RPi Cam Web Interface

[shinji2009]

hi. please can somebody add here http://elinux.org/RPi-Cam-Web-Interface that RPi-Cam-Web-Interface is a surveillance and dvr software? this sounds funny, but i found this great software just accidentally. i was looking for rpi surveillance software and find everything except RPi-Cam-Web-Interface. thank you.

[quavoce]

Quavoce,

Thank you for the good walk-through on how to set up a self-signed cert! Did you ever post a detailed account of setting an official authority cert for your domain as well as setting up the PHP Userform Login? If not I'd be very interested in one or if there is a good tutorial out there, let me know. I'd appreciate any direction. Thanks.

Hi Ben, I haven't posted any instructions yet as you're the first person to ask. I do have them fully written up on my local laptop to help me rebuild my setup, so it shouldn't take me long to make them publicly usable. I set up a blog to post such instructions but haven't really put much on there yet, so I'll have a go at adding these this week.
Here is a little sneak peak of what the end result will be:

• Secure reverse proxy running on a Raspberry Pi at home (using the latest NGINX webserver), so that you don't have to open multiple ports on your router for each camera
• Dynamic DNS URL for various web applications on other servers at home, e.g RPi Web Cam Interface
• Official HTTPS certification from letsencrypt.org for free
○ So that you don't have to login with your password being sent in the clear!
○ Required because self-signed certs don't work when trying to view recorded RPi Cam video on an iPhone/iPad
• Push notifications sent to your phone when events occur such as motion detection
• One Raspberry Pi for the proxy and separate Pis for multiple RPi Web Cam Interface cameras

[shinji2009]

hi help please is there any way to know why one of my rpi3b+ with RPi Cam Web Interface is always flashing green led like once a sec even if motion detection is stopped?

[quavoce]

Hi Robert,

Now that some of my cameras are continuously recording, I've noticed that they occasionally have watchdog reset errors that stops video recording. I can start the video again automatically by entering "ca 1" in the "Period Start" field within "Edit Schedule Settings" which works well, but the watchdog reset leaves behind an unconverted .h264 video file. Is there a way to look for these unconverted files after a reset and convert them please?

Following on from this, is there any way to debug the watchdog resets? Do they generally occur outside of the raspimjpeg processes control?

Thanks.

[quavoce]

hi help please is there any way to know why one of my rpi3b+ with RPi Cam Web Interface is always flashing green led like once a sec even if motion detection is stopped?

My green RPi light usually flashes too and is quite normal - it just indicates SD card activity.

[shinji2009]

hi help please is there any way to know why one of my rpi3b+ with RPi Cam Web Interface is always flashing green led like once a sec even if motion detection is stopped?

My green RPi light usually flashes too and is quite normal - it just indicates SD card activity.

thanks. well thats strange, i think. this is not how it always was, as i said i have two of them on the wall side by side and not so long ago both of them was not flashing in the dark so often. but now one of them do. and the software is the same. and cameras look in the same direction

[btidey]

Hi Robert,

Now that some of my cameras are continuously recording, I've noticed that they occasionally have watchdog reset errors that stops video recording. I can start the video again automatically by entering "ca 1" in the "Period Start" field within "Edit Schedule Settings" which works well, but the watchdog reset leaves behind an unconverted .h264 video file. Is there a way to look for these unconverted files after a reset and convert them please?

Following on from this, is there any way to debug the watchdog resets? Do they generally occur outside of the raspimjpeg processes control?

Thanks.

The watchdog is looking for the preview stream jpg file to be regularly updated. If that stops for more than the watchdog interval then that triggers the watchdog process. The intention here is to use the preview stream to check that the camera interfacing is functioning normally. Stopping of the stream can happen outside of raspimjpeg control with no accompanying errors. Those are normally to do with powering or cabling. Other stops (more common) will log camera interface errors in scheduler log just prior to the watchdog kicking in.

