[Solved] Streaming live images from non-IP camera over NVR?

[Nick6]

Hi all

New to this forum, landed here after a search for this none typical setup (I guess)

I wanted to be able to see live images from the security cams on another spot then where the NVR is located.
I have managed to find the URL's from most of the cams (at least the once that are IP cams).
With a RPi & omxplayer, I can see the live images of those cams, through the NVR, so not directly from the cams.
There is also a non-IP, digital cam that is hooked through coax with the NVR (dahua)
Those images can be viewed with a Android or Windows app so I wonder if, and how, I can also get that stream on the RPi.

Hope this is clear, if not I'm pleased to supply additional info.
TIA
Nick6

If posted in wrong subforum, can a mod please move it to the right one?

 

[pozzello]

when you say "With a RPi & omxplayer, I can see the live images of those cams, through the NVR " do you mean you are pulling a stream from the NVR's rtsp interface (probably port 554), or you are accessing a 'passthru' port at the NVR's IP that's connecting you to the cameras? Perhaps an example of the URI being used would help clarify...

I suspect you may be pulling streams direct from the IP cams thru the NVR's NAT, which is why you can't see the analog cams in that fashion (as they don't have their own IP interface). The NVR must provide some stream that is IP-encoding the analog cams as well - just need to figure out what that URI would be. You mention it's a Dahua NVR, so that shoudl be pretty easy to find out, tho I don't know offhand...

 

[Nick6]

Hi pozello, thanks for jumping in.

This is what I use for instance for 1 cam: "rtsp:/user-pw@<IP_NVR>/cam/realmonitor?channel=3&subtype=1"

 

[pozzello]

that does look like a stream from the NVR, not the cam. i imagine you've tried all the possible; channel numbers?... then i guess i would check the configuration of the channel for the analog cam(s) in the NVR's UI... perhaps something needs to be 'enabled' for it to provide live view via rtsp ? also, is there a channel zero? many NVR's provide a channel 0 encoding that is a composite view of all the cams. do you see the analog one(s) in that view?

 

[Nick6]

I have looked around in the NVR's UI but didn't find anything yet, will check again tomorrow.
Thanks!

 

[Nick6]

So finally got it working and you were right, I did find the right channel number for this cam...
I did try different numbers in the past but I was also searching for the right syntax so probably I tried that number with the wrong syntax and didn't remember what I had used since it's on different RPi's.

For future reference and anyone interested, this is the syntax for using omxplayer to view a stream (this is for a Dahua NVR, might differ for another brand):

omxplayer -o local --display 2 --avdict 'rtsp_transport:tcp' "rtsp:/<user>:<password>@<IP-NVR>/cam/realmonitor?channel=<channeln°_of_cam>&subtype=<streamn°>"

• <--display 2> is for first HDMI, 7 for 2nd
• <--avdict 'rtsp_transport:tcp'> use tcp instead of udp. With udp,, I had hickups which made omxplayer quit
• <channeln°_of_cam> explains itself I guess
• <streamn°> 0 or 1, where 0 is the highres stream and 1 lowres