You may own an Eken H9 series action camera. You may, like myself, have gotten a few different lenses for it to modify it for your own, non-fisheye, use.

But how will you connect to it either through a wire or wireless?

All you need is an application (VLC will do) that can read in an RTSP stream (read more on those over at Wikipedia) and punt it to wherever you’d like.

Be aware that you won’t be streaming out at full resolution (yet? maybe impossible?). While it does work the Eken can only output “standard def” 480p with the following network connection address.

I’m still looking into changing the URL around for different streams. Unfortunately the Eken flat out crashes if you connect to an invalid URL. That’s not exactly the best handling on error conditions there folks!

NMAP reports the following on ports 1 through 1000 (TCP) when it’s not active:

Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.1
Host is up (0.0084s latency).
Not shown: 998 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
21/tcp open ftp
554/tcp open rtsp

And for UDP:

Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.1
Host is up (0.0086s latency).
Not shown: 999 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
67/udp open|filtered dhcps
MAC Address: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (Unknown)

And the connection address is:

rtsp://192.168.1.1/MJPG?W=720&H=400&Q=50&BR=5000000/

• Q – might be a quality setting? While I didn’t notice a difference this would probably require objective testing
• W – is width (this doesn’t appear to change the cameras output; just the size displayed rendering it extremely dithered)
• H – is height (this doesn’t appear to change the cameras output; just the size displayed rendering it extremely dithered)
• BR – No idea as of yet

It also runs an FTP server on the address sharing out all the contents of your Eken to anything that connects up to it. Poor error handling and poor security come prepackaged on this unit.

But the Eken is at the lowest price point you’re likely to find. And the quality is in the cheap and cheerful camp rather than total crap. At the 40~50 USD price point I like it!

Other notes on the Eken H9 series:

• With the exception of the Plus they’re all interpolating up to 4K; the native hardware only handles up to 1080P 60fps well in my experience
• Eken’s H9 is running a wifi network at 54mbps (20mhz, no HT). That’d suggest 802.11g standards.
• The camera has a built in DHCP service in addition to RTSP and FTP servers
• Plug it in via USB without a memory card and it will act as a low-def video streaming device
• Plugging in the Eken’s USB cable seems to power it while streaming
• I found that my Eken seemed to have a heating issue; It may get a modification to dissipate the heat more effectively
• The WiFi RTSP with the above connection URL exports Motion JPEG (MJPG)
• The user is “331” and the password is “wificam” for the ftp service

A note on VLC:

• Tune down the network caching option under the network connection to reduce latency

Sources not listed above:

http://hackeken.blogspot.com/2017/01/reverse-engineering-eken-android-app.html#more: Listed the URL for connection as sniffed from WireShark. Hackeken also lists the username and password which are passed in clear-text.