RTSP support has now been released for the MV!
https://documentation.meraki.com/MV/Advanced_Configuration/External_RTSP
Thanks for sharing! There is going to be a lot of happy people when they read this!
I think it's bugged, I'm trying to enable the option to have a look at it however when I get the following dialog box I cannot click enable, its simply not being detected as a button to click.
I think this is a known issue from when it was first enabled today, please open a quick case so Support can correlate with any others reporting this, should be resolved shortly!
@MerakiDave It appears that any popup window inside my MV network doesn't work i.e. the export video or download images buttons don't work either.
I have opened a case.
Thanks @PhilipDAth for calling it out! I think there may be a blog post coming as well.
For others who might follow or stumble across this post, or have questions since RTSP on MV is new, a little additional background...
RTSP is often the only way to do many things in traditional camera systems. However, MV smart cameras have a variety of features and analytics built in to solve certain key problems.
Many traditional camera systems use RTSP for 3 main things:
1) Storage: RTSP can be leveraged to record on a server/NVR or other storage device. Longer storage can be achieved off camera but without Cloud Archive, basically customers can leverage RTSP to implement their own NVR, as much as we don't want to reintroduce an NVR into the architecture, a few customers do have this requirement.
For storage, Meraki added to the product line with the newer "X" models to double the on-camera retention time, and added enhancements around storage estimates based on what motion the camera has perceived lately. There is still Motion Based Retention (which now includes areas of interest) and scheduled recording, and then there are still the 90 and 180-day cloud archive licenses if needed. Collectively, these items tend to address the large majority of use cases where RTSP might otherwise be needed.
2) Integration: RTSP can be leveraged to integrate with other systems such as access control. Meraki added motion alert email capability which includes alerting on human motion only, as well as the snapshot API and the video link API. In addition, some Access Control partners have built MV integrations into their platforms, as well as the Dashboard REST APIs.
3) Analytics: RTSP is commonly leveraged to stream video to a VMS for viewing and/or using video analytics as a source of information to provide business insight. For analytics, Meraki offers motion heat maps, integrated edge machine learning, multiclass object detection (people and vehicles), people counting, the snapshot API, the MV Sense API and a number of great analytics partners for developing custom solutions. (See apps.meraki.io)
The point is, do not use RTSP to "Reverse The Smart Part". Most requirements can be met by positioning native MV camera features and API integrations, so make sure RTSP actually is a requirement. RTSP on MV should be used strategically for specific use cases, to complement and add to native MV functionality.
For example, if a customer already has an existing system with analytics not available with MV in Dashboard by default, they can potentially send MV video via RTSP into a 3rd party system to pick up additional specialized analytics. Another common use case is for large customers doing a long-term phased implementation, who can use RTSP as a bridge to legacy system requirements to migrate to MV smoothly. Yet another might be a requirement for public viewing monitors.
wow kudos meraki team for this new development actually it is true RTSP can be used in so many used cases around our market and i can see customers and partners can now leverage the full power of MV cameras
so now a quick question is this protocol available now in the existing MV cameras or we should wait for new release with RTSP capabilities?
@merakichamp noticed your other question on camera model support, note that RTSP is supported on all 2nd Generation cameras (all ending with a "2" as in MV12/22/32/72) with the latest firmware, but unfortunately not on the original MV21/71 models.
Thanks @MerakiDave, for the great explanation! We do have a blog post planned. I was hoping that no one would notice the feature until then, but I should have known that would never work with this group. 😂
good news.. that open our mv cameras to new possibilities..... I tested with one of my cameras and worked fine.
Thanks!!
yes!!! I checked in a mv12n with 4.3 firmware....
Has anyone noticed to tried to in the dashboard Reboot your Camera that is on Firmware 14.3 Mine says "Malformed Request" and will not reboot? Also if the Stream gets tripped up like using "blueIris" or something it will get stuck on 2 max streams and fail and you have to reboot to clear that stale stream.
which I found out you can't reboot remotely.
Just thought I would share.
Beta 4.4 is out and I can reboot my Cameras again. and the RTSP stream kicks back in After a reboot.
I would like to ask others about the RTSP I find mine to be very unreliable, and have to reboot / reconnect cameras very often. I have 3 MV's and seems always one of them is out to lunch. on the Meraki Dashboard they are fine its just RTSP.
I wonder if they turn this off in the long-term, because now that RTSP is available its actually easier to perform analytics using custom machine learning locally then relying on the MV sense API (which is slow). Thoughts?