ONVIF Support

[davidtraver]

Adding support for ONVIF compliant streaming would be very helpful.

[davidplowman]

Hi, that's an interesting thought, though in many respects that's not really "the kind of thing we do". Let me explain...

For example, you can do RTSP streaming with a Pi camera, but we ourselves don't provide an RTSP stack. Same goes with WebRTC - we would recommend a third party application to handle the streaming protocols and delivery. In fact, pretty much every non-trivial file and streaming format is handled for us by something else, be it FFmpeg, vlc, MediaMTX and so forth.

I think ONVIF would fall into the same bucket. As I understand it, it's built on RTSP, with various extra services, such as discovery, authentication and others, provided on top. I see there are some ONVIF implementations out there that would be the sort of thing we might use, though I'm sure there's some technical work involved in figuring out how to make use of them. If anyone had any specific recommendations in that area, or things we could do to make it easy to use a third party solution here, then we'd certainly be interested.

[davidtraver]

Thank you for your reply. I agree adding ONVIF support would be a big leap. But in the future it might be something worth considering.

The world of commercial in-place video cameras is huge, considering all the security cameras throughout the world. Having a convenient ONVIF solution for the Raspberry Pi could open uses for the Pi similar to what we've seen for raspberry display options for advertising, screens in stores, informational kiosks, menus in restaurants, signage in airports, and such.

ONVIF is being adopted throughout the NVR industry as the universal video stream and camera adoption framework. For example, Ubiquiti/Unifi recently opened the door to allow ONVIF compliant cameras into its previous proprietary NVR framework.

Sadly, a significant amount of wizardry is required to convert an RTSP stream from a Pi to ONVIF. After many hours of research and numerous false starts, I have not been able to make it work using the resources currently available for RTSP conversion to ONVIF using Raspberry Pis. The many packages for this on GitHub are quite quirky.

In any event, thank you for everything you do, and for your kind attention to my comment.