Some pointers about DASH (MPD) streaming

[bjia56]

Hi @twrecked, I saw in the 0.8.1.13 release notes that you're looking into getting MPEG-DASH streams working. We have it working inside Scrypted, using ffmpeg as the client. Here are a few findings from our previous investigation:

• Arlo's DASH endpoint requires a set of headers before it returns video data; otherwise, it returns an error page.
• Since DASH is http-based, ffmpeg can use the -headers flag to pass headers, e.g. https://github.com/scryptedapp/arlo/blob/main/src/arlo_plugin/camera.py#L743-L749
• The headers themselves can be constructed statically with a token present in the query parameters: https://github.com/scryptedapp/arlo/blob/main/src/arlo_plugin/arlo/arlo_async.py#L930-L945
• I don't recall the specifics about this one, but removing port 80 is required: https://github.com/scryptedapp/arlo/blob/main/src/arlo_plugin/arlo/arlo_async.py#L907

From personal experience, the DASH stream is not very stable compared to RTSP, and in Scrypted's persistent streaming mode, sometimes fails to load the stream even when a new URL is requested. My guess is that ffmpeg is missing compression algorithms that the browser may support, but I haven't looked into it. The Scrypted Arlo plugin typically prefers either the RTSP or the WebRTC streams instead.

[twrecked]

Many thanks for the info.

I actually figured out the egressToken piece a while ago and incorporated it into my lovelace card but completely forgot about it.

The problem I have now is getting this information into the stream component. I can modify the component to accept a headers option which is passed to PyAV and which seems to do nothing...

[twrecked]

And I just saw your comment about the android user agent - it still returns an RTSP stream.

Sorry I missed that, there was a lot of activity the last few days and it got buried in the deluge of people telling me they had the same issue...

I'll add that user agent to pyaarlo as well.

[bjia56]

Np, thanks for your awesome work keeping on top of Arlo's server side changes!

[bjia56]

Something else possibly worth looking into is replacing cloudscraper with curl_cffi, which in my experience does a pretty good job at bypassing cf for the login and works with sseclient.

[twrecked]

Thanks. I'll take a look.

I've realised I need to refactor the auth code so I'll take a look at this as well.