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Cameras in the apartment
We have a set of industrial cameras for recordings of video in the apartment.
Specifically, they are Hikrobot MV-CS050-10GC-PRO link on the manufacturer's website. Datasheet. Manual. CAD Drawings. Files downloaded on 20230315 from Hik's website.
Recording videos with gstreamer and Aravis
gst-launch-1.0 -e --gst-plugin-path=/usr/local/lib aravissrc camera-name="Hikrobot-MV-CS060-10GC-PRO-J11466033" exposure-auto=off exposure=50000 gain-auto=off gain=20 packet-delay=400 packet-size=9000 packet-resend=true do-timestamp=true ! video/x-bayer, format=rggb, width=3072, height=2048, framerate=10/1 ! bayer2rgb ! video/x-raw, format=RGBA ! queue ! videoconvert ! openh264enc bitrate=100000 ! h264parse ! mp4mux ! filesink location=test.mp4
Activating compression
Normally the cameras deliver raw frames in 8 or more bits per pixel. The default thing to get is 8bit per pixel, and since we have the color version of the camera, there is Bayer filter on top. The gstreamer line above applies a bayer2rgb filter to bring back the colors.
At the high resolution of 3072×2048, the maximum frequency of the pictures we can get is 19Hz, after that we saturate the 1gbps link to each camera.
These cameras offer on-board compression, which can be activated like this:
arv-tool-0.8 control ImageCompressionMode=HB HighBandwidthMode=Burst
And to turn compression off again:
arv-tool-0.8 control ImageCompressionMode=Off
That applies the setting to all the cameras found in the bus.
After that setting is active, it is possible to increase the frequency of acquisition to 30Hz, but I don't yet know how to uncompress the frames. I asked Maxxvision for technical support on 20230315. (Alexis)
Getting list of configurable options
arv-tool-0.8 features > features.txt
That will contain a list of all the options, and mention if they are read/write or read-only. Note that some options do not show up until you have enabled others, or they might appear disabled.
To read an option, use the same control command as before, for example:
amaldo@camtest:~$ arv-tool-0.8 control HBVersion Hikrobot-MV-CS060-10GC-PRO-J11466033 (192.168.50.96) HBVersion = 1.0 Hikrobot-MV-CS060-10GC-PRO-J11466035 (192.168.50.98) HBVersion = 1.0