Geovision Cameras Using Sub Streams

camcow

Not sure if this is a Geovision camera, Monocle gateway, or Alexa issue.

Monocle GW: 0.0.6
Camera: GV-EBD8711 v1.06
Amazon Echo Show 15: Fire OS/7.0 stagefright/1.2

Camera on Alexa works when I use the main stream on my Geovision camera (rtsp://xxx.yyy.zzz.ooo:554/CH001.sdp) with resolution set to 1920x1028 using H.264.
If I switch Monocle to a sub stream (i.e., CH002.sdp), the debug log shows it is using resources for the main stream (i.e., rtsp://xxx.yyy.zzz.ooo/media/video1/video vs video2).
I need to use the sub-stream for Alexa since my main stream is the NVR stream running H.265 with higher Mpix than the Echo Show 15 seems to be able to support. I thought about moving the NVR to a sub stream, but they do not support H.265 or full camera resolution and framerate.
Thinking either Monocle GW isn’t extracting and using the right sub stream, Geovision camera always gives main stream regardless of requested stream, or Alexa could be forcing the main stream.

Thoughts?

BTW: If anyone plans to use Geovision cameras with Alexa, key settings i’ve determined that work are:

CODEC: H.264
Stream Resolution: 1920x1028 - anything over doesn’t seem to work
Link: rtsp://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:554/CH001.sdp
Stream: main stream – for now?
Port: Ensure Geovision camera is set to RTSP port enabled on 554
Authentication: Digest – some cameras allow you to set basic and none.

camcow

Update - At least with a GV-EBD8711 8 Mpix eyeball camera with v1.06 firmware, you can set the main stream to H.264 and HD and use whatever authentication you want. Downside is you lose all the resolution you paid for and can’t get it back on another substream for your NVR.

I’m 99% sure the problem is with Geovision Firmware in that it always returns the main stream video regardless of substream path given.

To get around this: You can use a sub stream set H.264 and HD resolution. H.264 (vs H.265) is required by Alexa and HD is the max resolution since Alexa isn’t able to downscale video.

You must turn off RTSP authentication, and use the RTSP path: rtsp://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:554/media/video#/video

Where video# is either video1 or video2 and correlates to the substream you want–video0 is the main stream

Downside – your camera will be open and without a password to view and hear audio via RTSP to anyone that can connect directly to your camera network. You also might not get audio since RTSP DESCRIBE handshake isn’t really occurring and instead going directly to the media source.