future chimes. recommend relay based contact closure for use with both mechanical and electronic chimes.
  4. I like having a second acc relay for other stuff controlled by a secure app, although i do not need it now, i can see its use.
  5. It is a heavy lift to ask residential to add a wire or cable of wires to the front door area. However, I see the difficulty however getting a reliable network connection and working with the existing short circuit of a 24vac line to a mechanical chime while still having power to send video, and to work with a digital chime (falling edge with no appreciable current flowing). It might be doable with a small supper cap and a good wifi repeater, but adding a PoE wire is likely the best bet (debatable).
  6. motion detection needs to be better than any that i know of to prevent false triggers, either dedicated ultrasonic or IR. nice to have (not essential): input trigger from mat switch at the door or elsewhere.
  7. it absolutely needs to be easily integrated with security systems and NVRs.
  8. quick reliable alerts with configurable connection options (MIC, MIC volume, Speaker, speaker volume, camera, snapshot, etc). Two levels of alerts (motion=L1, button trigger=L2), with their own set of response settings locally and in the mobile app. Perhaps Blue Iris can do some of this, but i suspect getting reliable alerts from BI in under 3 seconds to be an issue, with little chance of getting two way audio to work well.
  9. worry about 1080P for a future model. using a low light 720P with a good DSP and WDR should blow the socks of anything else for now, and might eliminate the need for IR illumination, and the spiders and their false triggers. personally i would rather have a low wattage front door light on a timer and have great full color 24/7.
Note: mechanical chimes are substantially different than newer digital solid state chime systems. You need to work with both or have two models.
 
bdorring said:
there is dbell doorbell which looks interesting and compatable with blueiris. Wi-Fi video doorbell - dbell I did find a thread though in relation to security concerns with the dbell, which has put me off. Hopefully they will address these concerns in the future.
Click to expand...
The dbell HD+ is a great value if proven to work...at 139 its cheap and I like the fact that they advertise onvif compatibility and local recording...
there are no security concerns if the devices is cutoff from the internet...as it should be...
 
I have been looking for something like this as well. Would like some feedback on this if/when someone gets this working with BI.
 
@Jessy I'm thrilled that you are interested in meeting this need, fantastic!

I would like to provide you with some direct feedback about my take on it.
  1. In my opinion, "real" doorbell integration isn't completely necessary, but very desired. If I can have a camera with great 2 way audio, and set it up in a way that i can reliably be notified and communicate 2-way with the person at the front door, that is really my basic needs met.
    • Having said that, if doorbell integration is included, it must not interfere with standard operation. If there is a delay between the press and when the doorbell goes off, like what is introduced with the ring doorbell - honestly, don't even bother. You're better off not integrating at that point.
  2. It does *NOT* have to have a door lock/unlock integration! So long as you integrate [IFTT](IFTTT) support into the app, you can unlock pretty much any smart lock with a simple touch of a button within your interface with very little development effort on your behalf.
  3. It is indeed hard to wire up power/ethernet to the front porch, so being able to draw from the existing doorbell power is a fantastic solution. I would recommend the approach of using the doorbell power as a way to charge a set of rechargeable batteries. This will also allow people who don't have powered doorbells to power with just batteries if needed. (for customers with no wired front doorbell, having the option to use POE or a simple barrel plug style power adapter would be a great idea).
  4. Although the percentage of potential customers who have a wired doorbell is probably only around 70%-ish (total guess), the amount of people in the US with a porch light has got to be very close to 99%. I have never lived at, or visited a place without a front porch light. The electricity going to this front porch light may provide an avenue via powerline ethernet to get both power and network wired up to the front porch camera easily.
I hope these points are points that others can agree with. There are definitely lots of "nice to have"'s in this, but when it comes right down to requirements, the bare minimum *MUST HAVE* requirements are:
  • Good 2 way audio (does not have to be full-duplex, it can be half-duplex - this will eliminate the echo problem you referenced)
    • Doesn't even have to be a full IP camera, could just be an intercom with a way to bring in a video feed (there are plenty of available outdoor camera solutions to choose from)
  • Do no harm (don't make the existing doorbell worse in any way... no delay, no adding more buttons for the guest to press)
  • Do not force cloud subscriptions/internet connectivity
  • Have available standard protocols for integration with existing tools/NVR's (rtsp stream, onvif, etc...). If you want to make a nice custom app for increasing sales to the "average joe" that doesn't have an NVR, that's perfectly fine! Just make both options available and don't make internet access or cloud subscriptions mandatory and everyone's happy.
If you can bring us a workable solution, you will capture a great market to have and believe me, I will be firmly recommending your products to everyone I know.
 
bug99 said:
@Astrokamel, there are more people looking at this. Count on it. The market is huge. It is hard to get a product to market quickly enough to make money before the hardware choices are obsolete, so that sales can drive the next generations of products.
Click to expand...

