Cycle Through RTSP Streams? Stuck!

Posted on Author Kodi Community Forum - All Forums

Hi Kodis,

I’m not one to come asking for help at the drop of a hat. I only do so now out of desperation, as I have tried just about everything.
Thank you so much to any who takes the time to read this!

Here’s The Story
I have 4 RTSP streams, each one pointing to a different camera on my IP camera server, something like this:

Code:
rtsp://admin:admin@cameraserver:554/cam?chan=1
rtsp://admin:admin@cameraserver:554/cam?chan=2
rtsp://admin:admin@cameraserver:554/cam?chan=3
rtsp://admin:admin@cameraserver:554/cam?chan=4

I want to have those 4 streams display in Kodi automatically as the screensaver as either

  • Cycling through each stream for a set durations (say 10 seconds)
    [Image: 2iw3xc6.jpg]
  • Simply displaying all four feeds in a single output (a Mosaic)
    [Image: spga6c.jpg]

Trying The Cycling Setup
I put all 4 streams in a single .strm file, set the screensaver to play the strm file.
Success! The chan=1 feed loads! …and then it never stops playing Undecided. It seems there’s no way to specify/limit the duration of each entry in the strm file
Attempted solution: Tried send JSON commands from a Python script on a separate server to “next track” at set intervals… this didn’t work as the ‘next’ command wakes the screensaver.

Trying The Mosaic Setup
Tried using a ‘mosaic’ stream from VLC: Had a separate (local) media server take all 4 rtsp streams, used VLC mosaic to combine them, then stream to Kodi. Problems! – significant video quality loss, frame skipping, and (most problematic) a significant time delay which is no good at all for obvious reasons with security cameras.
Tried the same thing using ffmpeg on media-server side – same story

Any solutions at all for this?? I’ve reached the conclusion that any kind of transcoding is really not an option if I am to retain video quality and avoid delay.

Thanks heaps if anyone has any ideas Big Grin