No Audio on RTSP or OVNIF Camera config

[redneckgeek]

I've got an NetSurveillance camera (Chinese) camera that supports both RTSP and OVNIF. It has a microphone, but I cannot get the sound to be recorded by the NAS either via ONVIF discovery or setting the RTSP settings manually.

ffmpeg rtsp to the camera gives me sound and reports:
Stream #0:0: Video: hevc (Main), yuvj420p(pc, bt709), 2880x1616, 12 fps, 12 tbr, 90k tbn
Stream #0:1: Audio: pcm_alaw, 8000 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 64 kb/s

Neither the recorded audio on the Asustor NAS or the Surveillance Center live view will record/play the sound.

However if I set the live view setting to "stream from camera" it will play the sound with the live video.

Ideas? I've tried all the audio encoding options on the camera.. however since the play through in the Surveillance Center works I expect it's just a config issue or something that is different in the recording code than the pass through code.

PS I really don't like to have to use a windows virtual on my linux box to manage the Surveillance Center software... really??

/thanks
/rg