.h264 files are converted using MP4Box process using a cmd line (set in the raspimjpeg config file) like

Code: Select all

set -e;MP4Box -fps %i -add %s %s > /dev/null 2>&1;rm "%s";) &

The set -e is for detecting errors, the & is to run in the background.
The first %i parameter sets the framerate (e.g. 25), the second %s parameter is filled in with the input filename (the .h264 file), the second %s is filled in with the output filename (.mp4), the third %s is the input filename again which is used to remove the .h264 if the MP4Box works OK.

One could do an offline script to look for unaccompanied .h264 files and convert them using the same method.

I will have a look at running something like this at raspimjpeg start up but might be a few days before I can get round to that. To make it more general I might add the capability to just run a 'macro' at start up rather than hard wire this particular task in. This could then do the .h264 conversion as well as allow for other processes to be done if required.

[btidey]

hi help please is there any way to know why one of my rpi3b+ with RPi Cam Web Interface is always flashing green led like once a sec even if motion detection is stopped?

My green RPi light usually flashes too and is quite normal - it just indicates SD card activity.

thanks. well thats strange, i think. this is not how it always was, as i said i have two of them on the wall side by side and not so long ago both of them was not flashing in the dark so often. but now one of them do. and the software is the same. and cameras look in the same direction

The SD card activity can be either something associated with the camera software or due to other processes running on the Pi.

We try to minimise unnecessary SD activity in the camera software. The software is continuously writing the preview jpg but this is kept in /dev/shm which is RAM based. Similarly the status file can change but this is also kept in /dev/shm

The scheduleLog.txt file is kept in normal filing space so will cause SD activity. Normally if nothing is happening then the only new entries in the log are the management interval check which defaults to 1 per hour. If video recording is happening with splits then this will trigger log activity at the split rate.

[quavoce]

The watchdog is looking for the preview stream jpg file to be regularly updated. If that stops for more than the watchdog interval then that triggers the watchdog process. The intention here is to use the preview stream to check that the camera interfacing is functioning normally. Stopping of the stream can happen outside of raspimjpeg control with no accompanying errors. Those are normally to do with powering or cabling. Other stops (more common) will log camera interface errors in scheduler log just prior to the watchdog kicking in.

.h264 files are converted using MP4Box process using a cmd line (set in the raspimjpeg config file) like

Code: Select all

set -e;MP4Box -fps %i -add %s %s > /dev/null 2>&1;rm "%s";) &

The set -e is for detecting errors, the & is to run in the background.
The first %i parameter sets the framerate (e.g. 25), the second %s parameter is filled in with the input filename (the .h264 file), the second %s is filled in with the output filename (.mp4), the third %s is the input filename again which is used to remove the .h264 if the MP4Box works OK.

One could do an offline script to look for unaccompanied .h264 files and convert them using the same method.

I will have a look at running something like this at raspimjpeg start up but might be a few days before I can get round to that. To make it more general I might add the capability to just run a 'macro' at start up rather than hard wire this particular task in. This could then do the .h264 conversion as well as allow for other processes to be done if required.

Thanks Robert, I would be very happy to use a macro to fix the unconverted .h264 files after a watchdog restart, using the mp4box command example as a base.

Also thank you for the watchdog explanation. I was curious to know if I could tweak the watchdog parameters, and after a quick search I found a post that explains what the watchdog entries in camera settings means, so I'll update the wiki with the info.

[btidey]

Latest version has added startstop.sh macro. THis is called during start with command line parameter 'start' and during close down with command line parameter 'stop'.

An example startstop.sh macro is included in the macros folder which does a check at start up for any left over .h264 files and converts them to .mp4 It needs to be given execute permissions before it will be active.

This version also has a new config item in /etc/raspimjpeg called stop_pause. This defines a delay (in microseconds) that will be used after a video stop is performed. This may be helpful in split operations.

[quavoce]

Latest version has added startstop.sh macro. THis is called during start with command line parameter 'start' and during close down with command line parameter 'stop'.

An example startstop.sh macro is included in the macros folder which does a check at start up for any left over .h264 files and converts them to .mp4 It needs to be given execute permissions before it will be active.

This version also has a new config item in /etc/raspimjpeg called stop_pause. This defines a delay (in microseconds) that will be used after a video stop is performed. This may be helpful in split operations.

