[pimatic-mjpg] Add a live stream of your camera to pimatic

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I’ve been busy the last days and created a new plugin called pimatic-mjpg. This plugin is a simple version of pimatic-ip-camera, because it only shows a mjpg stream, without creating snapshots. You just need the URL of your mjpg stream (from e.g MJPG-Streamer or motion).

For instructions how to use it, please see the README.

If you like this plugin, then consider a donation.

it is possible to add a function to get a stream from an rtsp source?

i have three cameras here one has an mjpeg stream and two have an rtsp stream.

at the moment i use ffmpeg to save an image every second from there.
but this is just a workaround.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Chris

@chris It’s on the list: https://github.com/michbeck100/pimatic-mjpg/issues/1

Hi,

does not work on iOS or Android devices
The devices appears without showing any picture.

Using Chrome on Mac OS will show the picture.

Any ideas?

@chrizzz86 oh, that’s bad. Maybe that’s the reason why pimatic-ipcamera serves snapshots of the live stream? I will have a look into this. Let’s hope that this can be solved…

@chrizzz86 this one works:

http://camera1.mairie-brest.fr/mjpg/video.mjpg?resolution=320x240

I will see where the difference is.

Hi,
@chrizzz86: Just a wild guess. Do you grab the stream from an internal (192.168.x.x) IP ? If your android is not in the wlan you may not able to see the stream.

br
Mike

@merphun
Camera, Android/iOS and Pi are in same subnet

@chrizzz86 did you try the above camera stream url in the plugin provided from michbeck?
http://camera1.mairie-brest.fr/mjpg/video.mjpg?resolution=320x240

Good morning.

Thanks for developing this plugin. It works very well.

I feel i should warn people who view this on their mobile tho… It appears the camera stream will run in the background whilst the screen is off on android at least. Both mine and my wife’s phone have downloaded over 2 gb in just one day because of this. It has eaten into our data allowance.

Not sure if there is anything you can do about it, other than close the tab each time.

@leader21 Okay, stream you mentioned works!
Seems to be a problem of my cameras stream configuration.

@chrizzz86 maybe you need to figure out how to call the mjpeg stream of your camera. could be that you need to pass over credentials or need to open a port on your router etc …

Could figure it out: The cameras substream has been configured to h264.
But still, after changing the substream to mjpeg no success
This could be a problem, because rtsp is not supported (Yet )

If you’re into hacks, here’s what I did with my IP camera.
Take my RTSP stream, and transcode it with ffmpeg+ffserver into a webm video (unfortunately iOS doesn’t support webm either. thanks iOS), and output the video with ffserver into http stream.

Supposedly you could output HLS stream which Apple supports, but I have had no success with that format yet.

ffmpeg transcoding is a bit heavy as a task, so I made buttons for pimatic to start and stop those processes on demand, so they are not always running.

The thing with stream videos is that all mobile operating systems have support for different formats.

• MP4 format is supported with all devices, but can’t be used as a stream because there can not be a playback timeline (mp4 requires this) on a live stream.
• Theora works well, but only on desktop browsers.
• WEBM works with desktop browsers and Android Chrome. iOS does not support it.
• HLS works with iOS and IE edge, but not with firefox/chrome on desktop, and might or might not work on android.

I installed the plugin today and integrated my three webcams. Works so far.

Two questions:

1. I only have still images. For an update I have to reload the page. Can I customize the plugin to update the image at adjustable intervals? Or is that possible with a rule?

2. all three webcams are displayed on the PC. On the Android phone only the two Foscam devices. Unfortunately not Edimax’s. What could be the reason for this?

@WaJoWi the plugin is currently not in active development. Please try pimatic-ipcamera. Maybe this plugin suits your needs better. Sorry.

Although the plugin is still not in active development it works with my latest gadget from AliExpress: esp32-cam.
These cameras are less than 10$ with 1920x1080 support. Just follow these instructions to setup: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-cam-video-streaming-face-recognition-arduino-ide/

Then you can use the mjpg stream from http://<ip-address>:81/stream with pimatic-mjpg. You can configure it using the built-in webserver at port 80 of your cam. It even has face recognition.

Didn’t try with iOS yet, though.

I’m also thinking of integrating the stream into pimatic-hap to get live video from the home app.

Let me know how it works for you!