RTSP from Camera, or from SecuritySpy?

keness
keness
in SecuritySpy

I currently pull my camera feeds into HomeKit through HomeBridge and the Camera-FFmpeg plugin.

I am pulling directly from the RTSP streams provided by the cameras themselves.

If I'm not mistaken, I could also actually pull RTSP streams provided by SecuritySpy as well...?

My question is would there be a benefit to one vs the other? Is one or the other better for the network bandwidth? Or better for the load on the SecuritySpy server? Or, faster to load up in HomeKit?

Thanks!

Comments

  • chadchr
    chadchr

    I guess if I were to setup the HomeKit approach, I would need to get the streams from SecuritySpy since I have my cameras segmented on a separate VLAN than my HomeKit stuff.

  • keness
    keness

    For me they are both on the same network, so in that situation I'm wondering if one is preferred to the other.

    My GUESS would be to leave it the way it is, that pulling the RTSP feed directly from each camera spreads the load around rather than concentrating it on the SecuritySpy computer.

    Unless there is some big benefit to SS's streams compared to my (Hikvision) cameras' streams, such as a faster start-playing time or something.

  • pgh
    pgh

    I use cams->securityspy->scrypted->homekit secure video

    SecuritySpy and Scrypted are on the same computer, reducing the bandwidth usage on my local network.

    Everything is ok with h264 cams, but H265 cams are not well supported by Scrypted and Homebridge (CameraUI).

    Scrypted and Hombridge are a lot easier to configure with feeds coming from SecuritySpy.

  • Ben
    Ben

    Either way is reasonable. Getting the streams from the cameras avoids extra processing load on the SecuritySpy server as well as the possibility of recompression of the video data, which reduces the quality a bit. Getting the streams from SecuritySpy gives you a bit more flexibility to choose things like resolution and frame rate – and, if HomeBridge and SecuritySpy are running on the same Mac, you save some network bandwidth. So each method has its advantages, but really with a fast Mac running SecuritySpy and only a few cameras streaming at any one time, you probably won't notice a practical difference between the two options.

    One significant advantage of getting the streams from SecuritySpy is the ease of setup - we have published instructions for this. On the other hand, working out what the camera's snapshot and stream URLs are can be tricky as many manufacturers don't publish this information.

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