5.3.1 - July 16, 2020 Your Blue Iris web server now is also an RTSP server.

[fenderman]

5.3.1 - July 16, 2020
Your Blue Iris web server now is also an RTSP server. This opens up even more
interconnectivity options between Blue Iris and other systems (home automation, video
players, etc.) Use the URI /{cam-short-name} or /{group-name}. Authentication is completed
via Digest encryption only. As with /image and other web service calls, you may add stream,
quality, and image size parameters.

 

[bp2008]

It sounds like it will be re-encoding any stream you pull through the RTSP server rather than simply acting as a proxy. The documentation is rather incomplete.

 

[bp2008]

I played with it a bit.

VLC did ask me for a user name and password as expected, and when I tested with a fake un/pw I immediately got an IP ban from Blue Iris's web server. So I suspect BI's web server is not responding with the proper code in this case, so VLC just retries until it gets banned.

The stream startup was really slow in my tests over the internet to VLC media player.

Indeed Blue Iris does appear to always re-encode the stream produced by this. If there is a way to proxy the raw stream from the camera (and therefore be less demanding on CPU), I didn't find it in the documentation.

It looks like the accepted URL parameters appear are the same as those available to UI3, which are not properly documented anywhere. (unless you count UI3's source code as documentation)

So here's what I can tell you about them.

The arguments I've tested:

• stream - [0, 1, 2] Chooses which web server streaming profile to use for encoding the video. Default: 0
• q - Overrides the quality field from the chosen streaming profile. The acceptable range is 0 to 100 where 50 is default. 50 is about as high as it is ever reasonable to set it. For UI3's VBR streams, I have it set to 20.
• fps - [0-60] NOT FUNCTIONING PROPERLY IN MY TEST. Supposed to be a frame rate limit for the encoded video stream. If omitted, Blue Iris will just try to encode all frames.
• w - NOT IMPLEMENTED. Use h instead.
• h - Sets the height in pixels of the stream. It won't go higher than the native resolution of the camera, of course.
• kbps - [0, 10-8192] Overrides the bit rate limit from the streaming profile. If 0, the bit rate limit will be disabled. Otherwise, the acceptable range is [10-8192].
• gop - Overrides the GOP (i-frame interval) from the streaming profile. For live streams that never get recorded, a high value is ideal. The default is 300 in Blue Iris. I used 3000 in UI3's VBR profiles for added efficiency. If you are going to consume this stream in a program that records the video, you'd want to set the GOP to 1-4 times the frame rate.
• audio - [0, 1] NOT FUNCTIONING PROPERLY IN MY TEST. In my test, the audio stream was always present regardless of what was set here. Supposed to take a value of 1 or 0 to enable or disable the audio stream.

I did not test these, but they are implemented in UI3 so maybe they work here too:

• zfl - [0, 1] Overrides the zero-frame-latency flag from the streaming profile. 0 to disable zero-frame-latency. 1 to enable.
• preset - [0, 1, 2] where 0 is "ultrafast", 1 is "superfast", 2 is "veryfast"
• profile - [0-5] where 0 is "default", 1 is "baseline", 2 is "main", 3 is "extended", 4 is "high", 5 is "high 10"

 

[bp2008]

I've emailed BI support about the problems I encountered. This should be a pretty useful feature for some people once it is all polished up.

 

[Millstone]

This broke all cameras streaming from a Hikvision DVR on RTSP. Did it for anyone else? Had to revert back to 5.3.0.3 on this system.

 

[TonyR]

This broke all cameras streaming from a Hikvision DVR on RTSP. Did it for anyone else? Had to revert back to 5.3.0.3 on this system.

Yes, 2 yesterday as posted here.

 

[Millstone]

Yes, 2 yesterday as posted here.

Thanks

Oddly enough didn't affect hikvision cameras, just the DVR.

 

[asilva54]

5.3.12 (not sure if its just 5.3.10 or more) broke something for me:

bi on a subdomain via linuxserver/letsencrypt/nginx
organizr and other things on the main domain

log into bi subdomain, all works.
but after i log into main, the bi subdomain does 502s.
looks like cookie issue of some sorts.

after messing with nginx for days, i reverted back to 5.3.0.3 and no more issue. Even reusing Nginx settings from back in the v4 days.

 

[Spankaroo]

Can anyone share a sample URL and/or config steps to access these new RTSP streams from BI?

Newb here. ...

 

[silencery]

5.3.12 (not sure if its just 5.3.10 or more) broke something for me:

bi on a subdomain via linuxserver/letsencrypt/nginx
organizr and other things on the main domain

log into bi subdomain, all works.
but after i log into main, the bi subdomain does 502s.
looks like cookie issue of some sorts.

after messing with nginx for days, i reverted back to 5.3.0.3 and no more issue. Even reusing Nginx settings from back in the v4 days.

Had the EXACT same issue with precisely the same setup (LE/nginx).

For some reason, it's working now though with no changes to nginx. I did clear the connection settings for the BI mobile app. Maybe that did it.

 

[Millstone]

Ken examined my Hikvision DVR that was experiencing compatibility issues with 5.3.1.2 and thinks he'll have it fixed

 

[majones]

Can anyone share a sample URL and/or config steps to access these new RTSP streams from BI?

