Raspberry Pi Axis IP Camera Wall Display

I wanted to set up some Raspberry Pi boxes to provide a passive video feed of the AXIS webcams I have set up at my house. I hook these into unused HDMI video inputs on my televisions and on a spare monitor to act as wall displays for viewing the cameras.

This is really bare-bones and probably doesn't warrant public code, but none of this is well-documented and it took some experimenting to get it all working. Perhaps someone else will find it useful and be able to avoid the hassles of figuring it out themselves.

This script uses omxplayer to display the camera streams directly to the RPi's framebuffer so there's no need for X11 or a browser or any of that mess. The h264 decoding is hardware-optimized for the RPi's GPU and is extremely efficient. I'm seeing a load average of 0.08% while decoding four independent camera streams on an RPi 3.

top - 14:59:31 up  2:17,  5 users,  load average: 0.07, 0.06, 0.08
KiB Mem:    750640 total,   261288 used,   489352 free,    17568 buffers

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
18239 root      20   0  135084  22608  14412 S   3.0  3.0   0:32.00 omxplayer.bin
18238 root      20   0  134216  19272  14260 S   1.0  2.6   0:09.32 omxplayer.bin
18242 root      20   0  132964  18892  14272 S   1.0  2.5   0:09.24 omxplayer.bin
18235 root      20   0  132716  19820  14352 S   0.7  2.6   0:08.89 omxplayer.bin

Requirements

• Developed and tested on a Pi 3 Model B running Raspbian Jesse Lite (no X11)
• I allocated the max memory possible to the GPU using raspi-config
• Tested with AXIS M3027, P1427-LE, and M2026-LE cameras. Should work with any modern AXIS camera that can run firmware v5 or higher.

Installation

• Copy rpaw.conf.sample to rpaw.conf and edit to reflect your camera's viewer credentials. This code currently only works if it's the same username and password for all the cameras.

• Also in rpaw.conf add one or more CAMERA0n lines for each of your AXIS cameras. You'll have to sort out the --win and --crop boundaries for yourself. The sample config is for a quad display filling the entire 1080p screen with four equally-sized camera streams.

• Do a sudo make install

• This will create a systemd service called rpaw which can be enabled or disabled to taste. It will respond to start, stop, and status commands via systemctl as you'd expect/hope.

• Run raspi-config and set Boot Options to "Console Autologin". The video won't make it to the framebuffer unless there's someone logged in. There may be a way to fix this in systemd, but I haven't figured it out yet. This does represent a vulnerability if anyone plugs a keyboard into the device. As a workaround, I did determine that it will still display the video even if the pi user's shell is set to /usr/sbin/nologin which is better than nothing.

Notes

• The AXIS username and password are exposed in the proctable (visible via ps) so it's inappropriate to use this on a machine that's shared by untrusted users. There doesn't appear to be a way to avoid this with omxplayer currently. You could avoid it by enabling anonymous viewing on your cameras, but that's a horrible idea.

• Here are some other arguments that may work with the AXIS stream: resolution=160x120&compression=20&color=1&mirror=0&textcolor=white&textbackgroundcolor=black&textposition=top&text=0&clock=0&date=0&fps=0&audio=1&videokeyframeinterval=30&videobitrate=0&videocodec=h264