Weird password issue with IP camera and RTSP stream - Solved

[RWL-69]

I just want to share an issue I ran into with setting up an IP camera and the RTSP stream on a headless server that may help others.

I run motion on a headless server and purchased a cheap IP camera which I was trying to setup. Using a different computer, I could connect to the camera with the RTSP string with ffplay or VLC. I tested this many times before setting up the camera on the server.

netcam_rul rtsp://user:passwd@IP:554/streaming/channels/2

When setting up the camera on the server, I kept getting authentication errors. I suspected it was something with motion that wasn't working. I setup motion on the desktop computer I was testing the camera with and the camera worked with motion. I then compared config files between the two machines and tried to connect with the server with the exact config files. Still had authentication issues.

I started to check the server system logs and found that the authentication was being stopped by SELINUX and the camera accessing port 554. I had to make a SELINUX change to allow motion to access port 554 for authentication. Once I did this, the camera worked as expected.