ZoneMinder Forums

From a user perspective rtsp addresses are being parsed, mangled, and re-written on the fly within ZM.

Don't do this.

Ultimately this offers a grave opportunity for finger-pointing.

The user says, "I tried typing in the rtsp address just like it said in the
docs but ZONEMINDER WOULDN'T LET ME!"

For example if you try to type rtsp://username:password@ip.addr:554/stream1.....

You hit return and POOF. The dog rips up your homework.

ZM returns:

"rtsp://192.168.0.223:554/stream1"

username: username

password:password

And the implication is "Trust us. We'll put it all back together properly for you and everything will be fine."

And it doesn't work. For any of a million reasons.

But the finger points first at ZM for screwing around with our source address. You broke it, that's very clear: but can you put it back together again? What happened to my special characters?"

But as well as the public relations disaster, there is a good technical reason why you should not do this. It's simply another good opportunity for something to go wrong. Maybe a special character does get lost. Maybe it's older equipment that does not follow the rules.

If you want to pluck out my password and username fine, but please don't rewrite my requests: I fought hard to find them and they worked fine before YOU GUYS came along and started screwing around with them.

That's just CREEPY!

That's the perception, anyway.

If security is a concern, maybe use your powers of parsing to ****** the password upon presentation to the user, or treat the whole URL as a secret.

Just noticed this also.....why is it happening? ZM didn't do this URL parse before I'm pretty sure.

Right. This is a new misfeature. Prior to this install I think I was as high as 1.37.45 and I don't think it was doing this. Or maybe i didn't notice. My Tapo C320SW cams can handle the reconstruction, but I'm having great difficulty with my RTSP enabled Wyze V3 cams. You can view them just fine in VideoLan (VLC), just type in the address recommended in the forums (Wyze stopped supporting it) and you're in.

Try the same thing in ZM now, your address gets parsed and presumably reconstructed.....for me the V3's are not working.... and you're left wondering "Hmmmm... is this failing because ZM is fiddling with my source address?" '

(yes I've tried both ffmpeg and libvlc as recommended. At times I see zoneminder pulling packets via wireshark but ultimately still no display)

It's disquieting. I've been a die-hard supporter and defender of ZM for a decade, it seems, but i have quite a number of these Wyze-crack cams and if I can't get them working might have to consider a different platform. Though throwing the v3's in the garbage and buying a bunch of cheap Tapos (C120?) is also tempting,

It has been doing it for like 2 years.

The feature is because we constantly get people using weird characters in their passwords that are not valid in urls and then don't work when passed to ffmpeg.

I don't know why you are having troubles, I haven't had a single issue with it and find it very useful.