Is there a way to display rtsp in openhab

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
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1

I’m relatively new to OpenHab. I have the server up and running with a few basic binding working (local weather / nest).

I have a CCTV security cam system that is using rtsp only and no other way to view the streams and DVR. Is there a way to get the live stream in my portal? I’m currently running the server on centos and using ffmpeg to grab a frame from the rtsp feed every minuet and post it as a jpg. Though I’d really like to have a live feed. The DVR playback would be nice but not 100% necessary.

Any info is appreciated.

2

I don’t know the direct answer to the question, but if it is ‘no’ then you could transcode the stream to a different format using (for example) vlc.
https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/

3

See this page for some ideas. Not sure it answers your questions though.

4

Thanks I’ll check it out.

1 Like
5

Thanks. I’ve played with VLC but it’s a lot of background processes to keep track of. I’ll take another look though.

6

Hi there, did you find any solution for this?
Cheers!

7

Yes for the most part. It can be transcoded in real time with VLC, but that was difficult to manage and taxing my CPU as I add more and more cameras. In the end I wrote a bash script that ran ffmpeg to grab and save a frame from each rtsp stream. Since I keep writing over the same file I just added the static image to my sitemap and it refreshes when I load the page. The process would get stuck sometime so I added a line to kill the ones hanging and log the last time it ran successfully. It runs every minute via a cron job. Here is what I used:

#!/bin/bash
#Super awesome ffmpeg script

#Kill all hung processes
kill -9 $(ps aux | grep [f]fmpeg | awk ‘{print $2}’)

#Grab still image from camera 1
yes | /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i rtsp://my.ip.address/user=MyUser_password=MyPassword_channel=1_stream=0.sdp -vframes 1 -s 480x300 -f image2 /var/www/html/ch01.jpg &

#Grab still image from camera 2
yes | /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i rtsp://my.ip.address/user=MyUser_password=MyPassword_channel=1_stream=0.sdp -vframes 1 -s 480x300 -f image2 /var/www/html/ch01.jpg &

#Print log
echo “This script last run on” $(date) > /var/www/html/get-pics.log

1 Like
8

@cjsaba Thanks a lot for sharing!! I will try this.

9

@cjsaba I’ve got the script running, except one issue.
I cannot make it run every 5 seconds for example. So I’ve updated a script.

#!/bin/bash
#ffmpeg script

i=0

while [ $i -lt 12 ]; do
#Kill all hung processes
kill -9 $(ps aux | grep [f]fmpeg | awk '{print $2}')
#Grab still image from camera 2
yes | ffmpeg -i rtsp://XXXXXXXXXX/ch0.h264 -vframes 1 -s 800x450 -f image2 /var/www/html/cam2.jpg

sleep 5
i=$(( i + 1 ))

done
1 Like
10

I used a call to ffmpeg in a python script running on my windows machine. To get it to work, I had to add a ‘-an’ parameter to get it to save the file correctly. The -an tells ffmpeg to expect no sound. Here is the call I used, in case it will help someone else:

subprocess.call(["ffmpeg.exe", "-i", "rtsp://admin:@192.168.1.205/live0.264",
"-vframes", "1", "-s", "800x450", "-an", "-f", "image2", "C:/myimage.jpg",
"-loglevel", "quiet"])