Sometimes you find out a small gem like this beautifull piece of hardware. Xiaoyi Smart Camera is almost the perfect home camera. It has a beutiful design, good video quality, bidirectional sound, good construction, SD card slot, WIFI, a decent mobile app, and a bargain price. However it has some drawbacks:
- Latest firmwares have removed telet, FTP and RTSP access. WHY?
- Time Zone is stuck to China, so your recordings are miss-dated, what does moving through recordings by the mobile application a nightmare.
- Lack of wired networking.
I can accept the lack of wired networking but not the other two. The first was present in early firmwares. The Time Zone setting would be really easy to add. There are some alternatives on the Internet to fix the Time Zone issue but while helping they don`t solve the problem.
Solution 1
Disable ntpdate (from here):
I telnetted into the camera (username: root / password: 1234qwer)
Code:
cd /homemv ntpdate ntpdate.orig
touch ntpdate
chmod 755 ntpdate
date -s “2015-06-02 22:00″The commands above disable to program that tries to set the date from the internet, and then you can set the date manually to the current date/time. Hope this helps.
Of course, to be able to apply this solution you have to flash one firmware with telnet support.
Drawbacks:
Solution 2
Firmware mod (from here)
…
If you are living in a different time zone (GMT+6 is Germany, Denmake, Austria, Italy…) you have to download the file “equip_test.sh” open and modify the row. The line “my_version =” should contain possible the latest version of the firmware.
…
Drawbacks:
- While the timestamp on the video is fixed, the orange marks in mobile app timeline not, so moving through it doesn’t work very well.
Solution 3
Changing time zone in etc (from here)
Hello,
You can change the timezone.
Change the TZ file in /etc/
the command is :
echo “$my_gmt” > /etc/TZ
change $my_gmt by your timezone.
Note : GMT 0 => Beijing
for Paris = GMT+6
Have fun.
My solution
Work in progrress: I’ve create a bash scritp which changes the time of the mp4 files created by the camera to a previous date, 6 hours before. The script is executed every minute through cron.
Update: The best solution
Finally, the best solution it’s here and it does suppot moving through recordings perfectly.