Can't get cameras to work reliably.....

[RebelT]

I had a similar issue .
I couldn’t get the sub stream to work .
Reduced my camera resolution to 1200 x 800
But I have 3 cameras . I ffmpeg each frame to 640x480 8bpp in a batch file .
I get a cruddy frame rate of 1 frame every 4 seconds . But it doesn’t burden Hs clients .
So I have ip cameras in Hs clients with little cpu hit - but at a low FPS 😐

That is certainly another way to do it. In that scenario with 1 frame every 4 seconds, you're quite literally not rendering video, you're rendering snapshots. 😀 Most systems can likely handle that with a small number of cameras.

[Demusman]

That is certainly another way to do it. In that scenario with 1 frame every 4 seconds, you're quite literally not rendering video, you're rendering snapshots. 😀 Most systems can likely handle that with a small number of cameras.

All video is snapshots. Just a different frame rate.

[Crumpy]

Thanks everyone.

Strangely, it seems to be working better at the moment. The only change I made, and I have no idea if this made a difference, was to change the camera source in HSBuddy from HomeSeer to HSTouch Server. I don't use HSTouch, but it has got HS Buddy behaving better, and the web interface seems to load the images more reliably. HomeSeer Mobile is still pretty average - it loads about half of teh cameras. But I am in the process of moving my main mobile interface over to HSBuddy, so I care less about HomeSeer Mobile.

I did try the RTSP streams, and indeed they work, but I an going to stick with the HTTP streams for a while and see how it goes.

Thanks, Dave

[Eman]

Not a HomeSeer expert by any means, but I deal with video systems as part of my day job -- so take this how you please...

You may be right that your machine doesn't lack power as it relates to HS4 overall, but your machine absolutely lacks power when it comes to handling the video that you're pushing into it.

I don't know the specifics of how video is handled in HomeSeer, but I know that above all, you're asking HomeSeer (and thereby the machine you listed) to process and ultimately render 10 streams of 1280x720 video. For an optimized VMS to render that much video at those resolutions would take a fairly beefy Windows machine, preferably with a GPU. For a platform like HomeSeer, which is doing zero optimization and is just spitting out the video that's being blasted towards it, it would take even more. Long story short -- there is zero chance your machine can render that much video.

There are a couple of ways you could approach it to try and solve it --

1. Calculate the resolution you're trying to display the cameras at on whatever viewing device you're using, then lower the resolution coming into HS4 to that. From a simplistic perspective, if you're trying to display a 3x3 grid on a 1920x1080 screen, you'd be at roughly 640x360 per camera (1920/3 = 640, 1080/3 = 360). If you're only displaying on a phone, drop it even more. You want the resolution coming in to be as low as possible and still be able to see the cameras.

2. Reduce the number of cameras. At 1280x720, i'd be shocked if you can consistently render 4 streams with that machine, but who knows.

3. Get a substantially more powerful machine to run HS4. A full-blown desktop PC is likely your only hope, but you'll need substantially more processing power.

Again -- I'm no expert on HS4, and maybe there is some level of optimization happening with the video -- but I highly doubt it. This is almost certainly a rendering issue.

My question is (I haven't tested this yet!) What happens if the streams are coming from an NVR (Cameras >>NVR>>HomeSeer) ?

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/ww...rder-paper.pdf

Functional modules within the NVR benefit from hardware-accelerated graphics, enabled by the powerful video encoding and decoding performance and parallel processing capabilities of Intel® HD Graphics.

Now, in relation to the link I posted at #5 it does confirm that the system build should be designed to specifications / standards and make use of https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/media-sdk/documentation.html This one in particular : https://software.intel.com/content/w...ers-guide.html But also note that the end user can't achieve that. It's the software (HomeSeer) engineer who has to implement it by design. You can lower the CPU levels but can't change the quality of the videos if HomeSeer was choking on them. I hope someone is listening!


For Linux : https://github.com/intel/media-driver

Note! The 64bit thing keeps cropping up everywhere


Conclusion : There is a lot missing (including OnVif) before you can have better camera processing in HomeSeer


Eman.

