Intro
With Zendo, you can watch a live stream of all your security cameras at a glance.
You can also turn on lights in the same room to improve image quality in low-light conditions.
Cameras live alongside locks, gates, and an activity feed in the Safety & Security overview. Tap the “Activity & Cameras” button at the bottom of your floorplan to open it.
Set up your security cameras
- Tap
- Tap “Settings”
- Tap “Edit Floorplan”
- Tap “Activity & Cameras” at the bottom of your floorplan
- You can now add, change, or delete cameras.
You can link each camera to a room in your floorplan and add an optional label to identify it quickly.
Using your cameras
You can view all your cameras directly from the floorplan, regardless of your current floor. Simply tap the Activity & Cameras button.
The Activity & Cameras view provides a snapshot of each camera for quick status checks. These snapshots refresh periodically.
On a phone, once you have four or more cameras, the snapshots are laid out in a compact grid. More cameras fit on screen at once, so you spend less time scrolling to find the one you need.
Live stream
Tap a camera to open its live stream.
Additionally, you can turn on lights in the same room to enhance image quality in low-light conditions, directly from the live stream player.
Restrict access to security cameras
Troubleshooting
If Zendo tells you it can’t play video from a camera, the camera is sending video in a format live streaming can’t play.
Cameras compress video before sending it. Two formats are common: H.264 and H.265. H.265 produces smaller files for the same picture, so many cameras use it by default, but live streaming to your phone or tablet needs H.264. Your hub passes the camera’s video straight through without converting it, so a camera set to H.265 has nothing Zendo can play.
Snapshots and motion alerts from the camera keep working. It’s only the live stream that’s affected.
How to fix it
Change the camera’s main stream to H.264. You do this in the camera manufacturer’s own app or web page, not in Zendo.
- Open the app you used to set up the camera, or its web page.
- Find its video or stream settings. These are often under “Video”, “Encode”, or “Image”.
- Set the main stream (sometimes called “stream 1” or “high quality”) to H.264.
- Save the change.
- Open the camera in Zendo again.
If the camera also lets you choose an audio format, pick G.711. Live streaming can’t carry AAC audio, so a camera left on AAC streams video without sound.
Some cameras have a second, lower-resolution stream that is already set to H.264. If your hub lets you pick which stream to use, choosing that one also works, and it uses less of your network.
Supported brands
