I am trying to get video from my Tello EDU drone. It works in the app on my phone however I cannot seem to get it working on my laptop.
The UDP packets seem to be arriving since I can see UDP packets arriving on port 11111 in wireshark/netcat.
But when I try using the following python script from the DJITelloPy library it throws an error here.
When I looked into why it was throwing the error (due to the av.open() line above) I found that the av library is a wrapper for ffmpeg. So I tried to check if I could get video directly with ffmpeg with
. I then connected to the drone and did started the video with streamon() then waited three seconds then streamoff() but there was no output file. When I stopped ffmpeg with Ctrl-C I get "Error opening input: Immediate exit requested Error opening input file udp://0.0.0.0:11111" which seems to line up with the error from the python script above which was av.ExitError. So I think it may be an issue with ffmpeg. I am running Linux Mint 21.3 (which is based on Ubuntu 22.04) on a Lenovo Thinkpad T14s gen 3.
I have tried
- Upgrading the firmware on the drone with the Tello app so it can now use SDK 3.0
- Switching the UDP port to 12345
- Updating ffmpeg to version 6.1-1build2~22.04
- using VLC player to view the stream (does not work since I think it is using ffmpeg under the hood)
- downgrading the djitellopy to <2.5 when it used opencv instead of the av library (I get a different error related to ffmpeg from the opencv code)
- using ffmpeg to read a local mp4 file and output a copy of it (works)
I think it is likely it's some issue with ffmpeg on my laptop or how it is interpreting the udp packets but I can't figure it out for the life of me. Anyone else had this issue or any ideas on how to fix or do further testing?
UPDATE: Also tried sending video from a file over udp on localhost and then from another laptop on a different network both using ffmpeg and both of which did work but also tried with the same devices on the tello network and it did not work. I could not even see the packets in netcat here...
UPDATE 2: Was finally able to try on a different device and it worked. I also tried booting Linux Mint 21.3 (the OS I was using) from a USB on the not working laptop and installing only the necessary software to test with ffmpeg. It worked so I guess that means that probably it is an issue with some software I installed. My guess is it is related to pipewire/wireplumber which I had installed but I don't have any testing to confirm this.
The UDP packets seem to be arriving since I can see UDP packets arriving on port 11111 in wireshark/netcat.
But when I try using the following python script from the DJITelloPy library it throws an error here.
Python:
import time
from threading import Thread
import cv2
from djitellopy import Tello
tello = Tello()
tello.connect()
keepRecording = True
tello.streamon()
frame_read = tello.get_frame_read()
def videoRecorder():
# create a VideoWrite object, recoring to ./video.avi
# 创建一个VideoWrite对象，存储画面至./video.avi
height, width, _ = frame_read.frame.shape
video = cv2.VideoWriter(
"video.avi", cv2.VideoWriter_fourcc(*"XVID"), 30, (width, height)
)
while keepRecording:
video.write(frame_read.frame)
time.sleep(1 / 30)
video.release()
# we need to run the recorder in a seperate thread, otherwise blocking options
# would prevent frames from getting added to the video
# 我们需要在另一个线程中记录画面视频文件，否则其他的阻塞操作会阻止画面记录
recorder = Thread(target=videoRecorder)
recorder.start()
tello.takeoff()
tello.move_up(100)
tello.rotate_counter_clockwise(360)
tello.land()
keepRecording = False
recorder.join()When I looked into why it was throwing the error (due to the av.open() line above) I found that the av library is a wrapper for ffmpeg. So I tried to check if I could get video directly with ffmpeg with
Bash:
ffmpeg -i udp://0.0.0.0:11111 out.mp4I have tried
- Upgrading the firmware on the drone with the Tello app so it can now use SDK 3.0
- Switching the UDP port to 12345
- Updating ffmpeg to version 6.1-1build2~22.04
- using VLC player to view the stream (does not work since I think it is using ffmpeg under the hood)
- downgrading the djitellopy to <2.5 when it used opencv instead of the av library (I get a different error related to ffmpeg from the opencv code)
- using ffmpeg to read a local mp4 file and output a copy of it (works)
I think it is likely it's some issue with ffmpeg on my laptop or how it is interpreting the udp packets but I can't figure it out for the life of me. Anyone else had this issue or any ideas on how to fix or do further testing?
UPDATE: Also tried sending video from a file over udp on localhost and then from another laptop on a different network both using ffmpeg and both of which did work but also tried with the same devices on the tello network and it did not work. I could not even see the packets in netcat here...
UPDATE 2: Was finally able to try on a different device and it worked. I also tried booting Linux Mint 21.3 (the OS I was using) from a USB on the not working laptop and installing only the necessary software to test with ffmpeg. It worked so I guess that means that probably it is an issue with some software I installed. My guess is it is related to pipewire/wireplumber which I had installed but I don't have any testing to confirm this.
Last edited:
