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by ed25519FUUU 1081 days ago
I love this idea! All of my IP cameras just FTP to my server where they get immediately uploaded to my google drive. It works perfectly and it’s cheap but they’re still Chinese cameras connected to the Internet.

Is there a list of cameras that can be converted like this?

4 comments

I wrote a custom FTP->GDrive proxy daemon for use by my scanner. (I wanted USB->GDrive, but it turns out my Brother scanner wouldn't allow me to override scanning parameters on its display for USB, but it does for FTP...)

What are you using for this transfer?

I use a simple inotify script on the receiving FTP server that waits for a new file descriptor to close and then uses rclone to upload it.
I have an idea but needs some works:

Create a network just for the camera(s) - I.e. different wifi router.

Find out the server IP that the camera sends it’s video to.

Connect a pc/rpi to this camera’s wifi router on WAN port.

Assign all camera’s server IP you found above to this pc/rpi.

You should get all the traffic from cameras to their server. Up to you now what you are going to do.

Unless the canera uses HTTPS and certificate pinning so you can't re-assign a different IP to their domain. Snark: Good job privacy advocates!
Most xiaomi camera and white labels mostly work. I side load the customer firmware on a Yi camera and it’s been a solid wifi camera. The VLAN it’s on has zero internet access.
can you elaborate on your setup a bit more?

I've been struggling to find a way to do this. Seems like everything I find has removed any FTP/SFTP support and wants to send pics over LTE to an email address.

My goal is a simple weather cam that will upload an image every 1 minute. Simple as that. Old 2000s webcam style. I ran into an unsolved problem with my rPi3 and a Logitech cam and mostly gave up out of frustration.