RTSP Camera: Rotate or transpose with ffmpeg camera. extra_arguments broken?

[bt04]

So, after a lot of debugging, I have an understanding of what’s happening. Basically, the ffmpeg command is only used to capture still images every 10 seconds. When you click on a picture card in the UI, it starts a stream object, not the ffmpeg command that you’ve set up in configuration.

Debugging Details:

• Enable ffmpeg, add your ffmpeg camera with extra_arguments

ffmpeg:
  ffmpeg_bin: /usr/bin/ffmpeg
camera:
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: ffmpeg_front_door
    input: '-rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://user:pass@camFrontDoor:554/h264Preview_01_main'
    extra_arguments: -s 640x480

• Enable debug verbosity for haffmpeg and stream components

logger:
  default: info
  logs:
    stream: debug
    haffmpeg: debug

• Add a picture entity card to the UI and set the camera view to auto

• Restart and refresh your web-browser. These messages should show up in the log every 10 seconds. Note that the extra_arguments are preserved and only 1 frame of video is captured from the input stream to create the still image in the UI
  2020-08-18 21:23:27 DEBUG (MainThread) [haffmpeg.core] Start FFmpeg with ['/usr/bin/ffmpeg', '-rtsp_transport', 'tcp', '-i', 'rtsp://user:pass@camFrontDoor:554/h264Preview_01_main', '-an', '-frames:v', '1', '-c:v', 'mjpeg', '-s', '640x480', '-f', 'image2pipe', '-'

• click on the image and you should get a stream message. The extra_arguments are ignored.
  2020-08-18 21:30:09 INFO (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.stream] Started stream: rtsp://user:pass@camFrontDoor:554/h264Preview_01_main

Workaround
@salle found that a proxy camera can be used to start ffmpeg with the extra_arguments instead of the stream object.

Stream Component: Confirmed Cameras and Configurations

I’ve been having issues with streams dying, stream.record stalling (“Stream already recording to…”) and not working until restart of HA, or possibly taking “Preload stream” tick out of the problem cameras and waiting for the stream to die. Mostly “stream dying” means that it keeps playing a couple of second loops whenever I click a picture glance card having the problematic camera or not playing at all. Latest issues came with the Sonoff camera which only supports RTSP. That could be a good thi…

However, I found the ffmpeg process did not shut itself down reliably and end up with multiple encoders running at the same time

Conclusion
I wanted to use the ffmpeg_camera to re-encode a stream that could be consumed by my google home hub, however there are some pretty big limitations to using ffmpeg within home assistant

1. stream objects are used instead of the ffmpeg comand that is configured for the camera
2. The haffmpeg component is hard coded to use mjpeg encoding only.
3. The workaround using a proxy camera is not reliable.
4. Proxy cameras cannot be recorded or streamed to other devices.