ustreamer VS motion

FYI until recently this was known as 'rtsp-simple-server', but it outgrew simply being a RTSP server so it was rebranded. It is commonly used in the 3D printing community for serving webcams attached to printers along with ustreamer (https://github.com/pikvm/ustreamer).

uStreamer is far superior to the mjpgstreamer utility that nearly everyone uses. It supports the Pi's OMX media encoder, so you can get reasonable quality with low CPU usage.

I've been in the same situation as you and have been looking into https://github.com/pikvm/ustreamer as an alternative to mpjg-streamer under Raspian Bullseye with the unicam driver and the Media Controller API framework.

Maybe look at https://github.com/pikvm/ustreamer

...the documentation includes an example for the rPi camera as well as simple steps for making it a service.

I've done work before where we stream USB cameras via mjpg using https://github.com/pikvm/ustreamer

Granted this project looks like a lot more streamlined.

https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack - started working on this as a wrapper over OpenAI's endpoints for another product and it gradually became this.

Another project I worked on for my own use was a network isolated, lightweight video monitoring system. Around 5 years ago, I was looking to install a camera in our living room. I couldn't find anything I trusted that worked completely offline without some companion app pinging their servers. So I bought a basic IP camera on Amazon that supports rtsp and a raspberry pi. Created a fenced wifi network and added the camera to it.

Had an FFmpeg process read camera stream on demand and write to local buffers. Wrote a simple python server to listen for incoming connections on a different interface and stream the video on API requests. Then built an android app that talks to the python server to stream video on demand.

Also installed motion (https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion) on raspberry pi to detect motion in the video and store those snippets to local storage. With motion running, the adapter I was using wasn't delivering enough power resulting in storage occasionally unmounting and raspberry pi restarting taking the camera system offline. With motion detection disabled, the entire setup ran reliably for many years.

We used https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion for crude version of that in our office closet datacenter.

It just detected movement, sent an email with video file attached and a link to stream.

No face detect AI but this is ancient software, and minimum effort to set up

MotionEyeOS

I had a similar setup to see what my pet hedgehog was getting up to at night and I used motion to do motion detection on the stream and save videos when it happened. I think you can also set a script to run whenever motion is detected. Might be worth looking into.

I use Motion for my security camera... it only records motion if you want it to: https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion...

apt-get install ffmpeg libmariadb3 libpq5 libmicrohttpd12 wget https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion/releases/download/release-4.3.2/buster_motion_4.3.2-1_arm64.deb dpkg -i buster_motion_4.3.2-1_arm64.deb

You might consider Motion. It's reliable and uses little resources. It comes with a browser UI.