@Anteck Really thanks for this - I had a 20 character autogenerated complex password on Tapo, and just deleted the special characters and made my pass shorter in lack of any other good solution - but no - neither onvif nor rtsp works. Then I read your post, and it got my hopes up!

 

As you may understand, i cannot believe what you're claiming is true before I experience it myself - but if it is - that is some crazy, psychopathic coding right there....

 

It will be impossible to trust any of tp-link's coding if this is still true... Anyway, thanks for sharing this. I will wait for 30 minutes now, and if it works, I will let tp-link know it (as if they would care - if they managed this, they don't care about anything, other than being as sadistic as possible)

Have tech support look at the ARP process... A few here have mentioned that they could get around this by adding a static ARP entry, and others report that it works only after start up which means when it broadcasts for DHCP it will populate arp tables on various devices and allow the connection to function. After a while arp entries age out and then connections will start to get dropped if not maintained.

 

Why doesn't the camera respond to ARP requests on the network?!

 

I have captured the packets and can confirm the ARP requests continue but no response is given.

 

Proving the theory:

 

Yes, this is correct. I added a static ARP entry a long time ago and I've had no problems since.

I solved the problem by deactivating automatic firmeware updates on each Cam and downgrade them to 1.3.6

 

Check Version of your Cam V1 / V2 / V3 and download firmware last update before 1.3.9:

https://github.com/tapo-firmware/Tapo_C200/tree/main/Tapo_C200v2

 

1. (Important) Take an SD card that is **** NOT **** formatted by the camera before. (Reason here )

2. Format the SD card to FAT32.

3. Copy the old firmware file, downloaded before (see upper link), into the SD card and rename it to factory_up_boot.bin

4. Put the SD card into the camera and power up.

5. Here I assume you don't have serial console access, only way to make sure that the downgrade is successful is to see if the camera did the XY motor calibration or not.
   Firmware downgrade happens before motor calibration, and the calibration won't happen if downgrade is successful, the camera will just hang and await you to reboot it.

6. Wait at least for ~3 mins and if there is no motor calibration, TAKE OUT THE SD CARD and reboot your camera. If you don't take the SD card out, the camera will hang at the downgrade process again.

7. Check in mobile app if the downgrade is successful.

 

you can use the same SD-Card directly to downgrade all Tapo C200 of same version

 

Cam is working now again in Home Assistant.

many thx to kubik369  

 

Important: Manually update or downgrading firmware can brick your cam. Therefore you do this on your own risk -like me, too.

This is clearly an issue. Why can't tplink fix it?