FFMPEG+RECORD+No JPEG+Passthrough - Direct RSTP link somehow?

[moanzinder]

Good morning team

I'm new to ZM - running 1.36.33 on a bone stock Debian 12 VM

I have a H264 camera configured as an FFMPEG source type with RECORD function. Analysis and Decoding are off.
Source is rtsp://192.168.213.65:554/ch01.264 with TCP transport
Storage is camera passthrough only - JPEGS are disabled.

The above all works fine with CPU usage around 6% of a Celeron N5095 core per camera, "Continuous" events are raised and the stream is stored as expected. No live view is available - "Unable to Stream" and this is also expected.


In this scenario, it would be nice if ZM would serve the raw RTSP URL in the UI somewhere to allow easy access to the direct live feed from the camera. I appreciate this won't work in all environments (you need to have connectivity to the camera) but for my use case would be very handy.

What do you think?

[Magic919]

Have you tried the RTSP server?

[moanzinder]

Have you tried the RTSP server?

Well I hadn't before, but following your suggestion I gave it a shot. No dice I'm afraid.

For the Camera Passthrough monitors, if I open them in VLC the stream starts but stays blank for a very long time.
For the first couple of minutes, if I look at the VLC Statistics page, I can see "Demuxed data size" increasing and a suitable "Content bitrate" but no codecs are listed and the Audio / Video frame counters stay at zero.
Eventually, some video does come through but it's completely munged: horrible corruption, discolouration, very low FPS, no audio.

Regardless of whether the RTSP server works the way it's supposed to, you still have to manually enter the URL in VLC which I might just as well do with the raw camera URL.

Edit to add - if I use the RTSP server on one of my SubStream cameras (where I'm not doing passthrough and do store JPEGs), RTSP server works fine. Not sure if this is because they're much lower bitrate, or because of the JPEG/Passthrough config.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

[Magic919]

It’s not a fully formed feature, so maybe it has problems.

I’m sure Isaac could consider adding what you need as a feature. If it’s viable, you’d need to make the work worthwhile.

[iconnor]

In master we have decoding ondemand so live view works. Also we are working on h264 live view code through janus etc. At the end of the day browsers can't play rtsp. If you want more options switch to master.

[moanzinder]

Master is the rolling development version, right?

[dougmccrary]

yes - 1.37.42 presently.

[liliana89]

The idea of providing the raw RTSP URL in the user interface of ZoneMinder (ZM) to allow easy access to the direct live feed from the camera can be useful in certain scenarios. It would allow users to access the camera feed directly without going through ZM's interface.

sonic exe