IP Cameras

Fligg(?) acquired a cheap Chinese IP camera for testing. If we can get it to behave, the plan is to acquire more and deploy them around the space.

IP address is hard-coded at 192.168.1.10. telnetd is running on port 23, root password is "xmhdipc".

Language is hard-coded as Chinese. Only a single byte to change, but awkward as it's on a cramfs filesystem on a native MTD device with presumably very limited write cycles. Big 5Mb binary /usr/bin/Sofia does everything: streams rtsp, runs web server. Tries to connect to secu100.net for evil.

Moar data

Chipset is Hi3518 (datasheet). It has an ARM926EJ-S and ~40Mb RAM.

Contents of the included CD (160Mb).

Someone else playing with such a camera. Includes SDK, local mirror (600Mb).

Output

The following will save camera output to a file.

  gst-launch-1.0 rtspsrc location='rtsp://192.168.1.10:554/user=admin&password=&channel=1&stream=0.sdp?real_stream--rtp-caching=100' ! queue ! rtph264depay ! h264parse ! matroskamux ! filesink location=cam.mkv

The result isn't seekable but the following makes it so:

  mkvmerge -o cam-seekable.mkv cam.mkv

I've heard reports that UDP streaming is less reliable than TCP. More testing needed.

Streams:

• 0.sdp is 1280x720, 11fps, H.264, ~1Mbit/sec
• 1.sdp is 352x288, 12.5fps, H.264

(However the sensor claims 25fps.)

Things to do

On the camera:

• Get nfs mounting to work, get access to sane userland.
• Get DHCP client installed.
• Get NTP client installed.
• (Optional) Make a real rootfs with OE or embdebian or similar, boot it over NFS.

Elsewhere:

• Logging infrastructure. Storing the output of one camera stream should take about 15GB/day.
• JPEG output for web page display
• (Optional) Transcoding of the stream for viewing in web browsers that lack H.264 support