@Leofr1cs
The initial delay seems to be entirely based on the RTSP player and likely H.264 decoding built into the Alexa hardware devices. Some camera, mostly based on the Dahua hardware like Amcrest seem to only have around a 5 second delay while others often have closer to 10 second delays. In my testing using a high resolution versus a low resolution seemed to have little impact on improving this latency.
I have also tested these types of RTSP streams using Raspberry Pi hardware and that too has similar stream startup latency – so I’m just guessing that a combination of the hardware and software codecs just perform better on full desktop/laptops versus the limited capacity of the low power ARM-based devices.
So could it be further improved? Yes, I’m sure there is room for improvement in the optimization on these devices for RTSP streams and the supported video and audio codecs. Will Amazon improve it? Well, thats impossible to know – but there really has not been any significant improvement (that we have witnessed) in streaming performance and compatibility since the first release of the Echo Show Gen 1.
PS. Does the Monocle Gateway add latency to the streaming. Well, possibly … but minimal. From what we have seen in testing it does not add any more than 1 second to the streaming latency. Of course it could be worse in sub-optimal network conditions.
Thanks, Robert