I agree, but I also think that the amount of attention has called for a huge cash grab and hardware manufacturers are more interested in selling services than products, so they are doing all they can to force these types of devices to be proprietary/cloud based so they can force you to pay subscription fees.

Also, I think it's important to note that I don't consider IP cameras (or cameras in general) to suffer from becoming obsolete. A good quality camera today is still a good quality camera tomorrow - even if higher resolution or better low light cameras are coming out, your camera will still give you (more or less) the same quality audio/video as it did from day 1.

The only thing that you can do (and often happens) to make a camera go obsolete is to force its configuration through some wonky kind of activex control that requires an old version of internet explorer. Even if that version of Internet Explorer is the latest at the time of making, there will be a day where it will go obsolete. Use a technology that wont go obsolete, like pure HTML and CSS for coding it - programming using HTML/CSS for an interface honestly isn't hard, and even if some sort of plugin is required for fluent video at least allow basic configuration of the camera with no plugin - that's all most people want to do when they log in anyway.
 
fenderman said:
there are no security concerns if the devices is cutoff from the internet...as it should be...
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Agreed. I haven't looked into it too much. But I would imagine that when someone presses your doorbell, you want the dbell app on your phone to notify you, so you can start a 2-way conversation, which would require the dbell to have internet access
I guess you could setup blueiris alerts, so when motion is detected just in front of your doorbell, alert you, then you would open the dbell app straight away. Then talk to the person over the lan (VPN, or similar)

Is this how you think it would work? I am very interested in Dbell, especially the price. I want full functionality, but not at risk of security.
 
Posting the serious security concerns about Dbell that was posted by Rich on dbell forums, but has now been deleted. Assume dbell are trying to cover this up. Thankyou google cache.


I’ve had this product for a few weeks, and I think it’s only fair to share this.
There are significant security issues with these devices which you need to be aware of, you can form your own opinion from there. I hope these issues will be dealt with by a firmware update, but the shared code in the generic camera module is the issue with most of these.

Here are some of the issues you might like to consider:

  1. No password by default. Make certain you have set a password.
  2. uPNP (Universal Plug n Play) is enabled by default – this automatically allows internet connections IN to your camera on it’s local port (81)! We can use Shodan, the ‘open ports’ search engine to find people using this camera on the internet. Disable the uPNP option in the web interface.
  3. Opens a connection to remote servers – this is how the connection to the App works. dBell do not control the (Amazon AWS) server this connects to, it’s not certain who does. You can disable this, but the App won’t work.
  4. Cloud communications, as above, are sent unencrypted in clear text to these servers using the UDP protocol (this is how the mobile App is able to communicate). See note 1.
  5. A command execution vulnerability means anybody can connect via web interface and instruct your camera to run other commands. Exploits are already targeting these devices, as they all use the same generic camera module. See Note 2.
  6. It runs a telnet server, password can easily be reset and you can log in yourself. See note 3.
  7. Don’t worry.. attackers would use a malformed ‘GET’ instruction to recover your web interface password anyway. See: SSD Advisory – Over 100K IoT Cameras Vulnerable to Source Disclosure – SecuriTeam Blogs SSD Advisory – Over 100K IoT Cameras Vulnerable to Source Disclosure – SecuriTeam Blogs

  • Note 1..
“As I already mentioned this at multiple conferences, the cloud protocol is a nightmare. It is clear-text, and even if you disabled port-forward/UPNP on your router, the cloud protocol still allows anyone to connect to the camera, if the attacker knows the (brute-forceable) camera ID. Although this is the user-interface only, now the attacker can use the command injection to execute code with root privileges. Or just grab the camera configuration, with WiFi, FTP, SMTP passwords included.”
Jump ESP, jump!: How I hacked my IP camera, and found this backdoor account


  • Note 2..
A new Internet of Things (IoT) botnet called Persirai has been discovered targeting over 1,000 Internet Protocol (IP) Camera models based on various Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) products
Persirai: New Internet of Things (IoT) Botnet Targets IP Cameras - TrendLabs Security Intelligence Blog


  • Note 3..
Try this yourself. You (or anybody!) can reset the password of the root account on this camera like this. You can use this to telnet in and run your own commands.

1) go to website console of your camera with your username and password
2) go to Alarm Service Settings / Ftp Service Settings
3) as FTP server put: $(killall telnetd)
4) as username put: $(telnetd -l /bin/sh)
5) click Set up button, then click on Test button, in new window you should get error message (that’s ok)
6) since now you have got root access via telnet, so just run telnet (port 23) to IP of your camera (LAN IP) and you’re in
 
bdorring said:
1) go to website console of your camera with your username and password
2) go to Alarm Service Settings / Ftp Service Settings
3) as FTP server put: $(killall telnetd)
4) as username put: $(telnetd -l /bin/sh)
5) click Set up button, then click on Test button, in new window you should get error message (that’s ok)
6) since now you have got root access via telnet, so just run telnet (port 23) to IP of your camera (LAN IP) and you’re in
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Classic failure to escape user inputs. Amazing folks can't get a shell escape right in such an obvious situation, what year is it again?.:: Phrack Magazine ::.