Fantastic, thank you very much Robert! I've updated and will monitor how it performs tomorrow.

[harlock74]

Quavoce,

Thank you for the good walk-through on how to set up a self-signed cert! Did you ever post a detailed account of setting an official authority cert for your domain as well as setting up the PHP Userform Login? If not I'd be very interested in one or if there is a good tutorial out there, let me know. I'd appreciate any direction. Thanks.

Hi Ben, I haven't posted any instructions yet as you're the first person to ask. I do have them fully written up on my local laptop to help me rebuild my setup, so it shouldn't take me long to make them publicly usable. I set up a blog to post such instructions but haven't really put much on there yet, so I'll have a go at adding these this week.
Here is a little sneak peak of what the end result will be:

• Secure reverse proxy running on a Raspberry Pi at home (using the latest NGINX webserver), so that you don't have to open multiple ports on your router for each camera
• Dynamic DNS URL for various web applications on other servers at home, e.g RPi Web Cam Interface
• Official HTTPS certification from letsencrypt.org for free
○ So that you don't have to login with your password being sent in the clear!
○ Required because self-signed certs don't work when trying to view recorded RPi Cam video on an iPhone/iPad
• Push notifications sent to your phone when events occur such as motion detection
• One Raspberry Pi for the proxy and separate Pis for multiple RPi Web Cam Interface cameras

Hi quavoce,
Many thanks for sharing your findings.
I would be very grateful if you could share any instructions to install letsencrypt in particular. I have always failed in the past to install certbot on my raspberry pi as I was getting an 'Illegal instruction' error message all the time.
Thanks a lot!

[btidey]

I have added a simple multi camera view into the install set. Details are in wiki under Additions.

The view is just a simple web page showing the preview of multiple cameras. There is no functionality.

You need to set up a multiview.json config file which just holds the urls for the cameras and refresh rates. An example is included.

The view is accessed via host/multiview.html

The files are set up for 4 cameras but this can be easily changed as detailed in the wiki.

[harlock74]

Quavoce,

Thank you for the good walk-through on how to set up a self-signed cert! Did you ever post a detailed account of setting an official authority cert for your domain as well as setting up the PHP Userform Login? If not I'd be very interested in one or if there is a good tutorial out there, let me know. I'd appreciate any direction. Thanks.

Hi Ben, I haven't posted any instructions yet as you're the first person to ask. I do have them fully written up on my local laptop to help me rebuild my setup, so it shouldn't take me long to make them publicly usable. I set up a blog to post such instructions but haven't really put much on there yet, so I'll have a go at adding these this week.
Here is a little sneak peak of what the end result will be:

• Secure reverse proxy running on a Raspberry Pi at home (using the latest NGINX webserver), so that you don't have to open multiple ports on your router for each camera
• Dynamic DNS URL for various web applications on other servers at home, e.g RPi Web Cam Interface
• Official HTTPS certification from letsencrypt.org for free
○ So that you don't have to login with your password being sent in the clear!
○ Required because self-signed certs don't work when trying to view recorded RPi Cam video on an iPhone/iPad
• Push notifications sent to your phone when events occur such as motion detection
• One Raspberry Pi for the proxy and separate Pis for multiple RPi Web Cam Interface cameras

Hi quavoce,
Many thanks for sharing your findings.
I would be very grateful if you could share any instructions to install letsencrypt in particular. I have always failed in the past to install certbot on my raspberry pi as I was getting an 'Illegal instruction' error message all the time.
Thanks a lot!

Success!! I have finally managed to install certbot on my raspberry pi. I am more than happy to share the installation steps if someone is interested.

[harlock74]

I have added a simple multi camera view into the install set. Details are in wiki under Additions.

The view is just a simple web page showing the preview of multiple cameras. There is no functionality.

You need to set up a multiview.json config file which just holds the urls for the cameras and refresh rates. An example is included.

The view is accessed via host/multiview.html

The files are set up for 4 cameras but this can be easily changed as detailed in the wiki.

Hi Robert,

That's great. I will definitely give it a go! Thanks for your continuous big efforts!!

