grabbing an image from an rtsp stream

Maybe this will also help someone:

On my RPI (Raspberry Pi) here, I have two crontab scripts that do the following:

==> Every 5 minutes:  The RPI will run a script that will grab a JPG frame from a remote (Hosafe) rtsp stream.  Name each JPG with the current date/time.  Add each acquired JPG to a running accumulator.tar file.  The individual JPGs are availabe for view on my RPI web page.  Alternately, one could download the accumulator.tar and have all the JPGs to date (just for one day) for viewing on their PC.  That accumulator.tar is also available on the web page.  There is a note on the web page suggesting that '7zip' is a tool that can be installed on a Windows PC that can easily extract all the JPGs from the accumulator.tar file.

==> At 11:59 PM every night:  The RPI will run a second script that will place all the acquired JPGs for the day, into a single tar file with the name that is the date of all the JPGs.  The script also removed the acumulator.tar so that can begin accumulating from scratch for the new day.

One thing to note is that not all grabbed frames (JPGs) are of perfect quality.  Roughly 5-10% of them may have obvious corruption as seen with a viewer on the PC (I use Faststone viewer).  I am guessing that is corruption from the 2-hop link from my QTH to the actual camera.  That's roughly 2.5 miles plus 12.6 miles.  Also a more general comment is the summer night captures as usual show a lot of (QRN?) interference mostly from spider webs!  The day shots look nice and I have made lime-lapse movies from them.

Also, regarding the corrupted JPGs, I tried to use a Linux utility (can't remember its name) to automatically analyze and detect corruption it it didn't detect the bad JPGs.  Since I can easily review, find and move the bad JPGs with Faststone, I gave up pursuing an automatic method.

Everything I did is a bit of a hack but seems to work well and has been running solidly every day for over a month.  This whole thing was/is a bit of an experiment but is still interesting.  I get rid of the corrupted JPGs on the PC then zip up by day and put into a 'history' directory on the RPI that is also accessible from the web page.  FYI, I use MobaXterm to move files back and forth between my RPI and Windows 7 PC.  Below are the scripts and crontab information.

================================
crontab for 1st script:
     */5  * * * * /home/pi/bin/joe's-hosafe-cam1-2jpg.sh
================================
CONTENTS OF joe's-hosafe-cam1-2jpg.sh:

     #!/bin/bash
     today=`date '+%Y_%m_%d__%H_%M_%S'`;
     filename="/home/pi/Videos/joes-hosafe-cam1/$today.jpg"
     shortfname="$today.jpg"
     avconv -i rtsp://joes-hosafe-cam1.local.mesh:554/  -r 1 -vframes 1 -vsync 1 -qscale 1 -f image2 $filename
     tar --append --file=/home/pi/Videos/joes-hosafe-cam1/0-acumulator.tar -C /home/pi/Videos/joes-hosafe-cam1 $shortfname
================================
crontab for 2nd script:
     59 23 * * * /home/pi/bin/tar-joe's-hosafe-cam1.sh
================================
CONTENTS OF tar-joe's-hosafe-cam1.sh:

     #!/bin/bash
     cd /home/pi/Videos/joes-hosafe-cam1/
     NOWDATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
     tar --remove-files -cvf $NOWDATE.tar ./*.jpg
     rm /home/pi/Videos/joes-hosafe-cam1/0-acumulator.tar
================================
73 - Mike ab4yy

kg9dw - it seems like there's a missing " in this??

/usr/bin/avconv -y -loglevel debug -rtsp_transport tcp -i "rtsp://kg9dw-qth-cam.local.mesh:554//user=USER_password=PASSWORD_channel... -q:v 9  -vframes 1 kg9dw.jpg

I have two identical cameras (both HOSAFE).

This WAS working on the one with no user/password configured:  It stopped working with the same error shown below.
/usr/bin/avconv -y -loglevel debug -rtsp_transport tcp -i "rtsp://w6bi-simicam1:554//channel=1_stream=1.sdp" -q:v 9  -vframes 1 /tmp/w6bi-simicam1.jpg

I have another one that is configured with userid & password "view"
This is what I'm trying:
/usr/bin/avconv -y -loglevel debug -rtsp_transport tcp -i "rtsp://w6bi-drivewaycam-rtsp:554//user=view_password=view_channel=0_stream=0.sdp" -q:v 9  -vframes 1 /tmp/w6bi-drivewaycam.jpg

I've tried all four combinations of channel & stream, and they all result in

Invalid data found when processing input

Any suggestions?

Thanks.


 

avconv seems to be discontinued... try ffmpeg

ffmpeg -y -i rtsp://kg9dw-qth-cam.local.mesh:554 //user=USER_password=PASSWORD_channel=1_stream=1.sdp -vframes 1 kg9dw.jpg

it works for me in http://iz5fsa-server.local.mesh/webcams.html

 

Oh, and also, incase it is useful for someone, you can also use vlc (or shinobi) to transcode video, for example from rtsp to an mjpeg video stream, so that it can be directly streamed on a webpage with the html5 <video> tag.  Ie, instead of getting static images, to get live video streaming.  (Obviously this uses more processing power.)

cvlc -I dummy -R rtsp://192.168.10.211/live1.264  --sout "#transcode{vcodec=mjpg,vb=1000,scale=0.5,fps=10,acodec=none,threads=0}:standard{access=http{mime=multipart/x-mixed-replace; boundary=7b3cc56e5f51db803f790dad720ed50a},mux=mpjpeg,dst=:8881/videostream.cgi}"

192.168.10.211 is the ip address of the camera, and 8881 is the port of the computer vlc is running on that the mpeg4 video stream will be hosted on.


and then in the webpage:
 

<img src="http://192.168.10.13:8881/videostream.cgi">

 

192.168.10.13 is the ip address of the computer that VLC is transcoding on and 8881 is the port in the script above.
Note that I have three cameras and one vlc process running per camera, and each one needs its own port.