@DJ,
If you have been following the recent threads on Foscam cameras, you may have seen that I am looking for a way to potentially get better performance from the Foscam's by using VLC or ffmpeg to transcode the H.264 RTSP stream to MJPEG in real time (rather than using the jpeg stream in ARC, which has a good bit of lag, so is not useful for things like object tracking).
While looking at this, I realized that ffmpeg and aforge are used by ARC, so it is theoretically possible to add native support rather than a workaround. This could be useful for a number of web cams as well as the Foscam devices.
Is this something you could add to the wish list? I understand there may be challenges with getting it to work with tracking and recognition, so if the answer is no, I certainly understand.
Alan
Sure - I've been watching the thread and already ahead of ya!
I suspected as much. Pretty much every time I put effort into a workaround to make something work, you add it as a feature, so I figured I would ask first this time :)
Alan
Ha
that'll take a little longer to implement though - but it'll happen. Just no deadline at the moment until I wrap my head around the implementation.
OK. I have been digging through the Foscom docs, and I may be able to make it do mjpeg. I'll try tonight and let you know if it works and how the performance is. Then I'll also try the VLS transcode option and see how that works.
Alan
So, some success.
I can get the Foscam to have an MJPEG stream with this command:
and then view it in a web browser with this URL
and the performance is better than the snapshot mode, but even though it is displaying at 640x480 at 15 frames per second, if I use the URL in ARC, it just shows a black screen.
I'll try the transcoding RTSP to MJPEG at 320x240 with VLC and see if that works and doesn't significantly hinder performance.
Alan
Unfortunately, VLC keeps crashing when I try to trancode the RTSP stream to MJPEG, and the instructions I thought I had found for doing it in FFMPEG don't work.
I am not sure why the MJPEG stream that the camera has built in support for doesn't work in ARC, but it is not my top priority to solve at this time since snapshot mode does work, although the performance is not great.
DJ, if you want to look at the MJPEG issue, let me know and I can set you up as a remote user on my camera so you can access the stream and maybe see if it is doing something non-standard. If you don't have the time, no biggie...
Alan
Yeah set me up as a remote and I'll take a look
Cool. I emailed you the URL with the credentials embedded.
Alan