[RebelT]

My question is (I haven't tested this yet!) What happens if the streams are coming from an NVR (Cameras >>NVR>>HomeSeer) ?

I'm just going to address this specific portion of your question, irrespective of the HomeSeer portion you added below --

The answer is that it doesn't actually matter. The simple way to think about it is that the NVR is still just passing along bits and bytes to HomeSeer, and HomeSeer has to assemble those bits and bytes into video that your PC, tablet, or phone can display. The horsepower that is required for this comes from the machine that is displaying them, because there's nowhere else it CAN come from.

Another way to look at it is this -- for most low-end / residential NVR systems, if you plug a monitor directly into the NVR to watch and review the video, that's generally a pretty terrible experience. At that point, you ARE asking the NVR to actually reassemble all of those bits and bytes into a video, and since the NVR is also reserving some processing power for actually processing the video it's supposed to be recording, the thing usually bogs down. However, when you install the NVR software onto your PC, then load video that way -- it's generally a much better experience. The encoding of the video is happening on the PC, which probably has substantially more power than the NVR.

Ultimately, there really aren't any silver bullets to this from a HomeSeer perspective. The only thing HS could do would be to receive video streams into MyHS in the cloud, and then display them in a web browser or phone for you -- that way the majority of the encoding is happening in the cloud. But, that explicitly goes against one of the bigger draws for HomeSeer (in my book), which is that it's entirely local. I don't WANT a cloud-based platform, so I'll find another way to handle my video -- either outside of HomeSeer altogether, or with a more powerful machine to do that work.

[Eman]

Hmm............................... that part :

The only thing HS could do would be to receive video streams into MyHS in the cloud, and then display them in a web browser or phone for you --

Got me thinking Is the HomeSeer (MyHS) server being overly accessed ? thus offline repetitively Now that's gone too technical. I know it's not AWS but they are tying to provide a service.......................

Have you got this nailed?................................


And as a business if they are not going to use AWS, might as well look outside the box : https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/data-center/


Eman.

[Jon798]

Wondering if anyone can help me out getting my camera to work. It's an "Apeman ID73" which appears in the marketplace under several different chinese brands, and uses an iOS App IPC360

I can see the video ok using VLC and the URL:

rtsp://{user}:{password}@192.168.xxx.xxx/realmonitor?channel=0&stream=1.sdp/

Which gives a video stream at 640x360 and buffer size 640x386

I can't find or deduce a snapshot url for it.

When I configure the above URL in HS4, I get nothing - just a spinning circle when I choose the "Cameras" menu. Nothing in the logs.

Any clues, anyone?

Cheers,

Jon.

[Eman]

Wondering if anyone can help me out getting my camera to work. It's an "Apeman ID73" which appears in the marketplace under several different chinese brands, and uses an iOS App IPC360

I can see the video ok using VLC and the URL:

rtsp://{user}:{password}@192.168.xxx.xxx/realmonitor?channel=0&stream=1.sdp/

Which gives a video stream at 640x360 and buffer size 640x386

I can't find or deduce a snapshot url for it.

When I configure the above URL in HS4, I get nothing - just a spinning circle when I choose the "Cameras" menu. Nothing in the logs.

Any clues, anyone?

Cheers,

Jon.

I don't have cameras working but download Ispy : https://www.ispyconnect.com/download.aspx and after install click ADD then choose IP CAMERA WITH WIZARD and go through adding your camera with a few dialog boxes you will a stream of possible URLs you can test and see if you can get it working.

If you don't want to install you can also use this : https://www.ispyconnect.com/sources.aspx

Ispy for Linux involves extra work to install it. Take a pick!


Eman.

[Jon798]

Thaks, I'd looked through the online listings there before without luck. I tried installing iSpy too, but no new URLs and the ones it offered me didn't work, giving me FFMEG Input errors. I think it needs the VLC plugin to work. I have the camera working using BlueIris but just wanted to explore the HomeSeeer integration.

Still no snapshot URLs I can find. Does Homeseer require a snapshot URL as well as a streaming URL? Is there a list of supported cameras somewhere for HS4?

Cheers,

Jon.