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Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

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Re: Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to plug my project, APStreamline for just this use case ( https://github.com/shortstheory/APStreamline ). It supports network adaptive streaming which adjusts the resolution and bitrate of the H264 video streamed from the Pi camera depending on the quality of your network connection. You can then use an RTSP player such as VLC to view the video stream. It works great with other types of cameras too!

Took a look at your GitHub link, looks like you put in quite a lot of work. Looks very interesting. When you say "works great with other types of cameras", could you explain? You've tested with other cameras and could you tell us which?

Thank you! The list of cameras for which I have added special support are:

* Logitech C920

* Raspberry Pi Camera

* e-Con AR0521

* ZED2 Depth camera (in V4L2 mode)

In case your camera is not one of the above, APStreamline falls back to requesting an MJPG stream from the camera and then encoding it to H264 that using the x264enc software encoder. The software encoder has good quality but it requires more CPU power.

Re: Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

#72

It amazes me, really, that for as popular as this use case seems to be there isn't a simple, well-packaged way to stream a camera off a pi. I've been trying to get this working lately and nothing works "well". Motion is popular, but is limited to mjpeg rather than h.264. uv4l is closed source and not up to date with current OS versions. None of the various cvlc incantations to do better actually seem to work on my pi…

> I've been trying to get this working lately and nothing works "well". Motion is popular, but is limited to mjpeg rather than h.264. uv4l is closed source and not up to date with current OS versions. None of the various cvlc incantations to do better actually seem to work on my pi zero w, etc. Since you use motion, I suppose you want to have some kind of detection going on. I was toying with 2 pi0+cam and one pi4 so…

It seem this setup get close to the Jetson Nano 2Gb price range ($59), which from my experience is order of magnitude faster than rpi 4 for computer vision/video processing tasks. Is there any advantage of using Motion over nvidia-deepstream?

Re: Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took a look at your GitHub link, looks like you put in quite a lot of work. Looks very interesting. When you say "works great with other types of cameras", could you explain? You've tested with other cameras and could you tell us which?

Thank you! The list of cameras for which I have added special support are: * Logitech C920 * Raspberry Pi Camera * e-Con AR0521 * ZED2 Depth camera (in V4L2 mode) In case your camera is not one of the above, APStreamline falls back to requesting an MJPG stream from the camera and then encoding it to H264 that using the x264enc software encoder. The software encoder has good quality but it requires more CPU power.

Can this stream h264 directly from a Logitech C920 rather than decoding then encoding?

Re: Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took a look at your GitHub link, looks like you put in quite a lot of work. Looks very interesting. When you say "works great with other types of cameras", could you explain? You've tested with other cameras and could you tell us which?

Thank you! The list of cameras for which I have added special support are: * Logitech C920 * Raspberry Pi Camera * e-Con AR0521 * ZED2 Depth camera (in V4L2 mode) In case your camera is not one of the above, APStreamline falls back to requesting an MJPG stream from the camera and then encoding it to H264 that using the x264enc software encoder. The software encoder has good quality but it requires more CPU power.

Thanks for the in-depth reply.

Is there some process you setup on Github for others if we test with our own cameras and let you know?

Re: Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

#76
post #53

I have used this https://github.com/jacksonliam/mjpg-streamer for a number of years to great success. However a word of warning: Wifi streaming video can really degrade your wifi for other devices. especially if the streaming device is at the edge of the range of the wifi. Ethernet streaming is really the way forward.

Why not dedicate a WiFi channel to the video then? WiFi routers are inexpensive.

Thats a good question

You can, and it solves one of the problems: other clients wanting to use your bandwidth. With careful setup, and a low noise floor (ie not an apartment block) you could do this.

However you have to remember that you can only really run as fast as your slowest wifi camera[1]. That means that in practical terms, you need to make sure that all your cameras are syncing at the highest practical speed (this means not using the on board antenna in most cases)

[1] its more complex than this, but my understanding is that slower devices eat up the available transmit/receive time. which means that everything else is slowed down.

Re: Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

#77
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! The list of cameras for which I have added special support are: * Logitech C920 * Raspberry Pi Camera * e-Con AR0521 * ZED2 Depth camera (in V4L2 mode) In case your camera is not one of the above, APStreamline falls back to requesting an MJPG stream from the camera and then encoding it to H264 that using the x264enc software encoder. The software encoder has good quality but it requires more CPU power.

Can this stream h264 directly from a Logitech C920 rather than decoding then encoding?

Yes! This uses the H264 stream encoded by the C920 so you will be able to get an HD stream even on low powered devices such as the Raspberry Pi.

Re: Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! The list of cameras for which I have added special support are: * Logitech C920 * Raspberry Pi Camera * e-Con AR0521 * ZED2 Depth camera (in V4L2 mode) In case your camera is not one of the above, APStreamline falls back to requesting an MJPG stream from the camera and then encoding it to H264 that using the x264enc software encoder. The software encoder has good quality but it requires more CPU power.

Thanks for the in-depth reply. Is there some process you setup on Github for others if we test with our own cameras and let you know?

A pull request?

Re: Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

#79

It amazes me, really, that for as popular as this use case seems to be there isn't a simple, well-packaged way to stream a camera off a pi. I've been trying to get this working lately and nothing works "well". Motion is popular, but is limited to mjpeg rather than h.264. uv4l is closed source and not up to date with current OS versions. None of the various cvlc incantations to do better actually seem to work on my pi…

MotionEyeOS consistently crashes for me on raspberry pi zeroes. It's just not stable enough. I suppose it's the transcoding to mjpeg that's too heavy. But I'll try some of the alternatives mentioned here.

Re: Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

#80
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been trying to get this working lately and nothing works "well". Motion is popular, but is limited to mjpeg rather than h.264. uv4l is closed source and not up to date with current OS versions. None of the various cvlc incantations to do better actually seem to work on my pi zero w, etc. Since you use motion, I suppose you want to have some kind of detection going on. I was toying with 2 pi0+cam and one pi4 so…

It seem this setup get close to the Jetson Nano 2Gb price range ($59), which from my experience is order of magnitude faster than rpi 4 for computer vision/video processing tasks. Is there any advantage of using Motion over nvidia-deepstream?

I don't know much about nvidia-deepstream. Motion is a stand alone and ready to use program that can take multiple streams, detect frame to frame differences with different settings. Nvidia-deepstream seems to be an SDK that requires more specific AI/ML knowledge to set up motion detection.
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