[pumpkinpi]

I recently upgraded to the newest version on two cameras I have at work. I am saving the media files onto an NFS server via a symbolically linked /var/www/html/media file. However, since the upgrade, the MP4Box does not seem to be converting any saved videos. I have lots of .h264 files but no .MP4s. The .jpg thumbs are saved and they appear in the downloads page with "busy" labels. I think this is related to what you are discussing above, but I am not sure how to fix it or troubleshoot.

I should note that it has been about 14 months since my last upgrade and I had to remove the RPi_ folder and get the latest system from git to get it to install.

Thanks,
PPi

[quavoce]

Success!! I have finally managed to install certbot on my raspberry pi. I am more than happy to share the installation steps if someone is interested.

Sorry for the delay, I was hoping to find time to include details on how to secure raspi-runner and include updated IFTTT Go button instructions.
I'm glad you've got it working though!

Here are my instructions in case they help others:
https://quavoce.wordpress.com/2017/06/0 ... ncryption/

Edit - posted the correct URL this time.

[Gary Littlemore]

I've just tried ./update.sh to get to 6.3.5 and it never updated again. I noticed when the update was running an error, see screen capture below.

The error you are getting is in an install script command where it is getting the boardrev number in order to check whether it is a module that can handle 2 camera interfaces.

To do this it gets the system cmdline and extracts the boardrev from that.

For some reason your cmdline doesn't appear to have a boardrev parameter and so the extraction returns an empty string and the comparison fails.

You can check your cmdline by

Code: Select all

cat /proc/cmdline

I have improved the install script so that it doesn't throw this error even if boardrev is not present

I've tried updating from 6.3.6 and the ./update.sh still didn't update. I had to remove the folder and re-git clone again to get to 6.3.8

[quavoce]

I've tried updating from 6.3.6 and the ./update.sh still didn't update. I had to remove the folder and re-git clone again to get to 6.3.8

Hi Robert,

I too have had problems updating with the update.sh command, but I think I've found the solution.

The issue is with the "git fetch origin master" as this doesn't seem to pull the latest files. The commands from below were obtained from the update.sh file.

For reference to help others reading this:

"git rev-parse HEAD" - shows the hash of the local install
"git ls-remote -h origin master |awk '{print $1}'" - shows the hash of the latest install in GitHub.

As seen below, c262 doesn't update after running "git fetch origin master"

Code: Select all

pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $ git rev-parse HEAD
cd937032eb8730ec8f00662c06366583ba8fc262
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $ git ls-remote -h origin master |awk '{print $1}'
31e7d235c9f6b8a6427346bf7fd7a567d4c4a009
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $ git fetch origin master
remote: Counting objects: 27, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (13/13), done.
remote: Total 27 (delta 11), reused 27 (delta 11), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (27/27), done.
From https://github.com/silvanmelchior/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
   cd93703..31e7d23  master     -> origin/master
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $ git rev-parse HEAD
cd937032eb8730ec8f00662c06366583ba8fc262
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $

The solution it seems is to run "git pull" instead. As you can see, the local hash is updated after this command:

Code: Select all

pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $ git pull
Updating cd93703..31e7d23
Fast-forward
 README.md                   |   2 +-
 bin/raspimjpeg              | Bin 74132 -> 74212 bytes
 etc/raspimjpeg/raspimjpeg.1 |   3 +++
 www/config.php              |   2 +-
 www/macros/startstop.sh     |  12 ++++++++++++
 www/multiview.html          |  30 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 www/multiview.jsonD         |   1 +
 www/multiview.php           |  54 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 8 files changed, 102 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 www/macros/startstop.sh
 create mode 100644 www/multiview.html
 create mode 100644 www/multiview.jsonD
 create mode 100644 www/multiview.php
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $ git rev-parse HEAD
31e7d235c9f6b8a6427346bf7fd7a567d4c4a009
pi@raspicam:~/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface $

If I then run the install.sh command, the update works.

I tested this by editing update.sh on one of my cams and substituted "git fetch origin master" with "git pull". Executing update.sh then worked perfectly.

Would you be able to fix the update.sh script with the "git pull" command please?

