Tapo C212 (wifi camera)
2023 - 30€ - amazon
Cons
- Need to install Android/iOS App + create an account
- setup is a bit strange (and derouting at first) when trying to setup the Wifi connection
- the app establish a direct wifi link with the camera and so android complain severa time about losing network: it’s just that the connection first switch from wifi to direct cam then to wifi: don’t restablish the connection from the android popup or it will mess the setup.
- Setup can only be done through the App
- one account at the tapo level for global setting
- a second configuration from the app to create a user/password and enable the RTSP feed for the device.
- high quality
rtsp://user:password/IP Address/stream1- low qualityrtsp://user:password/IP Address/stream2 - RSTP is not enabled when a SDCard is present
- Wifi is restricted to 2.4Ghz
Pro
- once setup / rstp is functional and can be accessed by ffplay (for eg).
- seems to be supported by iSpy
ONVIF / PTZ
ONVIF stands for Open Network Video Interface Forum.
PTZ stands for Pan-Tilt-Zoom.
- HomeAssistant - easy to install as docker image
podman run -d --name homeassistant --privileged --restart=unless-stopped -e TZ=Europe/Paris -v /home/yves/home_assistant:/config --network=host ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable- ONVIF - use port
:2020for tapo camera device - HomeAssistant - Tapo: Cameras Control
- ONVIFViewer / gitlab - Linux Internet Camera Viewer - dev stopped
see also
- How to view Tapo camera on PC through RTSP stream
- Tapo P100 Homebridge - javascript server emulating Homekit API
- TP-Link Tapo C200 Camera Reverse Engineering
- Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock - how many existing Ring owners would have bought the camera had they known they would eventually give third parties access to the camera footage.
Written on November 23, 2023, Last update on October 21, 2025
hardware
camera
network
video
reverse