Root Your Woox/Tuya IP Camera For RTSP & Home Assistant

Intro

If you don’t care about any back info skip here

The Woox 1920×1080 Smart Camera, Model R4958 is essentially just a rebranded Tuya IP cam, these cams are the ones that work with the Tuya/Smart Life/Woox android apps but you can’t access them on the desktop so there for you cant use wireshark to find the stream link.

You could go to https://ipc-eu.ismartlife.me/ or https://ipc-us.ismartlife.me/ but alas, the Woox IP camera is not supported so even finding a stream link from the cam is difficult because there isn’t one.

The only possible way is by viewing the cam on your phone. This is because Tuya have had to encrypt the signal and lock the cameras down due to obvious privacy and security concerns. But what if you want these features and you are able to secure your network and what if you don’t want to use their “cloud” offering?

Luckily there is a simple softmod. All you need is a micro sdcard.

Also…

What are the options as far as getting the cam to display in Home Assistant?

We will be able to use these cameras over a private IP link just like any other cam and we can display the cam in Home Assistant with live streaming using MotionEye.

Setup

All you need is a Micro SD Card for the camera that can be permanently installed in the camera.

We need to download a GitHub repo and transfer some files to the sd card but first, we want the sd card formatted in a way that the camera wants so put the sd card in the camera, turn it on and open the app on your phone to view the camera. Select the settings from the top right.

Once formatted we can proceed to add the files to the SD Card.

Download GitHub Repo

To download we can either download it as a zip using the button on the GitHub repo page or we can use the terminal. The method should be the same on Windows/Mac/Linux.

The repo we want to clone is https://github.com/cjj25/RTS3903N-Tuya-RTSPServer

git clone https://github.com/cjj25/RTS3903N-Tuya-RTSPServer.git

You will also need to download one of the below files to tell the camera what definition you want to use. Lower resolutions can provide better performance and sometimes 1080p isn’t required. I used the 2.2.1 High Res. Download the file and add it to the root of your sd card along with the other files.

Once downloaded we need to upload everything from the sdcard folder to the root of our SD card.

First Boot

Boot the camera and wait a few minutes for it to fully initialize, give it some time and you may also need a couple of reboots before the softmod sticks. If you have upgraded the firmware the softmod will attempt to downgrade it. Be patient. Once you have it working it will work with your Tuya/Smart life apps and you will have a link like rtsp://192.168.0.8:8554 where we can view our stream and import to Home Assistant via Motioneye.

Firstly you will need to find your cameras IP address if you don’t already have it. You can use something like Angry IP scanner to check for active devices on your network and then go through them until you find the right one. Log into your router and check the corresponding mac address with the mac address on the bottom of the camera and you should see its IP. It’s a good idea to set the IP static so it will not change..

Complete!

There we have it, you should now have a stream URL that you can import into motioneye which can then be imported into Home Assistant!