Race Cameras: Camera protocols

Camera protocols

• RTSP: enter the camera URL; FFmpeg uses TCP transport. Credentials can be included in the source URL and are not returned in session status.
• SRT: caller, listener or rendezvous; host/IP, UDP port, stream ID, optional passphrase/AES key length and receive-buffer milliseconds. Requires FFmpeg built with libsrt.
• NDI: install a compatible ndi-python binding/NDI runtime; Discover NDI sources runs on this station’s network. Select the exact advertised name. NDI|HX may need compatible codec libraries. Runtime/hardware NDI reception has not been tested in this build.
• RTMP: pull an existing RTMP/RTMPS URL, or choose Listen for camera push using a plain RTMP URL such as rtmp://0.0.0.0:1935/live/finish. Start the station capture first, then have the camera push to the station’s IP with the same port/app/stream path. Listener startup has a 15-second connection timeout; reconnect if a sender arrives later. RTMPS depends on the FFmpeg build’s TLS support.

FFmpeg and Tesseract are required for RTSP/SRT/RTMP plus OCR. NDI reception uses optional ndi-python and requires Tesseract for OCR; ordinary FFmpeg alone is not an NDI receiver. Upstream dependency instructions: https://github.com/buresu/ndi-python . Current prebuilt NDI wheels target Python 3.10–3.14 on Windows x64, macOS arm64 13+ and supported Linux architectures; other systems need a compatible source build/runtime. Linux NDI discovery relies on Avahi. Linux setup now installs and verifies the NDI runtime, binding and compatible decoder libraries. Native NDI hardware reception still requires a live camera test.

python3 -m pip install ndi-python

Restart the station after dependency installation. Recordings can still be processed with camera_capture.py from the command line. No camera access is attempted until you explicitly start a session.