Is it possible to use a low-res Substream (for NVR detection) with Ring Cams?

[HQOFIQ]

Hi there - I have my Ring Doorbell Pro and my Ring Stickup Cam in use and everything is fine and connected to Home Assistant via Ring-MQTT ... Big Shout out to @tsightler - thank you very much for this cool addon!
But I have one thing that I cannot solve on my own yet (tried really much and researched a lot) and hope for someone to maybe have solved this already? Using Ring Cams 24/7 with a NVR (for detection, alert and recording) works fine but in contrast to other brands I am not able to "find" a RTSP-Substream-URL that works ... I want to use each cam with a main-stream in the original format (FullHD 1080p with audio) but for detection purpose (of the Coral TPU) I need a lower resolution sub-stream with only about 5 pics/sec or ffmpeg will run berserk on my RPI5 which has no hardware decoding for h264 :(
Ideas, Solutions or some other hint is more than welcome, thank you very much!

[tsightler]

This topic is covered in the project readme, you are simply trying to do something that Ring cameras were not designed for and not well suited to do. If you attempt to stream continuously your doorbell pro will almost certainly overheat in the summer (I should know, I have one) and continuous streaming also blocks most Ring features, such as motion detection, etc. I strongly recommend that, if you want features like this, to simply purchase devices designed for this use case.

However, if you are adventurous, I have been working on a solution to this which is currently implemented in the development version. I call this feature the "Snapshot Stream". Instead of attempting to stream video from the camera all the time, it instead uses the standard interval/motion snapshots, but creates a low-bitrate, 720p/5 FPS stream generated from the snapshots, which requires relatively low CPU usage even without acceleration. When the camera detects a motion/ding event, it starts a livestream but only grabs frames at 5 FPS and feeds those into the snapshot stream. I've worked hard to optimize the CPU usage and timing with this and, while it adds a small amount of latency, it seems to work fairly well. I was able to run 4 cameras concurrently with only a RPi4, and 8 cameras on a small x86 VM with only 2-vCPUs.

Would love to have you test it, just know that the feature is still in development and may not be 100% stable.

[tsightler]

To be fair, the load will increase when motion events are detected, because it still has to process the live stream, but at least it's not a consistent high load. I'm still tweaking on the concept, and tracking down a few reliability issues, but I felt like it was working well enough in my recent testing that it was at least worth letting a wider audience give it a spin. Please feel free to provide any feedback.

[HQOFIQ]

Setup was easy - stream is "working" (technically speaking) - downside is that the motion detection of ring cams isnt nearly as good as the one from frigate NVR for example ... would it be possible to have a 720p/5 frames stream created out of snapshots not taken by movement but over time - sorry, if i missed something in the concept? So not taking the snapshots only if ring detects movement but have the snapshots be created 5/sec every second as an rtsp stream so 720p then/5 frames?

[tsightler]

No, that would just be back to what you were already doing, so what would be the point?

The idea here is that CPU and battery usage is only high where there is something worth detecting, otherwise the snapshot is just used as a placeholder in the stream to keep the NVR tool happy. You can crank up Ring motion detection to as sensitive as you want, but, overall, you have to decide what you are willing to trade. If you want a continuous stream, then you will have to pay the CPU cycles to transcode the stream and get what you want (you can easily use a video filter to get a 720p 5 FPS steam with FFMPEG optimized for bandwidth/CPU), otherwise you have to trigger based on Ring motion.

Again, if you don't want to use Ring features, best to purchase a different camera solution, not try to hack around Ring's implementations. The goal of this feature is to allow some level of function with such tools without a constant stream, since Ring cameras aren't built for this.

[HQOFIQ]

I am happy with Ring as an alarm system and just want to use the cams for more than just that - that's all ... You mentioned to crank up Rings Motion detection ... was that just saying or how would you be able to play with that? Thank you very much for your support so far!

[tsightler]

I mean the motion settings in the Ring app. By default Ring cameras are pretty conservative with motion detections because, otherwise, they produce way too many alerts, their motion alert zone is only about 65% of the camera area and the sensitivity setting is medium. You can crank the setting all the way to max sensitivity and make sure the motion alert zones are the entire camera area and Ring will detect motion quite readily, IMO, generally too often, but, if you want to feed video to Frigate any time even the slightest motion is detected by Ring, it is largely possible. My stickup cam on my screen porch constantly detects me through the window when I'm walking around in my house. So, Ring detect motion, starts the stream, Frigate is then used to perform the detection on any images in the motion.

And sure, I understand why you are trying to use the cameras, I also have a bunch of Ring cameras and alarm, but I'm just saying it's mostly not worth it if you don't want to live withing the limitations of the devices. The doorbell pro will almost certainly overheat in the summer if you try to run a continuous stream, and many of the others will lock up or stop streaming for minutes at a time (I assume potentially overheating as well, but maybe firmware issues).

I used to have a strict rule that any questions about use of ring-mqtt with NVR would be deleted because I was tired of trying to help people with this, and, in many ways, your questions are perfect examples of the reason. You have Ring cameras, you want to use them with Frigate, OK, great, but they don't support continuous streams well, don't have a limited resolution/framerate stream, etc., so OK, you can transcode and live with stream restart, missing Ring motion detection, constant recording in Ring cloud, etc, but then it's "that uses CPU" or "that kills my battery" or "that overheats my camera and it freezes", so then I try to implement something that doesn't have these problems and it's "detection isn't as good/fast enough".

All of that is true, because we're trying to work around cameras that simply aren't desined for this use case so you have to pick which things you can live with. If you want fast detection on a continuous stream, then you have to dedicate the CPU for it and deal with stream reconnects or device issues. If you can live with slightly slower detection, you can use snapshot stream for lower CPU. If you want everything, pick a different camera.