[thestig]

You're not wrong about what it says, but yes I'm quite sure.  I couldn't get curls working for the life of me - tried .netrc's, explicit --user args, etc.  Only --digest worked.  *BUT* I neglected to say that of the three amcrests I had (2 domes 1 bullet) the bullet worked fine with basic auth.  I believe it's probably down to firmware - I was on the latest for each, but I'm guessing that going forward it's digest only.  Both firmwares are newer than the API documentation.  And yes, that command definitely gets me a snapshot, I just checked again.  The ?1 on the end of the snap command I believe works as shorthand for &channel=1

That's the python page I landed on as well for implementing digest (we should hang out).  While it seemed straightforward enough for me to re-implement if it was a small monolithic script, the size and interconnectedness of this plugin scared me off.  Too tempting to just swap my $50 amcrest for a $50 foscam and go back to building my better life one bash script at a time.  Though i did consider cheating and dropping to an os.system() in python and just curling the dang things like I know how to do.