Ryobi Garage Door Camera and Blue Iris

For the “smart-home” person in me, having a remote garage door with addons was sort of a no-brainer. However, I saw that the Ryobi garage door opener (GD200/GD201 series) had an addon module for a security camera. The security camera model is known as GDM610.

At first, i was excited because well, another camera! But on second thought, the Ryobi Android store app is absolute trash when it comes to accessing the video feed. So that’s where blue Iris came in.

Setbacks & Other Issues

  • Currently, there is absolutely no way to “remote in” to this camera to manage it. It’s legitimately “what you get, is what you get.”
  • RSTP is supported on the default 554 port.
  • OnVif is on a really awkward port, 8001.
  • WiFi is to be desired for when it comes to signal quality vs stable video connection. A lot of skipped video or a hung-up connection requiring a reconnect.
  • Blue Iris v5 will throw a fit when searching for details of the camera due to the wonkyness of the settings.
  • Have not found a way to feed audio from the camera module to Blue Iris. (BI “see’s it”, but doesn’t know how to path it properly)
  • Camera has a seriously bad habit of throwing “Error 400, Bad Request” at Blue Iris. Not sure what triggers this, but seems to be relating to when the IR-cut kicks on and off.
  • On the final product, you can’t disable the extremely annoying date and time stamp at the top right.
    • Customer Support was clueless on it, and appeared to not even know this RTSP mode was event possible. They contacted the manufacturers of the camera, and got a response a week later stating that the time stamp was “baked into the firmware of the device” -ugh.

Assumptions

  • Blue Iris v4 or v5 is installed.
  • The Ryobi camera module has been configured and connected to your WiFi network.
  • The WiFi camera has been assigned a static IP address on your LAN.
  • You have blocked the camera from “phoning home” on the internet.
    • NOTE: This will effectively block the camera from being accessed/used on the useless Ryobi Garage Door app.
    • This camera LOVES to phone home to some IP addresses, two in the states, one to an AWS or Microsoft data center, and a fourth possibly to a server in china(figures, right?).
  • No SD Card is in the SD Card slot on the module.
    • If you don’t like a blue-flasher rave at night, put tape over the annoying led. Another options is to open the device up and remove the led power connectors to inside the module – this will obviously void your warranty.

Blue Iris

Adding the camera on Blue Iris is vastly straight forward. Just that, you may need to fiddle with the network settings of it on the BI camera panel afterwards.

So, add a new camera…

Next, the camera configuration panel. Know your Ryobi cameras’ IP address!! (Hence the need for the IP to be static)

Input the IP address in the first field. It should look something like this. Where 192.168.22.226 is the IP that you set on your side of the internet!

Click the “Find/Inspect” button on the top right of that dialog box.

You should see something like this show up under the “Inspecting…” UI box.

Opening 192.168.22.226 port 80...
HTTP Get / request...
Redirected to 192.168.22.226:8001
OK
ONVIF GetSystemDateAndTime
HTTP 12005
Opening 192.168.22.226 port 8999...
ONVIF GetSystemDateAndTime
HTTP 12029
Checking for common cameras...
Foscam FI86xx/98xx compatible?
Foscam FI89xx compatible?
Foscam FI9821 V2 compatible?
Foscam FI9821 media port compatible?
RTSP port open?
RTSP port detected!
Done

For the record, I’ve gone through every camera on the list under Make and Model. Nothing is recognized to an exact model with this camera except the Generic/onvif + RTSP make and model mode.

Your window should look something like this now…

Don’t Press OK just yet, because some of those values aren’t right.

  • Set the Discovery/ONVIF port to 8001.
  • Set “Receive Buffer” to 0.5.
  • Set “Camera” to 2.
    • Seems to force a more steady quality. Not sure why.
    • 0 and 1 were always pixelated or simply low, stuttery quality.
    • 0 1 and 2 are all valid options, all output the same bitrate – around 25 to 40 kBps.
  • Remove the forward slash / on the Video Path field.
  • Set Audio format to RTSP.
    • Granted, this does nothing currently.
  • Username and password seem to be happy at admin:admin.
    • I do not know if that is even asked-for or accepted at auth time!

Your configuration should now look something like this…

“New Camera”

The main gut of configuration to the RTSP Ryobi camera…

Video Tab

Go to the “Video” tab if you’re not there already.

Within the “Image Format” section, set the max rate to 15 FPS.

The camera seems to have severe issues pushing anything more than 15 FPS at any given time. The WiFi signal is excellent according to the UniFi control panel, sitting at a constant -45 dBm. TX/RX respectively is 65Mbps and 72Mbps.

As a matter of fact, the camera simply doesn’t do any more than 15 FPS!

Everything else for now can remain as is on the Video tab.

Watchdog Tab

Since the camera loves to be problematic for no reason whatsoever, we need to configure the watchdog panel. Set it up to be something like the following image. As always, adjust to how you need it to be.

Once set, press OK and let’s see if the camera is active. It takes a couple moments for the camera to show up on the Blue Iris application, but it should indeed work with the above config!

Common Oddities Observed & FAQ

#1: The camera randomly turns off the IR-leds and IR-cut at the dead of night.
Answer: The camera could be internally restarting, overheated internally somehow, or isn’t getting enough power.

#2: I’m getting No Signal a lot on Blue Iris.
Answer: Bluntly put: The camera is terrible. Even with an absolutely perfect signal over wifi, this happens… a lot. Hence the need for Watchdog to be active.

#3: I’m getting “400 Bad Request” errors.
Answer:
Don’t use paths (forward slashes) in audio or video path fields. Port 8001 seems to have a lot of wacky redirecting going on.

#4: The audio is making popping or snapping sounds!!
Answer:
Audio format under Camera Settings -> Video -> Network IP ‘Configure’ button, Audio section at the bottom, is not set to RTSP.

Better yet, just disable audio processing for this camera. Have not figured a way to make audio route over Blue Iris yet! Go to the Audio tab on the Camera settings UI, uncheck the “Enable Audio Channel”.

#5: What IP’s do i need to block on the firewall so that it can’t talk to the Internets?
Answer:
13.90.28.146, 13.90.27.154, 52.239.158.74

#6: Should i just block it from accessing anything outside the lan?
Answer:
If you don’t want to play whack-a-mole with IP nulling, then yes – block it from accessing the WWW, but permit it access to the router and the LAN.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments