Rock64 for video surveillance

[martinschm]

Hi,

I am using a Rock64 (4GB, SSD via USB) running Debian for my home automation (ioBroker). Additionally I want to use it for video surveillance.

Currently I am trying out motioneye and I am streaming (or trying to) from 2-3 Xiaomi Cams that run the dafang hack. The latter enables the cams to stream via rstp H264. The cams are connected via wifi (Ubiquiti Unifi AC Pros). Both access points ( AC Pros ) and the Rock64 are connected via gigabit lan to my router.

At the moment the whole system is rather unstable and I am trying to figure out why. For a few days I was able to get streams from two cams, but I could not add a third one without motioneye stopping to show any cams. Now that we are back from vacation suddenly I can get only one cam to show up in motioneye. As soon as I add a second, no video is shown.

I guess there could be multiple sources or error:
- Wifi is bad (I was hoping that good hardware like Unifi would counter this)
- Router performance not enough for several streams
- Rock64 hardware (ethernet port) has too little performance
- motioneye software is buggy

Right now I am looking in all directions in order so solve this.

Load on the Rock64 is low after I upgraded to the newest version of motion. 

My questions to the community:
1) Has anyone else made any experience using the Rock64 for video surveillance ?
2) Can I rule out some of the sources by running certain tests ?

Best
Martin

[Rocklobster]

What speed is your broadband provider supplying you with.

[pkfpeters]

Hi Martin,

I don't have any experience with the motioneye software, but i think it
should be possible to handle three streams. I am using a rock64 with
two usb webcams and zoneminder and even that works.

Just as with every problem i would advise you to split up the problem.
First try to test the cams. Hopefully you also have another pc or
laptop. Try to open a stream (for example with vlc player) and look
at the bandwith that is used. Multiple the bandwidth times 3 to get
the total bandwith for your cams. Also keep in mind the number
of packets per seconds, since this also makes a big impact on your
wifi network.

If the cams (streams) work fine. Take the next step and try to get
a single stream to be handled by your rock64 and motioneye
software. If the stream is running login to your rock64 and run
'top'. Look at the system load, how many cores are using cpu
power. What is the i/o wait average? A high wait indicates problems
handling data from network and/or disk storage. In these cases
you could try to use a different i/o schedular or play with the
disk dirty write bufffers:
/sys/class/block/[your block device]/queue/scheduler
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes

Hope this will help to fix the performance issues.

[martinschm]

What speed is your broadband provider supplying you with.

Hi, i am not trying to access it from externally, this is all on my house network. Hence the broadband speed does not really matter.

[pkfpeters]

Hi Martin,

Just following up :-). Did you solve your issues with the bad performance?
Would be nice to hear if you solved it and if so how you did it.

[newzler033]

I've and issue like that, and almost the only thing that helped me was automated testing, that I've ordered from 3rd party company.

[Jozek]

i can use it with dietpi, but i get high cpu usage because i think that is using software, not the gpu