I used motioneyeos for a number of years on Raspberry Pi’s (as both a Fast Network Camera and a NVR on separate devices) and while it was helpful for live viewing, the RPI really struggled on the recording frame rate.

I have since invested in a professional NVR but since I had the RPI’s lying around I decided to set them up to stream on my network and let them be captured by my new NVR or any other device that I want.

Start with a fresh install on the RPI and run the below commands:

raspi-config
#enable the camera if not done so already
sudo apt-get install ntpdate
sudo apt-get install vlc

Create a file on the Desktop called stream-rtsp.sh as per the below:

nano stream-rtsp.sh

!/bin/bash
raspivid -o - -t 0 -w 1296 -h 972 -fps 8 -b 2500000 -rot 180 -a 12 | cvlc -vvv stream:///dev/stdin --sout '#rtp{access=udp,sdp=rtsp://:8554/stream}' :demux=h264

Make the file execturable:

chmod +x stream-rtsp.sh

Test the script by running it manually:

./stream-rtsp.sh

Making the script run on startup by creating the file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/stream-rtsp.service

[Unit]
Description=auto start stream
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/home/pi/stream-rtsp.sh
User=pi
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Set the service to auto start:

sudo systemctl enable stream-rtsp.service

Reboot the system and confirm the system started the service by:

sudo systemctl start stream-rtsp.service

Now lets check if the device is successfully streaming by on a different device launching VLC and navigating to Media –> Open Network Stream, enter the below (modify for your IP address) and click play:

rtsp://192.168.1.xxx:8554/stream

You should now see your camera screen. I will show you how to add this to Hikvision NVR in a later post.