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I have a macbook and I would like to use it to monitor a nest wireless security camera, including an approximately 1 tb archive of continuously updated video history (perhaps of motion detected clips only). This can be done by subscribing to a nest cloud account, but that can get expensive, especially for several cameras, so I'd rather do it myself.

Can anyone point me to open-source code that will handle this? If not, is there another type of camera that will allow me to do this over wifi?

abby yorker
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    *Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, **tool, software library**, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow* – OneCricketeer Oct 05 '17 at 00:18
  • Here is a similar question that garnered 491 points: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/449763/where-can-i-find-android-source-code-online ... what, specifically, invalidates my question? I am just looking for an existing open source starting point, not a recommendation. – abby yorker Oct 05 '17 at 20:54
  • Question was asked in '09, before the rules of Stackoverflow evolved – OneCricketeer Oct 05 '17 at 21:17
  • Considering "watching Nest Cam over Wifi is free". I dont see why you can't port forward your router to whatever services nest runs. http://www.noip.com/support/knowledgebase/how-to-setup-a-webcam-and-access-it-from-anywhere/ – OneCricketeer Oct 05 '17 at 21:22
  • I am now looking at: https://developers.nest.com/documentation/cloud/camera-guide. - This seems to allow one to access the live feed (s suggested in the previous comment) within the api. I understand that this thread is off-topic, but I will still report what I find noone objects, in case someone else wants to do this. – abby yorker Oct 05 '17 at 21:30

1 Answers1

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As promised above, I will update the status of this issue.

After a significant amount of work and also significant progress, I was able to connect to the live nest camera feed programatically but was never able to actually record the live stream into short videos, although this was easy for my MacBook webcam. My belief is that Nest has engineered this feed such that camera owners cannot directly access it, leaving no option but to use their "Nest Aware" monthly service. I do not want to do this as I do not want to pay for it and because I want to create options that Nest Aware does not offer.

Searching the web, it appears that this kind of thing might be done by using another software package, "blue iris". I did not want to get this either as I am sure that flexibility would be sacrificed and also the camera would need to be made publicly shared(!)

So I am giving up on Nest, although I like the hardware.

I did find an alternative. I also had an Arlo Q camera and I tried that, using an open source API on GitHub:

https://github.com/jeffreydwalter/arlo

I was able to access the camera and save motion detected videos to my disk within an hour of finding the above link. So, if you want to do this type of thing, I recommend Arlo over Nest.

abby yorker
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