Getting Video Stream to Show Up on Cockpit or QGroundControl

Blue Robotics Software
1

Hey,

I’ve been having issues trying to get two camera feeds on Cockpit. I’m using a speedybeef405v4 flight controller with a Raspberry Pi 3b+. One camera I am trying to use has H264 encoding but the other does not - they are both USB web cameras. Using Mavlink (not checking the disable Mavlink box) I am able to see the preview on the H264 camera but not the other one. Trying to see them on Cockpit or QGroundControl I am unable to see either, but can see the flight controller attitude values working. Disabaling Mavlink for the video streams, I can see the previews of both cameras but can only see the H264 camera on Cockpit and QGC.

Ideally, my goal would be to be able to switch between the two video streams on Cockpit with a press of a button on the controller, but right now I can’t even see two video streams.

My questions:

  1. What is the point of Mavlink for video streams and is it needed for my purpose?
  2. Is it possible to view a video stream with MJPG encoding in Cockpit or QGC? How would I do that?
2

Hi @urchin -
Are you able to get the stream from the H264 ok in Cockpit / QGC? You may find slightly better performance by selecting RSTP instead of UDP for the stream type from it…

Mavlink in this context refers to the Mavlink camera manager - letting the autopilot process manage the video stream. I would not expect this to be supported by your flight controller, or a pixhawk - but I do think it works with the Navigator, which uses a fundamentally different approach for where the code that runs the autopilot is being executed (Pi CPU vs. dedicated microcontroller.)

I’m afraid your non h264 camera is currently unsupported - no way at all to get it working, at any frame rate. Sorry for the news!

How is the speedbee working? Have you been able to configure a frame type and get motors moving?

3

  1. Yes, QGC can see the H264 camera. It’s kind of hard to tell but it seems RSTP does have a little less delay.

  2. Thank you for explaining Mavlink and clarifying the non-H264 camera support.

  3. For the record, speedybee f4v4 works with ArduSub 4.6.0 (DEV). I can select frame type in QGC, but I actually do not have any motors yet that I can test.