Odd image from camera (ffmpeg RTSP)

Hardware
1

I have two KGuard QRT-502 cameras with RTSP streams, set up with ffmpeg according to what I found here, and only one works properly in HA.

I can connect to the RTSP streams with VLC and via their web interface, and both work fine.
I’m using fixed IP addresses for them, and the same settings in HA, like:

- platform: ffmpeg
  name: Living Room
  input: -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://192.168.1.71:554/12

- platform: ffmpeg
  name: TV Room
  input: -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://192.168.1.72:554/12

What I usually see is like:

rtspNotOK.png517×591 110 KB

As you can see, the TV Room camera is fine, but the living room camera shows what looks like the in-between frames or only where motion is occurring. It’s all grey when there’s no movement (at first I thought it was just blank until I moved something in front of it).

When I wiggle the camera (so the whole image is moving), I see it like:

So the whole image is there…
Would anyone know why I am only seeing the part of the image that is moving, or otherwise what the problem is?
I have been through the cameras’ settings via the web browser and both cameras are identical except for the names/OSD and IP addresses.

I have tried using only one at a time and it’s the same.
I have two MJPEG cameras, which do not have the same problem.

Thanks!

2

I don’t see that before. You can play with ffplay and try options. I don’t know what the right option is for that. Maby a demux option or you give more time in detection state. I think this camera send not a lot of mpeg key frames and he need more time to wait for a key frame.

Maby ask this also on ffmpeg.org

3

I’ve seen such images before with ZoneMinder (the application itself, not directly related to HASS, but uses ffmpeg as well). In my case it was caused by transmission errors during the RTSP stream. When using UDP as the protocol and average signal quality of the Wi-Fi cam, packets seem to be dropped, which causes the frames to look like that.

I can’t say what’s the problem in your case. But just for testing I would connect the camara with a LAN cable and compare to see if it behaves differently. If so, the dropped packets caused by the Wi-Fi signal might be the actual issue here.

4

Thanks for the replies!
I don’t think the camera has a wired connection, but I’ll check.
I’ll try ffplay and see what options I have, but I only have this problem in HA. Using VLC or Web viewer works fine. I might try increasing the key frame rate of the camera.
The extra odd thing is that both cameras are the same and have the same settings (as far as I can tell).

5

Hi. Checking in…
No wired connection.
The camera now sometimes works in HA… I upgraded to 0.38 and it was fine for a while, so I thought that was it, but now it’s intermittent. Sometimes (much more than before) it’s OK, and other times it’s grey like in my original screenshot.

6

hi , were you able to upgrade the firmware ? , as the camera web server seams to have very old components not recognized by modern js browsers, tks

7

I didn’t find do any firmware updates. It’s been fine for some time now.

8

Seen image many time with my cheap cameras and poor rstp stream.