[quavoce]

Quavoce,

Thank you for the good walk-through on how to set up a self-signed cert! Did you ever post a detailed account of setting an official authority cert for your domain as well as setting up the PHP Userform Login? If not I'd be very interested in one or if there is a good tutorial out there, let me know. I'd appreciate any direction. Thanks.

Hi Ben, I haven't posted any instructions yet as you're the first person to ask. I do have them fully written up on my local laptop to help me rebuild my setup, so it shouldn't take me long to make them publicly usable. I set up a blog to post such instructions but haven't really put much on there yet, so I'll have a go at adding these this week.
Here is a little sneak peak of what the end result will be:

• Secure reverse proxy running on a Raspberry Pi at home (using the latest NGINX webserver), so that you don't have to open multiple ports on your router for each camera
• Dynamic DNS URL for various web applications on other servers at home, e.g RPi Web Cam Interface
• Official HTTPS certification from letsencrypt.org for free
○ So that you don't have to login with your password being sent in the clear!
○ Required because self-signed certs don't work when trying to view recorded RPi Cam video on an iPhone/iPad
• Push notifications sent to your phone when events occur such as motion detection
• One Raspberry Pi for the proxy and separate Pis for multiple RPi Web Cam Interface cameras

Just to put context around this link, in answer to my summary above, the following link provides the instructions promised. Hope it helps others build similar setups!
https://quavoce.wordpress.com/2017/06/0 ... ncryption/

[harlock74]

Success!! I have finally managed to install certbot on my raspberry pi. I am more than happy to share the installation steps if someone is interested.

Sorry for the delay, I was hoping to find time to include details on how to secure raspi-runner and include updated IFTTT Go button instructions.
I'm glad you've got it working though!

Here are my instructions in case they help others:
https://quavoce.wordpress.com/2017/01/1 ... o-buttons/

Hi quavoce,
Many thanks for sharing these very detailed instructions. They are very helpful indeed!
Can you please let me know if you ever tried to install the same letsencrypt certificate on two different raspberry pi's within the same home network, basically same DNS server but different port?
Thanks a lot!

[quavoce]

Hi quavoce,
Many thanks for sharing these very detailed instructions. They are very helpful indeed!
Can you please let me know if you ever tried to install the same letsencrypt certificate on two different raspberry pi's within the same home network, basically same DNS server but different port?
Thanks a lot!

No I haven't used the certificate on two Pis (I don't think that would work?), I just have the proxypi as the gateway into my network, which in turn redirects external access to multiple different Pis depending on the URL.

e.g.
https://myurl/mycam1 -> goes to CamPi1
https://myurl/mycam2 -> goes to CamPi2
https://myurl/mycam3 -> goes to CamPi3

[harlock74]

Hi quavoce,
Many thanks for sharing these very detailed instructions. They are very helpful indeed!
Can you please let me know if you ever tried to install the same letsencrypt certificate on two different raspberry pi's within the same home network, basically same DNS server but different port?
Thanks a lot!

No I haven't used the certificate on two Pis (I don't think that would work?), I just have the proxypi as the gateway into my network, which in turn redirects external access to multiple different Pis depending on the URL.

e.g.
https://myurl/mycam1 -> goes to CamPi1
https://myurl/mycam2 -> goes to CamPi2
https://myurl/mycam3 -> goes to CamPi3

Hi,
Thanks for letting me know. However it looks like it can be done as per the following links:

https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/2005

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/373 ... auto-renew

I have also opened a new thread on the letsencrypt forum. I will report back here should I succeed

[ksdehoff]

I'm having a problem running with motion detection on a Pi Zero and am wondering if anyone has figured out a fix - the problem is that the pi zero simply stops responding to anything on the network after a period of hours, requiring me to power cycle. I'd suspect some sort of resource exhaustion but am not sure - anyone have suggestions on how to properly configure motion detection to run on a Pi Zero?

[shinji2009]

hi. can anybody tell me please. because i am not too smart in all if these things. generally, how safe it is to not set the password to access to rpis with RPi Cam Web Interface, if rpis are connected to the router via wifi and no ports for them are forwarded?