RTSP on raspberry PI to view grid

[kylevidrine]

I am looking for a simple solution to deploy some raspberry PI devices on the back of monitors for viewing an RTSP stream. Does anyone know of a stable combination of PI OS with an RTSP viewer that will launch on startup full screen for totally unattended operation?
On a second note is there a way to view a grid of 4 RTSP streams on the same setup? Raspberry PI with some RTSP viewer like VLC?
If I can only get one full-screen IP cam on my monitor then I will be fine with that but it would be nice to display a grid of 4 IP cameras on my wall-mounted monitors.

Note The Raspberry PI I will be testing with is a 3 b+

Thanks

 

[NielK]

I did an experiment about a year ago using rpisurv (GitHub - SvenVD/rpisurv: Raspberry Pi surveillance) to view RTSP streams. It can comfortably dispay 4 cameras in a grid as long as you're displaying substreams (which makes sense unless you have a huge 8k monitor).

Setup

• RPi 4B, 2GB RAM, GPU memory set to 512MB
• rpisurv 2.1.7 installed, taking rtsp streams directly from the cameras
• Dahua 5442 cameras (15fps, main stream= 2688 x 1520, substream = 704 x 576)

Main stream display

• 1 x main stream displays reliably
• Adding a second causes rpisurv to hang "trying to connect"

Substreams

• Up to 11 substreams reliably displayed
• Extra substreams are displayed (tried up to 16) but the whole screen flashes rapidly with 12 or more.
• rpisurv author says that the rapid flashing indicates that the GPU is at its limit
• With 11 streams, memory usage = 230M / 1.40GB, CPU < 10%

I now use UI3 as the user interface to show a grid of 9 cameras. (It depends on having Blue iris of course.) Raspberry Pi kiosk (Raspberry Pi Kiosk using Chromium) makes sure that everything fires up when the Pi is booted. Setup is a Pi stuck to the back of the monitor. Only three leads: mouse plus power for Pi and monitor.

There's a new version 3 of rpisurv in beta (GitHub - SvenVD/rpisurv at v3_latest).