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Usage

First camera

  1. Open the menu: tap the screen, or press OK on a remote.
  2. Choose a slot (1–8), then Settings.
  3. Enter the camera URL, for example rtsp://user:password@192.168.1.10:554/stream=0, and choose the transport under it (TCP / UDP / Auto / Multicast, a new slot starts on Auto). URL formats: transports.md. Below them, Turn (Auto, 0°, 90° ↺, 180°, 270° ↺, counter-clockwise) turns the picture of a camera mounted sideways or upside down (#201). Auto leaves it to the URL's ?rotate= and the toys' defaults. It applies in the single view and in the grid, to H.264, H.265 and MJPEG, and to snapshots and screenshots; the decoder turns the picture (Android 6+; before that only MJPEG is turned). Mirror flips the picture left to right, after the turn (#226), in the single view and in the grid, for H.264, H.265 and MJPEG, and in snapshots and screenshots. A mirrored H.264/H.265 slot is drawn with OpenGL ES instead of straight by the decoder (this path also turns it, on any Android version); a mirrored MJPEG slot is decoded in software.
  4. Save. The app connects at once and reconnects by itself when the stream drops (exponential back-off, 1 s up to 30 s).

The URL dialog is titled Camera N URL. The picture is fitted to the screen whatever its shape, without cropping. URLs are stored encrypted, see security.md.

Menu

The menu is one grid: the eight slots on top, two rows of four below. Every word cell is two slots wide.

[ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 ]
[ Settings | WebUI  | Grid   | Slides ]
[ Exit     | Reset  | Debug  | UDP    ]

The menu on a phone

Item Action
1–8 Switch to a camera slot (single view). The number of the active slot shows the connection quality: green under 100 ms of jitter, yellow 100–300 ms, red above. A grey number is an empty slot
Settings URL, transport, turn and mirror of the active slot. Single view only, grey elsewhere
WebUI The camera's web interface, see WebUI. Single view only, grey elsewhere
Grid The view: multi-view (2×2 or 3×3) or the single camera. Does not change the playback mode
Slides The playback mode: every frame, or key frames only, see Slides. Does not change the view
Exit Close the app. The small text under it is the version and build hash (v2.10, <hash>)
Reset Clear all settings after a confirmation, see Reset
Debug Text in the corner of every multi-view cell (resolution, codec, decoded/received fps, key frames, status), or none. Long press (remote: hold OK, or Menu on Debug): save a report to Download/OpenIPC and share it
UDP The U cell full-screen

Items that are on (Grid, Slides, Debug, UDP and the active slot) have an orange fill; the item the remote is on has a light blue frame. On a narrow screen or with a large font the labels are shortened with an ellipsis rather than clipped.

Gestures and keys

Input Action
Tap / OK / Enter (D-pad centre) Open or close the menu
Back / Esc Close the menu or a dialog; without one, Back keeps its system action
Pinch, then drag Zoom (1× to 5×) and pan, single view
Double tap Reset the zoom
Long press, single view Save a screenshot, see Screenshots
Long press, multi-view Play this cell's sound; again to mute

Remote control

The app is in the Leanback launcher of Android TV devices and does not require a touchscreen. OK opens the menu; the D-pad moves through the grid; the first key after a menu opened by touch moves the focus to the active item. In the reset dialog Cancel has the focus, so a stray OK deletes nothing.

Multi-view

Grid shows the configured slots in a 2×2 grid, or in a 3×3 grid once any of slots 5–8 is used. The ninth cell of the 3×3 grid is the U cell. Tap any cell to open the menu.

Multi-view with eight cameras and the menu

Each cell has its own connection and decoder. The device's video decoder has a fixed budget (the AG-216 test box decodes about two 1080p30 streams at full rate), so the grid adapts:

  • Cells start on key frames only, then decode every frame in priority order while the decoder keeps up: the U cell while it receives a stream, the cell whose sound plays, then slot order.
  • Cells beyond that stay on key frames: the picture updates once per key frame interval (key frames in the corner text). MJPEG cells show one frame per second instead (reduced).
  • The limit is learnt per device by measurement and kept across restarts. How: architecture.md.
  • A key-frame cell beyond the hardware decoder's instance limit (the AG-216 has 4 × H.265) uses a software decoder (· software in the corner). Only beyond that does it show Decoder limit: N × H.265.
  • When even key frames are too much, the lowest-priority cell is paused (Paused: decoder overloaded) and tried again after a quiet period. Losses in the first 10 s after the grid starts do not count.
  • A cell whose UDP stream loses a piece of every key frame shows the frames with the damage concealed (· damaged) rather than a black picture.
  • When frames arrive in several cells for 20 s and none is decoded, the app says that the device's video decoder does not respond (seen on the AG-216, #145); only a restart of the device helps.

Substreams of the cameras, where available, let more cells play at full rate. Some cameras accept only one RTSP client at a time.

Audio: long-press a cell to play its sound, long-press it again to mute. The selected cell shows an AUDIO badge and is remembered.

Slides

Slides decodes key frames only, in multi-view and in the single view: the lowest decoder load, with the picture updated once per key frame interval (MJPEG once a second). It never changes the view, and Grid never changes Slides; both may be on. /stats.json reports the mode as "mode": "slides" in multi-view and "decode": "key frames".

The U cell

The U cell plays a camera that pushes RTP over UDP to port 5600 of the device (udp://@:5600), for example OpenIPC Majestic with an outgoing destination, see transports.md. Until a stream arrives it shows every address of the device to send to. UDP in the menu opens it full-screen. Other ports or multicast groups go into a slot as a udp:// URL.

WebUI

WebUI opens the camera's web interface in a built-in browser, with the credentials taken from the slot's RTSP URL. It uses the system WebView: it needs a working WebView package (on some devices Google's Android System WebView); without it only WebUI is affected (#15). On a touch device the page scrolls the focused field above the on-screen keyboard. Close closes it.

WebUI on a phone: the page scrolls the field above the keyboard

Opening a camera from another app

The app accepts plain-text shares (ACTION_SEND, text/plain). Sharing an rtsp://, udp:// or http:// URL from another app, for example OpenIPC Network, puts it into the active slot, saves it and switches to the single view. An optional transport extra (tcp, udp, auto, multicast) sets the slot's transport; without it the slot keeps its setting.

adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.SEND -t text/plain \
  --es android.intent.extra.TEXT 'rtsp://user:pass@192.168.1.10/stream=0' \
  --es transport udp -n com.openipc.decoder/.Decoder

Screenshots

A long press in the single view saves the picture to Pictures/OpenIPC (at most 3840×2160; a larger stream is scaled down). Screenshots need Android 7.0 or newer; Android 7–9 ask for the storage permission first. For a picture of the whole grid from another computer use /snapshot.jpg of the debug page.

Reset

Reset asks Start with a clean slate?; Clear settings removes all camera slots, their transports and the other settings, and the app restarts as right after installing. The cameras are not changed. Cancel has the focus.