live_stream_xiaomi_ants_smart_camera_via_ffmpeg.mdown

Live stream Xiaomi Ants Smart Camera via FFMPEG

This assumes you have a Xiaomi Ants Smart Camera that still has the open RTSP enabled. I think newer firmware might remove this capability. If you Google enough you can find instructions on how to downgrade.

FFMPEG

FFMPEG is where most of the magic happens. I use OSX and as such am a fan of using Homebrew to install free software. Here is my ffmpeg install command:

brew install ffmpeg --with-faac --with-fdk-aac --with-ffplay --with-fontconfig --with-freetype --with-frei0r --with-libass --with-libbluray --with-libcaca --with-libquvi --with-libsoxr --with-libssh --with-libvidstab --with-libvorbis --with-libvpx --with-opencore-amr --with-openjpeg --with-openssl --with-opus --with-rtmpdump --with-schroedinger --with-speex --with-theora --with-tools --with-webp --with-x265

It has just about every option enabled. You may want less, I added the --with-rtmpdump option because I needed to send my stuff over RTMP. This document requires the use of RTMP.

Nginx (optional)

What can one say? Nginx is probably one of the most useful pieces of software in recent years. It has available to it an RTMP module. This allows Nginx to act as a media streaming server.

I also installed this via Homebrew. Here is my command for that:

brew install nginx-full --with-gunzip --with-libressl --with-passenger --with-spdy --with-webdav --with-rtmp-module

Live streaming from a camera requires the following nginx config:

rtmp {
   server {
       listen 1935;
       chunk_size 4000;
       # Transcoding (ffmpeg needed)
       application media_server {
           live on;
           hls on;
           hls_path /usr/local/media/media_server;
           hls_nested on;
           hls_variant _low  BANDWIDTH=640000;
           hls_variant _hi  BANDWIDTH=2140000;
           # ffmpeg static execution
           # this is using direct copy so no re-encoding is done
           exec_static /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i rtsp://<camera_ip>:554/ch0_0.h264
          -c:v copy -c:a copy -ar 44100 -f flv rtmp://127.0.0.1/media_server/live
           ;
       }
   }
}

Inside the server block in your nginx.conf file:

# path to HLS application service
location /media_server {
   types {
       application/vnd.apple.mpegurl m3u8;
       video/mp2t ts;
   }
   root /usr/local/media;
   add_header Cache-Control no-cache;
}

You can change the root, hls_path, and location (and any other configuration paths) to be whatever you want, just make sure you connect all of the dots.

Also be sure to change anything labelled <camera_ip> to be the IP address of your camera.

Commands

Basic transcode with audio

I'm not a fan of this method since the stream is already compressed.

ffmpeg -i rtsp://<camera_ip>:554/ch0_0.h264 -c:v libx264 -g 50 -preset fast -b:v 4096k -c:a libfdk_aac -ar 44100 -f flv

No transcoding with audio

This is a straight copy over to an RTMP stream.

ffmpeg -i rtsp://<camera_ip>:554/ch0_0.h264 -c:v copy -c:a copy -ar 44100 -f flv rtmp://<rtmp.target>

No transcoding with no audio

Same as above but with the audio stripped out.

ffmpeg -i rtsp://<camera_ip>:554/ch0_0.h264 -c:v copy -c:a copy -an -f flv rtmp://<rtmp.target>

Examples

Just some examples I've had success with.

Send to Twitch.tv with audio

ffmpeg -i rtsp://<camera_ip>:554/ch0_0.h264 -c:v copy -c:a copy -ar 44100 -f flv rtmp://live-iad.twitch.tv/app/YOURTWITCHSTREAMINGKEY

Send to Twitch.tv with no audio

ffmpeg -i rtsp://<camera_ip>:554/ch0_0.h264 -c:v copy -c:a copy -an -f flv rtmp://live-iad.twitch.tv/app/YOURTWITCHSTREAMINGKEY

Send to Nginx style setup as above (with audio)

ffmpeg -i rtsp://<camera_ip>:554/ch0_0.h264 -c:v copy -c:a copy -ar 44100 -f flv rtmp://<nginx_server_address>/media_server/live

Thanks

Thanks to asm960 and their Ants Xiaoyi Smart Camera - How to connect via RTSP thread on the MIUI forums. Without it none of this would be possible.

This is a first draft. Hopefully it will get some good fleshing out.