Anyone have experience streaming camera feeds to Emby?

[podrae 1]

I have Emby setup at home on a server and also have Agent DVR with three cameras

I understand its possible to stream them through to Emby using the IPTV plugin perhaps. I'm very new to agent DVR and streaming in general so not sure where to start with this.

I found one thread where a couple of guys were successful with this using a strm file or something along those lines. Can anyone step my in the right direction?

[Luke 37046]

Hi, what kind of output format does it have?

[podrae 1]

well it looks to have rtmp, there is some instruction on how to stream to Youtube and embed on web pages but I'm a bit lost on it. Maybe I would be best going to the Agent DVR forum this was just a hope someone has done this exact thing.

[daldana 47]

Hi @podrae,

Are you trying to stream individual cameras or the output from Agent DVR? The easiest is to stream the full output from Agent DVR by creating a streamlink and use that as a library. I have Agent DVR and this is what I did with my 7 cameras. To do this I created a text file in Notepad (I'm a Windows user) with this one line in it;

http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8090/video.mp4?oids=1,2,3,4,5,6,7&maintainAR=true&size=1920x1080

This is assuming you are using the standard port of 8090 for Agent DVR (you need to add your ip address of the Agent server). The numbers after "oids=" are your camera numbers in Agent. Save the file with a .strm extension (remove the .txt extension) in a separate folder ( I named my file AgentDVR.strm and saved it in C:\AgentDVR which was a new folder).

Now make a new library in Emby with the content being "Movies", then point it to the folder you saved the streamlink file in. Give the library a name you will recognize, click OK, and you should be able to see the cameras you listed in the .strm file you created.

Note: This will only show the View output from Agent DVR, you will not be able to select individual cameras. Let me know how this works for you.

[podrae 1]

Thanks for the detailed advice. I will give this a go and get back to you.

[rbjtech 4248]

Also available In the Channels Emby Plugin catalogue :

 

[podrae 1]

Ok so I have tried both suggestions. With @rbjtechplugin I can get cameras going if I point it to each individual one using URLs generated for my model here Connect to Ipc cameras (ispyconnect.com)

That's cool but I would rather have them all display on the screen at once...

I have edited the link @daldanasuggested accordingly and tested in a browser. It prompts for my Agent users credentials then loads a video player which does not display the feeds. It fails in emby for no compatible stream. I was wondering if you could explain the OID a bit more? I have three cameras named deck, shed and backyard. I can't see anywhere that they are numbered as  such so i just cut it down to 1,2,3 is that right?

[daldana 47]

Yes, the oid numbers are just the position of the camera in the Agent grid when you open up Agent. The other two settings are just specifying to keep the aspect ratio and resolution.

I use Onvif in Agent with Mibao cameras and the typical camera settings are 1920x1080: rtsp://admin:password@192.168.xxx.xxx:554/realmonitor?channel=0&stream=0.sdp in the "Live" and "Record" URLS. Are you using Onvif settings or something else? 

[podrae 1]

4 hours ago, daldana said:

Yes, the oid numbers are just the position of the camera in the Agent grid when you open up Agent. The other two settings are just specifying to keep the aspect ratio and resolution.

I use Onvif in Agent with Mibao cameras and the typical camera settings are 1920x1080: rtsp://admin:password@192.168.xxx.xxx:554/realmonitor?channel=0&stream=0.sdp in the "Live" and "Record" URLS. Are you using Onvif settings or something else? 

Yeah its Onvif, the URL i used for the plugin was rtsp://password:@192.168.x.xxx:554/live/0/main, that is direct to the cameras though not Agent

[daldana 47]

On the Video Source section in Agent, can you see any other URL in the dropdown box for either Live or Record? I'm not sure, but I think Emby is looking for something with a file extension like the .sdp in my example. I might be wrong though.

BTW, I think the reason you are being asked for credentials is because you need a username in the URL. It should read rtsp://username:password@...

[podrae 1]

Ok so I have formatted http://xxxxxx:xxxxxxx@192.168.1.194:8090/video.mp4?oids=1,2,3&maintainAR=true&size=1920x1080

This opens a page ok testing in a browser without credential prompt so thats cool but its just a wee video player that attempts to run but fails to load anything, I haven't attempted in an Emby library, it should work directly in the browser when testing right?

I have the rtsp  links for each individual camera under playback and recording as above, these are what I added into the camera plugin so they work ok.

Id like to get your method going though so I can have all cameras displaying on the one screen

[daldana 47]

No, you won't see any output in a browser, but if you use VLC and put that url in the "Open Network Stream" box, it should show all of your cameras. Once you see that, you should be able to create that library in Emby.

[podrae 1]

Your a legend, ok its working now

Thanks so much for your help

[daldana 47]

Anytime!

[podrae 1]

@daldanaOne more question. This is working good for me on PC as its direct play. If I play it from a TV or Android phone on my network it works but constantly pauses and eventually gets way behind. I suspect this is due to the fact its transcoding for these devices.(reports as FLV) its only using about 15% of my server CPU but its obviously not fast enough. I've tried changing the cameras output to h264 from 5 and disabled transcode throttling and changed to substream but does not seem to help. Any suggestions on that, Do you get the same issue?

[daldana 47]

@podraeI did get that issue when I first started using Agent, in exactly the same way. But my problem came from having an underpowered PC that I was running Agent on and I would notice the CPU on that PC (not the PC I run Emby on) would be at 95-99%. Now I'm using a 3rd generation I5 PC for Agent and it does much better, but I still see the CPU jump to 65-75% when viewing on my phone through Emby. Are you running Emby and Agent on the same PC? If not, check your CPU use on the Agent PC when you are viewing. 

[podrae 1]

I have it running in a ESX VM with two 8 core Xeons, I have given it 12 virtual cpus and its only running at 20% currently when viewing

[podrae 1]

Im going  to try shifting Emby to GPU encoding to see if that helps