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The Anker Eufycam 2C is my current favourite wire-free security camera, it is affordable, has a built-in spotlight, offers colour night vision and best of all has human detection to reduce all the annoying false alerts.

On top of all this, Eufy cameras also have an RTSP option which allows you to integrate it with an NVR such as BlueIris or a NAS that has surveillance functionality such as QNAP or Synology.

With this being a wire-free camera, having an RTSP stream is a bit of an odd feature, 24/7 recording would trash the battery. However, this camera doesn’t work quite like that, and it can affect your set up process.

RTSP Stream not working? It is not a 24/7 stream

From my testing, getting this set up with BlueIris and Synology Surveillance Station, what appears to happen is that the RTSP stream opens up when motion is detected which leads to the same functionality you would get via recording directly to the microSD card.

So before you try to integrate the cameras with your NAS, just be aware, you are not getting added functionality, you just massively bump up the storage – in my case, this would take the potential storage from 16GB to 6TB.

Setting up RTSP in eufySecurity

Setting up RTSP within Eufy is easy enough, just go to the camera settings, hit the RTSP setting and go through the step by step procedure.

The main thing you need to do is make sure you have a static IP address for the Homebase. It looks like you can’t do this manually on Eufy, so you will have to tell your router always to assign the IP address to that device (if your router supports it). If you don’t power your router or Eufy down very often, it shouldn’t change its IP anyway.

Setting up the Eufycam 2C in Synology Surveillance Station

The trick to getting this to work is to enable RTSP as you add the camera to Surveillance Station. When I first tried, I had already got it to work in BlueIris, leaving it for a while the Eufy closes the stream so when I added the camera to Synology it just camera up with an error. So toggling RTSP off then on worked immediately.

As far as the settings go, it is pretty easy. You will need to modify the URL provided by the Eufy to include the port number so what you type into surveillance station should look something like this

192.168.x.x:554/live0 (With you adding the correct numbers for the X bit)

With the RTSP stream live I was able to test the connection and get it working immediately.

When I initially set this up, I set Synology to record motion only, knowing that the camera only worked on motion anyway. However, I found that I wasn’t getting recordings. Switching to continues fixed the issue, the camera activates on motion anyway so surveillance station can just do continues recording when the feed is live.

Setting up the Eufycam 2C in BlueIris

BlueIris has had mixed results for me so far; getting the camera to work is easy enough; taking the above information into account. It did take some tweaking with the settings though, I found that manually setting it up was the only way to get it working, just switch the URL prefix to RTSP, type in the URL and that’s about all you need to do.

Initially adding it showed the stream working great, image quality looks fantastic when blown up on a big monitor, so I was very happy.

However, Eufy will cut out the feed eventually, as expected. However, when the camera detects motion again, the stream doesn’t wake up properly and it stays as a 404 stream not found. I suspect that BlueIris doesn’t test the stream URL frequently enough to notice a live stream

Overall

The NAS/NVR functionality won’t work like most people want it to, and to be honest, I would recommend just sticking to the default recording.

The only benefit you will get with the NAS is being able to increase the retention of recordings significantly. If this is what you are after, then it works perfectly (on Synology).

If you have multiple other cameras all recording to the NAS, it could be worth adding the Eufycam so you can have everything all in one place.

Last update on 2024-03-29 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

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One Comment

  1. Another benefit of recording to NAS is that if you are recording locally and the camera is stolen the footage goes with it, but if it is dumped to a NAS you still have the footage.

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