Newb here. ...

rtsp:/[user]:[username]@[BI IP]:[Port]/[camera or group name]&w=1280&h=720
eg rtsp:/user:user-password@192.168.1.24:89/Garden&w=1280&h=720
The w and h tell the BI server to resize the image if you want.

 

[Spankaroo]

rtsp:/[user]:[username]@[BI IP]:[Port]/[camera or group name]&w=1280&h=720
eg rtsp:/user:user-password@192.168.1.24:89/Garden&w=1280&h=720
The w and h tell the BI server to resize the image if you want.

Awesome, thanks. Was thinking of sharing this to the Monacle thread (Blue Iris and Amazon Echo Show)
Several people have cams without proper rtsp streams, etc.. This could be a solution that allows them to have simple rtsp url's that work for each cam and allow display on an Echo show.

I'll have to test it out myself.

 

[majones]

Awesome, thanks. Was thinking of sharing this to the Monacle thread (Blue Iris and Amazon Echo Show)
Several people have cams without proper rtsp streams, etc.. This could be a solution that allows them to have simple rtsp url's that work for each cam and allow display on an Echo show.

I'll have to test it out myself.

Good idea!

Actually, I've got BI working on my Echo Show 5 and my tips are (1) to remove the user/password from the rtsp url and enter them in the Monocle camera setup box with DIGEST authentication, and (2) to use @proxy-tcp as the tag.

My experience is that the Echo Show 5 is slow to load the streams from BI, and then it runs with a lag of about 10s behind reality. I'm not sure if that is a BI or a Show 5 processing problem, or maybe both. However, it is real progress to see groups of multiple cameras setup within BI, and to be able to resize the image (my Show 5 can't handle my cameras' main streams, so I have been using the substeams that have weird frame shapes and distort the images.)

I'll look out for your post on the Monocle forum.

 

[phtp]

I can't seem to get RTSP working and maybe I'm forming the link wrong. Is the Camera name the full name or short name? I tried both.

Are there any additional settings in BI needed aside from webserver being configured? webserver through Browser works fine.

RTSP:/<Server>:<webserver port>/<Camera Name>

 

[bp2008]

It needs to be the camera's short name, and there's nothing else you need to configure. Here's an example that works for me.



Or with some arguments to affect the encoding:

 

[phtp]

It needs to be the camera's short name, and there's nothing else you need to configure. Here's an example that works for me.

View attachment 68523

Or with some arguments to affect the encoding:

View attachment 68521

Thanks for validating. I ended up rebooting just now and that resolved the issue. I assume maybe after the update the service didn't restart or something didn't apply correctly until after the reboot.

 

[phtp]

Awesome, thanks. Was thinking of sharing this to the Monacle thread (Blue Iris and Amazon Echo Show)
Several people have cams without proper rtsp streams, etc.. This could be a solution that allows them to have simple rtsp url's that work for each cam and allow display on an Echo show.

I'll have to test it out myself.

I was unable to get it going even with all different tags. With @tunnel tag I would get 401 unauthorized and with @proxy i would get 404 file not found. Both show in the blue iris status connections as the correct user logging on. Tried with and without audio and @audio tags without any luck.

 

[Spankaroo]

I was unable to get it going even with all different tags. With @tunnel tag I would get 401 unauthorized and with @proxy i would get 404 file not found. Both show in the blue iris status connections as the correct user logging on. Tried with and without audio and @audio tags without any luck.

Have you confirmed first that you can get the RTSP stream using VLC or something like that? Would want to isolate whether the problem is using Monacle or something else.
I haven't tried Monacle yet, just too much going on lately. I tried with VLC and struggled for quite a while, but then realised my Antivirus/security suite was probably getting in the way. To test that theory, I tried VLC directly on the Blue Iris Windows box. Everything worked great. With that confirmed, I focused on my Bitdefender settings and was able to allow the traffic being blocked (no block notifications in Bitdefender, so I was clueless for a while).
One other thing I also did was to ensure that anonymous users were allowed (LAN only), just so I didn't need to deal with authentication yet.

With all that, I confirmed that @bp2008 gave me what I needed.

 

[phtp]

Have you confirmed first that you can get the RTSP stream using VLC or something like that? Would want to isolate whether the problem is using Monacle or something else.
I haven't tried Monacle yet, just too much going on lately. I tried with VLC and struggled for quite a while, but then realised my Antivirus/security suite was probably getting in the way. To test that theory, I tried VLC directly on the Blue Iris Windows box. Everything worked great. With that confirmed, I focused on my Bitdefender settings and was able to allow the traffic being blocked (no block notifications in Bitdefender, so I was clueless for a while).
One other thing I also did was to ensure that anonymous users were allowed (LAN only), just so I didn't need to deal with authentication yet.

With all that, I confirmed that @bp2008 gave me what I needed.

Yeah I was able to confirm VLC works locally and on a remote PC so firewall shouldn't be a concern. It might not be compatible with the cameras that I have, but I don't think that should matter given that from monocle's perspective, blueiris would be the "camera".

If you have some luck with it, please provide an update. Thanks.