Hi, all!
I recently had an issue where my mechanical chime stopped working after over a year of the doorbell working fine. I troubleshooted for a day or two and eventually found the source of the problem, so I wanted to post my findings here in case others run into the same issue.
I've seen many older posts which touch on this issue, including issues with the doorbell settings, needing to factory reset the doorbell, the doorbell transformer being too powerful or not powerful enough, the length of wiring between doorbell and chime, and finally I came across a post that mentioned audio back-channels and Blue Iris setup that made me look into my BI settings.
The old post mentioned that when having other programs or software that uses the Amcrest doorbell camera, you need to turn off back-channel support for audio, because it will cause a setting in the device itself to turn off the ringing button functionality while it's in use. The post mentioned being able to "disable it by adding #backchannel=0 to the end of the connection. E.g., rtsp://<user>:<pass>@<ip>:<port>/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0#backchannel=0."
For me, this was a Blue Iris check box that I apparently marked when setting up the camera. In the "Network IP camera configuration" window used to configure video connection in Blue Iris, at the bottom of this window is a checkbox for "Setup RTSP back-channel for talk support (PCM-U format)". Once I unchecked this box, my mechanical chime started working again! I didn't even correlate that the chime stopped working when I moved my BI to a new PC and had to reconfigure the settings!
I hope this post helps others find their issue! If it does feel free to leave a comment below!
Happy IT Networking and Smart Home Configurations to you all!