Perhaps we should thank them because it gives an opportunity to poke at the internals without a JTAG or similar rigging.
 
Nathan said:
I have a Doorbird. Ken @ Blue Iris has been using access to mine in order to add more Doorbird integration to Blue Iris.

Capturing the video feed and the audio feed via Blue Iris does work, two-way audio does not. One catch about capturing the audio feed is that Doorbird only allows a single feed, so it means their app will refuse to work while Blue Iris is pulling the audio. Their SDK claims that the App will take precedence, but that does not seem to be the case.

Ken added integrations for callbacks for the various sensors yesterday (doorbell), I believe you will see this in a new release in a few days.

Another downside is that they only have EU based servers - so latency pretty much sucks vs. if they had a US based deployment for US customers. Audio quality is better than what you typically get from the RTSP two-way in a Hik/Dah camera in BI - the app is VOIP based and is reasonably full duplex.

List of annoyances:
- The UI of the app is weak. The amount of time it takes to get into the app and actually start talking to someone "feels" like too long. (IOS).
- No US servers
- The speaker is always hot at the Doorbird - you can hear white noise 24/7
- There are audible alerts that all of your neighbors get to hear about the state of things. Lose Internet access? The Doorbird will let your neighborhood know for you
- The API is definitely beta, perhaps alpha
- Form factor: huge
- There is a scheduled "restart" of the Doorbird. It effectively restarts the core software, so some probability of a few minutes of the random day, your doorbell doesn't work. You have no timing control over this.
- Video quality - terrible. Any $100 Hik/Dah blows this thing away. This won't be your only camera near the door.
- You can't close the loop - the cloud service is required to use the Doorbird app via the Internet. There is no way to have the app connect directly to your Doorbird, even if you knew how to expose it. There is no cost right now for using this though. The latency to my house from my phone is infinitely better than the latency to round trips to the EU servers. Note: Using the app on the LAN - it WILL connect directly, with a VPN, it will as well.

My current setup is roughly this:
Doorbird app for talking/listening to someone/unlocking the door - I don't use the cloud recording service
Blue Iris for capturing the video stream - no audio
I have the dry contacts for the doorbell and the unlock that feed into a PLC and then to an ISY. I did this because I found their HTTP based callbacks did not work correctly but their dry contacts did. The ISY then controls additional automations like unlocking the ZWave door and sending notifications for the doorbell.
I can unlock the door from the Doorbird app, which triggers the dry contacts and then the ISY does the rest.

It works OK - it isn't perfect. Doorbell offerings could get better, I've been struggling with Doorbird support trying to get them to listen to my issues. This has given me mixed success.

If you have any specific questions, shoot.
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Hi Nathan, I ' ve already got intouched with Ken from Bule Iris for Audio integration issue, will keep you in the loop on news and updates...
 
Nathan said:
Classic failure to escape user inputs.
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The majority of the 'security' concerns are about the web interface which surely won't be exposed to the internet??
Not encrypting the communications to the cloud is a bit of a concern. Would appear to be an amateur company that doesn't use SSL. What else do we not known about??
 
After working for the past year with Ken on getting my Hik indoor cube cameras to work over WAN with enough clarity to be useful, I've finally hit a hard deadline and had to go the "ring" route. What's crazy is that the Hik cameras are clear as a bell (both ways) when communicating from the Server PC to the cameras on the LAN. It's only when the connection is coming from the app (via LAN or WAN) that the audio goes to pot.

I needed something that would give me immediate push notification and clear two-way audio. I bailed on Ken simply because we were no longer making any progress. The ring works (security concerns about cloud-based servers aside), and now if someone is at my door, I can establish a direct line of communication with them. I don't use the subscription (cloud-storage since I already have my doorway covered by at least 3 different cameras.
 
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erkme73 said:
After working for the past year with Ken on getting my Hik indoor cube cameras to work over WAN with enough clarity to be useful, I've finally hit a hard deadline and had to go the "ring" route. What's crazy is that the Hik cameras are clear as a bell (both ways) when communicating from the Server PC to the cameras on the LAN. It's only when the connection is coming from the app (via LAN or WAN) that the audio goes to pot.

I needed something that would give me immediate push notification and clear two-way audio. I bailed on Ken simply because we were no longer making any progress. The ring works (security concerns about cloud-based servers aside), and now if someone is at my door, I can establish a direct line of communication with them. I don't use the subscription (cloud-storage since I already have my doorway covered by at least 3 different cameras.
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are you using android or ios? I believe he farms out the android app so hes at the mercy of the developer...
 
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