Live video from FFMPEG

1

Is Sharptools able to show an FFMPEG live video stream from cameras like Eufy, Wyzecam, Reolink, etc.?
Can an Amcrest NVR output a format that could be shown in SharpTools?

2

It depends on the type of video stream that is being output by FFMPEG. (FFmpeg is an open source software project for video and audio.)

The short version is it has to output a format supported by a browser like MJPEG streams or JPEG snapshots. If the NVR doesn’t output a supported format (eg. only RTSP), you may be able to use a software package like Blue Iris, TinyCam, or motionEye to translate the stream into a supported format.

3

Hi Josh,

So TinyCam can run on the android Fire Tablet that’s acting as the Sharptools dashboard?

4

It technically can, yes. Depending on the number of cameras you are going to be streaming, you might want to consider dedicated hardware otherwise you could end up slowing your Fire Tablet down (this is especially true for older Fire tablets).

I’ve seen different feedback from different community members – some have lightweight use of TinyCam and just use their Fire tablet, some just use an old Android phone as their TinyCam server, and some use dedicated hardware like an NVIDIA Shield TV.

5

Hi Josh, Is there any free app i can install on an x86 SFF computer that can translate the stream?

6

There’s a variety of solutions out there.

The most popular ones with the SharpTools community seem to be TinyCam (Android) and Blue Iris (Windows). Both of these are paid software though.

I’ve heard of people using open source projects like FFMPEG or VLC to do this. Both utilities are free… the challenge is they aren’t necessarily easy to use for the average person (for this purpose) and there aren’t any really excellent guides out there. So if you’re technically inclined, don’t mind digging through manuals, don’t mind the command line and editing configuration files, they are really cool software packages.

A few years back, Kerberos.io entered the scene and they had a plan for a mix of open sources and premium offerings. I haven’t looked into them in a while to how things have come along though.

There may be others too – if you find something good, I’d love to hear your experience!

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8

The Amcrest IP cameras are hooked up to an Amcrest NVR. Have you ever seen a solution using an Amcrest NVR to output HLS?
Do you know if the Fire Tablet 10 11th generation is powerful enough to run Sharptools / fully kiosk and tinycam with 2 or 3 RTSP streams?

9

After trying MotionEye and others, I gave in and bought Blue Iris. Totally worth it as it’s way better as an NVR with lots of options to tweak things and had the added benefit of making it easy to pull the cameras into SharpTools.

2 or 3 probably isn’t too many. Do you plan on streaming to multiple tablets or just the one? If you have multiple tablets, you can use the image snapshots to always be shown and then have the video open up if you tap the tile.

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10

Hi Chris,

I’ve heard bad things about the Blue Iris android app, that’s why i went with the 4TB Amcrest NVR. I know its a sunk cost fallacy but it would be such a shame to throw it away. I plan on streaming to 4 tablets. How often are image snapshots updated?

Thanks,
Albert

11

Yeah, the Blue Iris Android app isn’t the best. I tend to use TinyCam from my phone to view my cameras. And I use the main Blue Iris desktop app or the Blue Iris web interface when I’m trying to review footage if there was some sort of issue.

You could update the snapshots as often as you like. Like every second if you wanted. I just noticed that it was a lot lower load to refresh a snapshot image than stream videos to lots of tablets.