I recently set up an Armcrest Pro-HD IP Camera to work with my Linux based home monitoring system. I'm currently using MotionEye, but may switch to another monitoring system in the future.

I wanted an IP camera that would work with my setup, be cheap, and easy to set up. Easy to set up for me means not needing to flash the firmware, or worry about needing to use an app on my phone or other such nonsense.

Getting the Amrcrest camera to work was easy, but required several web searches, so in case someone else is in the same situation, I'll include the steps needed to make it all work here.

Hardware Setup

The hardware setup for this camera is very straightforward. It comes with a USB cable for power, and an Ethernet cable for connectivity. It may be possible to use the app and avoid needing Ethernet, but we'll need the Ethernet connection to do our setup. The camera assumes that it's on a LAN with DHCP. You'll need to find the IP address of the device, but that's fairly easy as the camera registers itself to your DHCP server with an identifier that's easy to recognize, with the prefix AMC and then some hex values, such as AMC0000_FFFF. The hex values are part of the device's serial number. For the purpose of this blog post, let's say that the camera it has the IP address 192.168.1.50. Obviously your camera is likely to be on another IP.

Once the camera is booted and on the network, just point your browser on the same network to its IP, ie http://192.168.1.50 and you can use its built in web server to configure it. The default admin username is admin and the default password is also admin. It will ask you to change the pasword, and this is a good idea.

Now that you're here, unless you plan on using Ethernet, set up your wifi connection on the camera. On my camera, I did that by going to the top, clicking Setup, then on the left, clicking Network (it's right under Camera) and then Wifi.

The rest should be fairly familiar.

MotionEye Setup

This camera has a lot of features built in, including motion detection, SMNP, and email notification, but I wasn't able to get those working. Instead, I'm using MotionEye to capture the camera's data stream and process it locally.

To do this, I used this URL (remember your IP will be different) rtsp://192.168.1.50:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0. Motioneye asked for a username and password, and I used admin and the new password I set earlier.

It will also ask you for TCP or UDP. I don't think there's a big difference, but some people mentioned UDP causing artifact errors.

From there, it all worked for me. I hope it works for you too!