Tello Video Web Streaming

[jgraves]

I've been following the reverse-engineering threads and I am particularly interested in the live video feed from the drone. I'm wanting to control the drone and offer remote web video feeds from the same raspberry pi. (REST calls to control the drone).

I almost have this working, but no matter what I try (vlc stream, flask, rtsp server), I seem to get huge delays in the video.

Is anyone able to make the Tello video available via something like a feed into Motion or using M-Jpeg streamer (MJPG-streamer).

Thanks.

-John

 

[Krag]

I got significant delay with everything but finally discovered you can actually play video streams in ffmpeg, and with minimal delay. This is from memory and might not be right but you get the gist.

ffmpeg -i udp://<server ip> -f sdl "window title"

I have been using ffmpeg for years and didn't know it could "play" video.

 

[jgraves]

Interesting. Maybe that would help to eventually stream in a browser window.

I tried ffmpeg -i udp://192.168.10.1 -f sdl "Tello", but nothing.

-John

 

[Krag]

You can't consume the feed from the drone directly. You have to strip out the NALs before you send it to ffmpeg.

 

[brizey]

I was thinking of something like this Dregu/visio after the NALs were stripped. You could use hello_video to play the raw packets on a RPI.

 

[Krag]

I was thinking of something like this Dregu/visio after the NALs were stripped. You could use hello_video to play the raw packets on a RPI.

That project uses Broadway.js for playback in a browser and I have never had much luck getting that to work. First it is really slow (it is c++ compiled to java) and second it only supports h264 baseline. I think Tello uses Main.

I have been wanting to try out this project.

samirkumardas/jmuxer

In theory it should be able to play Tello streams in a browser with only a little massaging of the NALs. And since it uses MSE it should be fast and compatible.

You would still have to have some kind of server tho. For security reasons I don't think Websockets can ever connect directly to the Tellos UDP stream.

 

[jgraves]

@Krag .

Interesting. My plan was to have a Raspberry PI with a second WiFi USB dongle connected to the Tello. On the Pi would be a node server serving REST calls to control the drone. This same Pi could be used to serve the jmuxer video. Let me start to play around with this.

Thanks.

-John

 

[brizey]

Thanks krag, I tried with the spark and didn't get a decode so figured the profile was not baseline but thought it might be worth a shot on this one.

 

[ababa]

I implemented it with webrtc media and data channel.

トイドローン Tello をWebRTCでつなげてみた - Qiita

 

[ababa]

 

[Rob_28]

A simple way to display video would be ffplay, which is included in ffmpeg.
I got it to work like this.

1. Send "command" and "streamon" to udp port of the tello 8889. I use the Python Script provided by Ryze to do this, but feel free to use a different program.
2. The tello will now be sending an h264 stream over udp on port 11111.
3. Use the following command to display the stream: ffplay -probesize 32 -i udp://@:11111 -framerate 30

("-probesize 32" makes the delay of the stream minimal.)

 

[chiel]

Hey Rob,
Thanks for the good advice. I got the streaming working as well. But even with the probesize option I still have a huge delay;
I don't know if I am the only one. Does someone know if there is way to get a lot less latency like on the tello app?
Delay is now between 1-10 sec.

 

[Krag]

As I said in the #2 post I got minimum delay by using ffmpeg instead of ffplay.

ffmpeg -i udp://<server ip> -f sdl "window title"

 

[chiel]

@Krag
Hey, thanks for the suggestion. But I don't get video.

I tried:
ffmpeg -i udp://192.168.10.1:11111 -f sdl "window title" => no video.

ffplay -i udp://192.168.10.1:11111 => does work, but has big delay.

Any idea's what I might be doing wrong?

 

[kmostafa]

Hi All,
As I am new here and interested in the same, can you please share a more details steps.

Thanks in advance

 

[Neoflash]

@ababa

View attachment 1436

This is very similar to what I'm trying to do except that I'm using a Node.js instead of Python and I'm trying to send the videostream through the Data Channel instead of the Media Channel. Could you share your ffmpeg command with us to see how you deal with the h264 to vp8 conversion for live streaming.

 

[Tikum]

Try:
ffplay -probesize 32 -i udp://0.0.0.0:11111 -framerate 30
ffmpeg -i udp://0.0.0.0:11111 -f sdl "Tello"

 

[Krag]

@Krag
Hey, thanks for the suggestion. But I don't get video.

I tried:
ffmpeg -i udp://192.168.10.1:11111 -f sdl "window title" => no video.

ffplay -i udp://192.168.10.1:11111 => does work, but has big delay.

Any idea's what I might be doing wrong?

Its been forever since I did this. Maybe I have the command wrong. But if ffplay plays the stream then ffmpeg should too.

 

[SteenN]

The commands suggested by Tikum works on Windows
:
ffplay -probesize 32 -i udp://0.0.0.0:11111 -framerate 30
ffmpeg -i udp://0.0.0.0:11111 -f sdl "Tello"

However, on my Mac the screen opens and there is no errors, but the screen remains black. Maybe it's because the sdl library isn't included in the ffmpeg build

 

[DinoBaldi]

On my Mac works great !