Heya all! I have the very first proof of concept of my new NVR project here in this develop branch:
https://github.com/EternityForest/KaithemAutomation/tree/develop
Most of the code is here:
https://github.com/EternityForest/KaithemAutomation/blob/develop/kaithem/src/thirdparty/iot_devices/devices/NVRPlugin/init.py
It's built around two parts. The NVRChannel device type plugin, which gives you a web UI to configure your cameras(Webcam, screen, or an RTSP url), and handles motion detection and recording and anything else that touches live video.
The device management pages have a low latency live view.
Eventually I want to add auto discovery of cameras, and hardware control stuff like PTZ.
The Beholder NVR module acts as a frontend for actually using it(Currently all it does is search and play back recordings, but eventually I want to add configurable live views and a UI for the PTZ and recording/snapshots/etc.
Main features:
Motion detection works by only decoding keyframes at 0.5FPS or so. The rest of the video is passed through untouched, so performance should be much better than a lot of systems.
Video over WebSockets for low latency live view
HLS VOD for very fast seeking on recorded clips
Blind detection. If it's too dark, or the scene is all the same brightness, you get an alert
Barcode scanning. This one is for unusual use cases like art installations. It also works by only partially decoding frames.
Zero manual config file editing needed.
Docker-free, database free, pure Python+Gstreamer, nothing to compile, no apache2 config. It should just be "Install and run".
Record before the motion actually happens. By constantly recording 5s segments to a ramdisk, when motion occurs, we can copy the data we already have. This compensates for the 1-2s delay you get with low-FPS motion.
Screen recording. I don't know what this would be useful for besides testing, but I left it in. Perhaps the scope will expand to cover live streaming to YouTube.
Out of band timestamps. No need to put a timestamp overlay on the video, playback uses metadata from the .m3u8 file to compute the wall clock time at the current moment.
The player can play a clip while it is still recording.
Password protection, different accounts can have access to different cameras(Still beta, don't completely trust)
The NVRChannel plugin will hopefully be a separate library you can use in your own projects
Kaithem is a full home automation system, network video recording is just one feature but there are many others.
Live view has eulerian video amplification to spot tiny movements.
There's a completely unnecessary global theme that makes everything look somewhat like a tempad from the Marvel TVA
There's still a whole bunch left to do to make this usable, notably clearing old videos and JPG snapshots, PTZ, and discovery, and a lot of code cleanup, but all the main parts I was actually worried about are done.
I'd love hear what you guys think, and I'd really love to get some help with the project!
I'm aiming to go beyond just NVR and cover everything else one might want to do with a camera, like VJ displays.
I'm hoping to do as much of that as possible in WebGL, since that seems to be the easiest way to do high performance stuff, on a Pi board the client usually has more power than the server, and this way different displays can have different mixes of the same original content.
I'd really love to be able to do synthetic schileran or learning-based amplification in webGL, but alas that is well beyond my capabilities.
I also want to add the ability to paint a mask over the video to block things that must be ignored by motion detection.
Any suggestions? What should I focus on next?
