nest-api

Nest Camera Video Streaming in VLC player

I have got a public share nest camera address from my friend. Instead of using a web browser for seeing the video, I want to use a VLC player to video stream. This way allows me to use many other features of VLC to do video analytics on the video. How to do it?

Solution

  • I was able to do this in these steps:

    1. Go to the public video share URL. It should be something like this:

      http://video.nest.com/live/pSgnOZ0s4t

    2. If you use developer tool on chrome and see network traffic ....look for a URL with .m3u8 in the end... it will be something like this:

      https://stream-delta.dropcam.com/nexus_aac/37451e60aeac457f9800704f1662147e/playlist.m3u8

    3. Once you get that open that file in a text editor....you will get something like this inside the file

    #EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=400816,CODECS="avc1.77.31,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=1280x720
chunklist_w391480529.m3u8

    The stream URL is then

    https://stream-delta.dropcam.com/nexus_aac/37451e60aeac457f9800704f1662047e/chunklist_w391480529.m3u8

    1. Once you have this then install livestreamer to extract video like this:
    livestreamer "hls://https://stream-delta.dropcam.com/nexus_aac/37451e60aeac457f9800704f1662047e/chunklist_w391480509.m3u8" best -o nest_video.ts
    1. This will save the file to your disk.

    I used this to avoid nest aware subscription. Unfortunately, they charge so much for that service. When someone can just save the video to a disk and upload to a cheap cloud option...