RTSP viewing on RaspberryPi 4

Hardware
1

I have a dashboard with two RTSP streams and I wanted to have a monitor by the front door to let my kids check outside, so they can open the door for friends or family.

The dashboard runs a few seconds behind on my PC or phone, which is not ideal but the main issue is that on the Pi, they have started to hang completely recently. It is currently running Ubuntu 22.04 and Firefox and the cpu and memory use are fine.

Not knowing much about RTSP, what settings should I consider and what other metrics might be helpful in finding the bottleneck on this device?

I am not opposed to changing OS or browser, this setup is just what I am familiar with.

2

Hi, welcome to the forum!

You could make sure that no unneeded applications are running on the RPi.
Also, don’t pull the high resolution stream since there is no use on a small display with a lower resulution.

Eventhough I mainly use FF on my systems, I’m using Chromium on a RPi 3.

3

I found there is a Medium and Low resolution stream that I simply had to enable. Does the higher resolution require more processing to render? I would have guessed it is just bandwidth and that shouldn’t be an issue within my home network.

I will test the lower resolutions for a few days and see how it does.

4

If there is more data going through the pipe (your network) this also has to be processed by CPU/GPU

5

I tried the medium resolution stream and there was almost no change. I swapped to Chromium and it is has been running smoothly for two days.

The only strange thing, I put the browser in full screen but over night it shrinks to about half the screen. I will do some reading on this.

6

I run this command for a full screen kiosk experience:
chromium-browser --kiosk --disable-pinch --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --disable-session-crashed-bubble --hide-scrollbars --enable-features --app=http://my_HA_IP:8123

Also, are you keeping the streams visible all the time?
You can use a browser_mod popup to show them when the doorbell rings (if you have an trigger for that)
If you really want to only see the doorbell cam, there are other and better ways to do that.

Another thing: I turn off the displays with HA when nobody is home/asleep.

7

I will get around to changing the startup command from Firefox, thanks for all the params to consider. That device stays on the dashboard with the streams all the time, I just power off the monitor at night.