Full local access to Imou / Lechange (Dahua-chipset) cameras from Linux —
live view, image & night tuning, motion detection, SD-card inventory and local recording.

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Why this exists

Imou ships no Linux client. The Windows and mobile apps are not LAN clients — they authenticate against Imou's cloud and tunnel P2P to the device. That is the whole reason the camera "only works on Windows".

The camera itself is not the problem. It speaks RTSP, ONVIF and DVRIP, and Linux handles all three natively. This is the toolset that came out of mapping exactly which local interfaces do what — and which ones the firmware quietly refuses.

The full protocol write-up is docs/PROTOCOL.md. That is the interesting part if you own a different Imou, Lechange, Dahua or Amcrest camera.

What you get

Live view	1080p main or 640×480 sub stream, in-app
Snapshots	one click, JPEG straight from the camera
Image tuning	brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, gamma, chroma, style
Night / optics	auto / colour / B&W, IR LED, switch sensitivity, white balance, anti-flicker, mirror, flip
Motion	enable + sensitivity, read from and written to the device
SD card	capacity, plus every clip with times, duration, size and motion events
Local recording	24/7 segmented MP4 to your disk, with retention, surviving logout
Settings	autostart, recorder on/off, segment length, retention, camera-SD toggle

Everything runs on your LAN. No account, no cloud, no relay.

Install

Requirements: Python 3.10+, ffmpeg, python3-tk, python3-numpy.

git clone https://github.com/dailybarid/imou-linux.git
cd imou-linux
./install.sh              # app + icon + menu entry
./install.sh --service    # ...and the 24/7 recorder as a systemd user service

The installer asks for the camera's own account — the device password / safety code set in the vendor app, not your Imou cloud login — and writes it to ~/.config/imou-camera.env with mode 600.

Then launch Imou Camera Control from your application menu.

Why a venv? The distro python3-pil ships Pillow without ImageTk (it lives in the separate python3-pil.imagetk package), so system Python dies on from PIL import ImageTk — silently, when started from a menu. The installer builds a venv with a complete Pillow. Note --ignore-installed: with --system-site-packages, pip otherwise sees the system Pillow as already satisfying the requirement and installs nothing.

Use it

./launch.sh                       # GUI
./imou_sd.py --storage            # SD card usage
./imou_sd.py --list 7             # every clip from the last 7 days
./imou_sd.py --list 7 --json      # same, machine-readable
./imou-record.sh --test 20        # record 20 s to prove the pipeline

The recorder writes ~/imou-recordings/YYYY-mm-dd_HH-MM-SS.mp4 — 1080p HEVC, roughly 1.7 GB/day, pruned to your configured retention.

Settings tab

These controls act on real system state, not local preferences:

Control	What it actually does
Start Imou Camera when I log in	writes/removes ~/.config/autostart/imou-camera.desktop
Record continuously	systemctl --user enable --now / disable --now
Segment / Keep for	writes IMOU_SEGMENT + IMOU_RETAIN_DAYS, restarts the recorder
Record to the camera's own SD card	rewrites the camera's Record schedule (bitmask 393222 on / 0 off)
View log	opens ~/.cache/imou-camera.log

Toggles read live state on startup, so they show what is true rather than what was last clicked. If a camera read fails, the SD toggle stays at "checking…" instead of falsely reporting "disabled".

Configuration

~/.config/imou-camera.env — see imou-camera.env.example:

IMOU_HOST=192.168.1.100
IMOU_USER=admin
IMOU_PASS=your-device-password
IMOU_SUBTYPE=0          # 0 = main 1080p, 1 = sub
IMOU_OUTDIR=/home/you/imou-recordings
IMOU_SEGMENT=300
IMOU_RETAIN_DAYS=30

The one thing to remember

RTSP returns 403 on a perfectly valid password unless you append the ONVIF flag:

rtsp://USER:PASS@HOST:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0&unicast=true&proto=Onvif

Without &proto=Onvif you will conclude the credential is wrong. It is not.

Honest limitations

Firmware facts, not bugs to report:

• SD playback over the network is impossible on this firmware class. Metadata yes, clip bytes no: /RPC_Loadfile returns 500, RTSP /cam/playback returns 404, and :8086 is live-only. Local recording is the answer.
• PTZ appears in ONVIF but fixed-lens models have no motors.
• ter:NotImplemented from ONVIF means the firmware simply does not do it.

If you pull the microSD, the .dav clips remux losslessly: ffmpeg -f dhav -i clip.dav -c copy clip.mp4.

Credits

The DVRIP surface and the :8086 XAV layout were informed by the community work in home-assistant-plugins/imou-life. This implementation is independent Python.

License

MIT