Rtsp camera support using motioneye

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For those wanting to integrate IP cameras with RTSP support, I have found is a very workable work around.

Calin Crisan maintains a package for the Raspberry Pi which will run on Raspbian including the latest Jessie called motionEye. https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneye/wiki

motionEye is a web frontend for the motion daemon, written in Python 2.7.

“Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from cameras. It is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed; in other words, it can detect motion.”

motionEye, in addition to providing viewing an recording capabilities from rtsp cameras, will also serve jpeg and mjpeg images. I haven’t been able to get mjpeg working yet, but I currently have it serving jpeg images to HA without issues.

Best thing about it is that in runs on the same platform as HA and will run comfortably on the same device. If you turn off all the motion detection and recording, then there is no appreciable added load to the system over accessing the cameras directly from HA (if the camera supports jpeg)

Be aware when you are installing that motionEye is python 2.7. You will need to specify pip2 when installing. Instructions use pip, which will probably run pip3 on a device already set up for HA.

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In this blog post I was using motion to access USB webcams. I don’t think that you need motioneye to work with RTSP or other network cameras. motion along should be sufficient.

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You are right, but motion itself isn’t being maintained very much and is not optimized for the Pi. MotionEye uses a fork and has all the instructions on how to best run motion on the Pi. Plus it has a pretty decent web interface for setting motion up, which can be a bit of a pain.