I did that for 5 different cameras yesterday, you're saying Unifi's cameras doesn't allow user management? That sucks!
> No, it connects to you!
I thought frigate connects to the camera's RTSP stream (maybe with ONVIF in the mix)?
For the adoption stage, UniFi cameras broadcast on UDP port 10001 using a proprietary TLV (Type-Length-Value) protocol. The Protect console listens on this port and picks up new cameras immediately. 4 bytes `\x01\x00\x00\x00` sent as UDP broadcast to `255.255.255.255:10001`
The response then contains these fields:
| Hex Code | Field | Data |
|----------|-------|------|
| `0x01` | MAC Address | 6-byte hardware address |
| `0x02` | MAC + IP | Combined MAC and IPv4 address |
| `0x03` | Firmware Version | String |
| `0x0B` | Hostname | String |
| `0x0C` | Platform (Short Model) | String |
| `0x0A` | Uptime | 64-bit integer |
| `0x13` | Serial | String |
| `0x14` | Model (Full) | String |
| `0x17` | Is Default | Boolean (adopted vs unmanaged) |
So conceivably at step 2 you could use your own modified URL to point to your own NVR and then grab the FLV streams from there.
> 1. Connects to the camera via SSH (default credentials) 2. Configures the Inform URL (TCP 8080)
Not what I expected but okay. Looks like there's a `set-inform` command. It looks like it opens a TLS connection, doesn't check the certificate, and tries to opens a websocket:
GET /camera/1.0/ws HTTP/1.1
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
Host: ...
Origin: http://ws_camera_proto_secure_transfer
Upgrade: websocket
Connection: close, Upgrade
Sec-WebSocket-Key: ...
Sec-WebSocket-Protocol: secure_transfer
Sec-WebSocket-Version: 13
Camera-MAC: ...
Camera-IP: ...
Camera-Model: 0xa601
Camera-Firmware: 5.0.83
Device-ID: ...
Adopted: false
x-guid: be9d8e45-62a8-ae84-8b23-71723c7decaf
...then again I did a search for a couple strings and ran across https://github.com/keshavdv/unifi-cam-proxy . It's the opposite direction of what I want (makes a standard camera work with Unifi Protect) but maybe contains the protocol details I'm looking for...
Actually, yes. I got lazy and just asked Claude Code to write a server, using that as a reference...and it worked. It was able to change the password and have it start streaming flv video. Not exactly a production-quality implementation but as a proof-of-concept it's quite successful.
Right, that's the expectation of Frigate, my own Moonfire NVR, and basically every other NVR out there. Ubiquiti decided to think different.
Honestly it might be less work than some other cameras that (allegedly) speak RTSP. You'd be shocked how low-quality these implementations are. Never advancing timestamps, setting the RTP MARK bit arbitrarily, writing uninitialized memory framed as audio packets (on cameras that don't have microphones), closing file descriptors then writing data to them anyway (and so having it show up on the next accepted connection to be assigned that fd even pre-auth), etc.
Thanks for the reassurance that I'm not such an incompetent dev as I feel.
Funny how companies tend to be competent at either devices or software, and rarely both. This sounds vaguely like the automotive industry.