Minimising Streaming Latency
-
(Forum Admin - I thought this counts as a support issue - but if not please move to the appropriate forum).
Are there any best practises for minimising latency of the camera streams?
I’m using both a Fire Tablet 8" and an Alexa Spot, and I get a 5 - 6 second delay on any stream that I watch.
As a contrast, watching the same streams on my laptop (using iSpy), the delay is down to a second or less…
If I understand the functionality of the Monocle Gateway correctly, once it has brokered the connection between the RTSP source and the Amazon device, it does not actually touch the stream.
From the above I’m guessing that the latency is actually down the Amazon devices.
All streams originate from Ubiquiti Video IP cameras (UVC-G3-Micro and UVC-G3-FLEX) and are currently in 1920-1080 format.
There are options to reduce the stream resolution down to 1024x576 or 640x360, which I guess would help.The main driver for this coverage of the Front Door camera - I find some delivery drivers (I’m looking at you Amazon Logistics!!), use a “press the bell and run” approach and 6 seconds latency gives them enough time to escape and flag a “You weren’t in” reason for non-delivery.
-
Unfortunately they best we have ever seen with any camera/configuration is about 5 seconds. So optimizing to get sub 5 second latency “may”? not be possible. On a computer running FFPLAY or VLC you can certainly see almost no latency in the streams, but on other similar embedded systems such as a Raspberry Pi, we still see several seconds of latency before a stream starts. If there is any optimization to be had, I think its inside the embedded device and their implementation of RTSP and their H.264 decoding.
If I understand the functionality of the Monocle Gateway correctly, once it has brokered the connection between the RTSP source and the Amazon device, it does not actually touch the stream.
Correct, the gateway only relays the RTP packets – it does not touch (inspect or alter) them in any way.
All streams originate from Ubiquiti Video IP cameras (UVC-G3-Micro and UVC-G3-FLEX) and are currently in 1920-1080 format.
There are options to reduce the stream resolution down to 1024x576 or 640x360, which I guess would help.Honestly I have not seen that dropping the resolution have all that much impact on latency except in cases where the high resolution is taxing the CPU on some low-end camera or the higher resolution stream is taxing some network bandwidth too heavily.
Thanks, Robert
