While connected surveillance cameras can be useful, they are also likely to have serious security breaches. They are thus at the origin of one of the most important DDOS attacks, or are sometimes publicly visible. In fact, it is very difficult to identify the origin of the cameras; no guarantee can be given on the security level or the durability of the manufacturer’s servers.
However, it is very simple – and very economical – to be able to make a simple monitoring system yourself using a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi Foundation offers a small camera module). Many other brands exist, and the following article will also work with a simple USB webcam.
Camera activation
First connect the camera to the Raspberry Pi using the correct interface. Apply yourself to this connection: it took me a long time to try to operate this camera before I realized that the web was not inserted to the bottom of the connector.
It is then necessary to activate the camera with:
sudo raspi-config
Select Interfacing Options » P1 Camera » Enable, before restarting the Raspberry Pi.
The camera uses the v4l2 driver, which is integrated by default in the kernel provided with Raspbian. To test if the camera is working properly, you can take a picture with:
raspistill -v -o test.jpg
You can also record a video (here for five seconds):
raspivid -o test.h264 -t 5000
If your camera is upside down for connection reasons, you can return it with:
v4l2-ctl --set-ctrl vertical_flip=1
v4l2-ctl --set-ctrl horizontal_flip=1
First try: MotionEye
I first tried to use the excellent MotionEye software, which offers a web interface to view the webcam, but also to make recordings and detect movements.
However, I couldn’t get a suitable framerate: whatever the settings used (including with minimal resolution and quality), I never managed to exceed 1.0 fps, which makes the result quite disappointing…
Second try: v4l2rtspserver
The well named RTSP, for Real Time Streaming Protocol, allows to set up a particularly fluid streaming.
Installation
The v4l2rtspserver software allows you to easily use this protocol with our camera. You can install it with:
sudo apt-get install cmake liblog4cpp5-dev libv4l-dev
git clone https://github.com/mpromonet/v4l2rtspserver.git
cd v4l2rtspserver/
cmake .
make
sudo make install
Configuration
You can then start a video stream with:
v4l2rtspserver -H 972 -W 1296 -F 15 -P 8555 /dev/video0
The previous command allows you to delimit an image in 1296x972, with 15 fps (which allows a suitable brightness in a dark room).
The video stream then becomes available from the following address from any software that can play it, such as VLC (on your computer or phone):
rtsp://<raspberry-pi-ip>:8555/unicast
The image becomes perfectly smooth and, as soon as the connection is sufficient, the quality is very suitable. However, there is still a latency time of about one second.
It should be noted that v4l2rtspserver also allows you to specify a user name and password, for greater security.
Launch on startup
To launch v4l2rtspserver at boot, let’s start by entering the command with the above parameters in the ExecStart section of the following file:
sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/v4l2rtspserver.service
We then activate v4l2rtspserver at boot:
sudo systemctl enable v4l2rtspserver