home-assistant.io/source/_components/camera.ffmpeg.markdown

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layout	title	description	date	sidebar	comments	sharing	footer	logo	ha_category	ha_release
page	FFmpeg Camera	Instructions how to integrate a Video fees with FFmpeg as cameras within Home Assistant.	2016-08-13 08:00	true	false	true	true	ffmpeg.png	Camera	0.26

The ffmpeg platform allows you to use every video feed with FFmpeg as camera in Home Assistant.

You need a `ffmpeg` binary in your system path. On Debain 8 you can install it from backports. If you want Hardware support on a Raspberry Pi you need tobuild from source by yourself. Windows binary are avilable on the [FFmpeg](http://www.ffmpeg.org/) website.

To enable your FFmpeg feed in your installation, add the following to your configuration.yaml file:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
camera:
  - platform: ffmpeg
    input: FFMPEG_SUPPORTED_INPUT
    name: FFmpeg
    ffmpeg_bin: /usr/bin/ffmpeg
    extra_arguments: -q:v 2

Configuration variables:

• input (Required): A ffmpeg compatible input file, stream or feed.
• name (Optional): This parameter allows you to override the name of your camera.
• ffmpeg_bin (Optional): Default 'ffmpeg'.
• extra_arguments (Optional): Extra option they will pass to ffmpeg. i.e. image quality or video filter options.

{% linkable_title Image quality %}

You can control the image quality with extra_arguments -q:v 2-32 or with lossless option -pred 1.

{% linkable_title Troubleshooting %}

In most of case, ffmpeg autodetect all needed options to read a video/audio stream or file. But it is possible in rare cases that's needed to set a option to help ffmpeg. Per default ffmpeg use 5 seconds to detect all options or abort.

First check, if your stream playable by ffmpeg with (use option -an or -vn to disable video or audio stream):

$ ffmpeg -i INPUT -an -f null -

Now you can see what going wrong. Following list could be help to solve your trouble:

• [rtsp @ ...] UDP timeout, retrying with TCP: You need to set RTSP transport in the configuration with: input: -rtsp_transport tcp -i INPUT
• [rtsp @ ...] Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video: ..., none): unspecified size: FFmpeg need more data or time for autodetect. You can set the analyzeduration and/or probesize option, play with this value. If you know the needed value you can set it with: input: -analyzeduration xy -probesize xy tcp -i INPUT. More information about that can be found on FFmpeg.