UniFi Cameras on Tizen

A native Samsung Smart TV (Tizen) app that shows your UniFi Protect (or any RTSP) cameras as a live grid, with a D-pad → fullscreen picker. Runs entirely on your own network — no cloud, no subscription, and no dependency on Home Assistant or anything else.

• Live N-camera grid (2×2, 3×3, whatever you configure), one HLS stream on the TV
• Arrow keys move a highlight; OK blows a camera up to fullscreen; Left/Right cycle; Back returns to the grid
• Pick which cameras, how many, and their order by editing one config file
• Works with any camera that exposes RTSP
• Resilient: go2rtc auto-reconnects dropped cameras, a watchdog restarts the stream if it stalls, and the TV app reconnects itself — a wall display recovers without anyone touching it

  UniFi Protect / any RTSP camera
            │  rtsp://…
            ▼
  ┌───────────────────────────────────┐   an always-on box you own
  │  restreamer  (this repo)          │   (Windows, Mac, Linux, a Raspberry Pi…)
  │   go2rtc (auto-reconnect cameras) │
  │     → ffmpeg → mosaic + per-cam   │
  │     → HLS on http://HOST:8099     │
  └───────────────────────────────────┘
            │  HLS (http)
            ▼
     Samsung Tizen TV  ── the app (this repo)

Why a restreamer? (read this first)

Most consumer TV's cannot play RTSP streams, that is why ubiquiti (unifi) sells their rediculously overpriced HDMI tv adapter. This eleminates the need to spend additional money for another Unifi product. You do NOT need to spend more money if you already have a device to run the restreamer. Samsung consumer TVs cannot play RTSP — their video player (AVPlay) only speaks HLS/DASH/MP4. And the TV has one hardware decoder, so it can't decode several camera streams at once. This project solves both with a tiny restreamer on a machine you already leave on: ffmpeg pulls your RTSP cameras, composites them into one HLS "mosaic" stream (so the TV decodes a single stream but sees the whole grid), and also serves each camera on its own for the fullscreen view.

So there are two parts: the restreamer (a couple of small services) and the TV app. You need both.

Requirements

• A Samsung Tizen TV (2020+ / Tizen 5.5+). Tested on a 2023 CU8000.
• An always-on host on the same LAN to run the restreamer: Windows, macOS, Linux, or a Raspberry Pi. Needs ffmpeg and python3 on PATH.
• Your cameras' RTSP URLs. For UniFi Protect: enable RTSP per-camera in Protect, then the URL is rtsp://<NVR-IP>:7447/<alias>.
• To build/install the app: Tizen Studio CLI on a Mac/Linux/Windows machine, a free Samsung account, and Developer Mode enabled on the TV. (One-time; see Part 3.)

---

Part 1 — Set up the restreamer

On the always-on host:

git clone https://github.com/xtantaudio/unifi-cameras-on-tizen.git
cd unifi-cameras-on-tizen/restreamer
cp config.example.json config.json
# edit config.json: list your cameras (name + rtsp url), and the grid (cols x rows)

config.json is the only file you edit to choose cameras, count, and order:

{
  "grid": { "cols": 2, "rows": 2 },
  "cameras": [
    { "name": "Front Door", "url": "rtsp://10.0.0.5:7447/aaaa" },
    { "name": "Backyard",   "url": "rtsp://10.0.0.5:7447/bbbb" },
    { "name": "Garage",     "url": "rtsp://10.0.0.5:7447/cccc" },
    { "name": "Driveway",   "url": "rtsp://10.0.0.5:7447/dddd" }
  ]
}

• Which cameras / how many: add or remove entries.
• Order (grid position): cameras fill left→right, top→bottom, so reorder the list.
• Layout: set grid.cols × grid.rows. Fewer cameras than cells → the extra cells are black.

Then install the services:

macOS

./install-macos.sh          # downloads go2rtc, starts now + at boot, auto-restarts on failure

This installs three services: the mosaic (root LaunchDaemon), the HLS server (user LaunchAgent), and the watchdog (root LaunchDaemon — see Staying up). The mosaic runs as a root LaunchDaemon — a per-user service gets blocked by macOS "Local Network Privacy" from reaching your cameras. On first run macOS may pop a "allow local network" prompt — click Allow.

Windows (run in an elevated PowerShell — installs Task Scheduler jobs that start at boot and auto-restart):

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process Bypass -Force
.\install-windows.ps1

Windows has no Local Network Privacy, so a normal SYSTEM task reaches your cameras fine.

Linux / Raspberry Pi — see restreamer/systemd/README.md.

Hardware encoding (optional, lightens CPU) — set "encoder" in config.json: h264_videotoolbox (macOS, default), h264_nvenc (NVIDIA), h264_qsv (Intel), h264_amf (AMD), h264_v4l2m2m (Raspberry Pi). Default "auto"/libx264 (software) works everywhere.

Verify it's serving (from any machine):

http://<HOST-IP>:8099/mosaic/index.m3u8     ← the grid
http://<HOST-IP>:8099/config.json           ← the camera manifest the app reads

---

Part 2 — Point the app at your restreamer

cd unifi-cameras-on-tizen/app
cp js/config.example.js js/config.js
# edit js/config.js — set host to your restreamer:
#   window.CAMTV = { host: "http://<HOST-IP>:8099" };

config.js is gitignored, so your host never ends up in the repo — same pattern as the restreamer's config.json. The build refuses to run if it's missing or still says CHANGE_ME.

That's the only app edit. Camera names, count, and grid layout are fetched from the restreamer at runtime, so after this you change cameras by editing the restreamer's config.json — no app rebuild needed.

---

Part 3 — Build, sign, and install to your TV

Samsung requires apps to be signed with a certificate tied to your specific TV. This repo does that headlessly (no flaky GUI). One-time toolchain + per-TV cert.

Which machine to build from: the build/sign scripts are bash (sdb, expect, openssl). Run them on macOS or Linux — or on Windows via WSL or Git Bash. This is a one-time step to get the app onto the TV; the restreamer can run on Windows independently. The TV app, once installed, doesn't care what OS built it.

1. Install Tizen Studio CLI (the small "web-cli" package) from http://download.tizen.org/sdk/Installer/ and install the Samsung Certificate Extension (cert-add-on) and TV web tools. On Apple Silicon you also need Rosetta (softwareupdate --install-rosetta). Set TIZEN_HOME if it's not ~/tizen-studio.

2. Enable Developer Mode on the TV: Apps → type 12345 → turn Developer Mode on → set Host PC IP to the machine you're building from → restart the TV.

3. Get a Samsung token (opens a browser login to your Samsung account):

   python3 tools/capture-token.py

4. Generate the cert, sign, and install (replace with your TV's IP):

   ./tools/sign-and-install.sh 192.168.1.42

   This reads your TV's DUID, calls Samsung's cert API, builds the signed .wgt, and installs + launches it. After the first time, re-deploy app changes with ./tools/build-install.sh <TV_IP>.

Certificates expire in ~30–90 days. The installed app keeps running, but to re-install after that, re-run capture-token.py + sign-and-install.sh.

---

Using it

Button	Grid	Fullscreen
Arrows	move the highlight	Left/Right = prev/next camera
OK	fullscreen the highlighted camera	back to grid
Back	exit the app	back to grid

Switching streams shows a brief "Loading…" — the TV's single decoder tears down and rebuilds between streams (≈1–2 s). Normal.

Staying up unattended

A wall display is only useful if it survives things going wrong at 3am without someone relaunching an app. Three mechanisms cover three different failures, and they're independent:

Failure	What handles it
A camera reboots or drops	go2rtc reconnects it; ffmpeg never sees the blip
The restreamer process crashes	camtv.py exits if either child dies, so launchd/systemd restarts the whole chain
ffmpeg freezes without exiting	the watchdog notices and restarts it
The TV loses the stream	the app reconnects itself

That third row is the one that's easy to miss. KeepAlive/Restart=always only fire when a process exits. A hung ffmpeg is still running, so the service manager sees a healthy service while the picture is frozen — nothing restarts, and it stays that way until a human notices. So the watchdog ignores process state and watches the output instead: if no stream has written a new HLS segment for STALE_SECS (default 60), it restarts the mosaic service.

The fourth row matters just as much. Restarting the stream doesn't help if the TV has already given up on it — the old behavior was to show "Stream error" and stay dead. The app now retries the same URL indefinitely, showing "Reconnecting…" instead, with backoff — 2s, 3s, 5s, 5s, 10s, 15s, then every 30s. It also runs a 15s buffering watchdog, because AVPlay's onerror doesn't reliably fire on a dead stream — it often just hangs in "buffering" forever.

It never gives up, and that's deliberate. An earlier version stopped after 10 attempts, which tested fine against quick restarts and then failed for real: a 45s outage plus ffmpeg's startup put the stream back just after the budget expired, leaving "Stream error" on screen while a healthy stream was being served. Worse, the app was still running, so relaunching it did nothing — the runtime just foregrounds a live app without re-running its JS, and only a reinstall recovered it. Any finite ceiling has that failure mode; it merely changes which outage length triggers it. Nobody is standing at a wall display to press a button, so late recovery beats no recovery.

Tuning (environment variables on the watchdog service):

Variable	Default	Meaning
STALE_SECS	60	No new segment for this long ⇒ stalled
CHECK_INTERVAL	300	Seconds between checks
MAX_LOG_MB	10	Rotate logs above this size (0 disables)

Watchdog activity is logged to restreamer/logs/watchdog.log.

Changing cameras later

Edit restreamer/config.json, then restart the restreamer:

• macOS: sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/com.unifi-cameras.mosaic
• Linux: sudo systemctl restart camtv-mosaic

Relaunch the app and it picks up the new camera set automatically.

Troubleshooting

• App installs but the grid is black / "Stream error": the app can't reach the restreamer. Check http://<HOST>:8099/config.json loads from another device, and that js/config.js host is right. Note the app shows "Reconnecting…" while a stream is unavailable and keeps retrying forever (after ~6 attempts it adds "check the restreamer"), so a brief message during a restreamer restart is expected, not a fault. It recovers on its own within ~30s of the stream returning — if it doesn't, the stream genuinely isn't being served.
• The picture froze and nothing recovered it: check restreamer/logs/watchdog.log. No STALE lines means the watchdog isn't running (launchctl list | grep unifi-cameras / systemctl status camtv-watchdog); ERROR: kickstart failed means it's running but can't restart the mosaic — on macOS it must be installed as a root LaunchDaemon to act on a system-domain job.
• TV rejects the install ("Invalid certificate chain"): cert expired, or Developer Mode / Host PC IP not set. Re-run Part 3.
• sdb connect refused though the port is open: the TV's Developer Mode Host PC IP isn't set to your build machine.
• Restreamer log shows "No route to host" on macOS: the mosaic isn't running as the root LaunchDaemon (install-macos.sh sets this up), or you haven't allowed local-network access.
• A camera plays in the grid but black in fullscreen: it's likely H.265/HEVC and your TV's fine with the mosaic (re-encoded H.264) but not the copied HEVC. Transcode that camera — see docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

How it works

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full design, the AVPlay/HLS constraints, and the headless Samsung-certificate flow.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.