Adding a video stream from an IP camera in Kodi TV using Surveillance Cameras add-on

Although ZoneMinder is the best open source tool for surveillance and ip camera recording, streaming its sources to yet another streaming application (such as Kodi) is definitely not its strength.

Installing Surveillance Cameras add-on

While looking for an alternative way to directly display the IP cameras video stream in Kodi without going through ZoneMinder, I found the Surveillance Cameras add-on, which is part of the official Kodi TV add-on repository (= no need to install an additional and unofficial repository).

The big advantage is it does what it says it does: It connects directly to a video stream of an IP camera, without having to go through yet another software or proxy.
The disadvantage: Only three cameras/streams can be configured and there is no multi-view (watch multiple streams at the same time) possible.

Nevertheless, I gave it a go.

In Kodi 18.x (Leia), the add-on can be installed by going to Add-ons -> Download -> Video add-ons and scroll down until Surveillance Cameras shows up. Or use the add-ons search, to find the add-on in the search results.

Once installed, the add-on needs to be configured.

Configuring the IP camera streams

In the add-on settings, the streams can be configured using the Configure button. 

The stream configuration is very straight forward. 

In the number of cameras one can select the number of cameras (1-3) and then define the stream and location for each camera. The stream in this case is (usually) a rtsp address.

Depending on where and how Kodi runs, it may be easier to manually configure the add-ons settings.xml in a terminal. In my case Kodi runs on a LibreElec system to which I am able to connect with SSH.

The newly created config file for the Surveillance Cameras add-on can be found in  /storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.video.ipcams/:

LibreELEC:~ # cat /storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.video.ipcams/settings.xml
<settings>
    <setting id="cam1" value="rtsp" />
    <setting id="cam2" value="" />
    <setting id="cam3" value="" />
    <setting id="loc1" value="" />
    <setting id="loc2" value="" />
    <setting id="loc3" value="" />
    <setting id="numcams" value="1" />
</settings>

Here the previous (incomplete) setting for the rtsp path is showing up. This config file can now manually be configured. Here I added two cameras (increased the numcams setting to 2) and defined their streams:

LibreELEC:~ # cat /storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.video.ipcams/settings.xml
<settings>
    <setting id="cam1" value="rtsp://user:password@IP.address.camera.one:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1" />
    <setting id="cam2" value="rtsp://user:password@IP.address.camera.two:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1" />
    <setting id="cam3" value="" />
    <setting id="loc1" value="Door" />
    <setting id="loc2" value="Garage" />
    <setting id="loc3" value="" />
    <setting id="numcams" value="2" />
</settings>

Note: If a camera requires authentication before the stream is shown, the credentials can be be added in the following style: rtsp://user:password@ip.address.of.camera:554/path/to/video/stream

When launching the add-on again in Kodi, both cameras should now show up with their relevant description (Location):

And finally how the camera stream looks like on screen:

Use lower quality sub stream

To benefit from a very quick image update and real-time streaming, one should use a lower quality sub-stream of the IP camera. Newer IP cameras often have the possibility to define multiple streams. A primary stream for high quality images (for example for recording or image zooming) and a secondary (or even more) streams with a lower resolution. Forcibly a lower resolution results in less bandwidth and the chances of image delay decreases.

Depending on the camera vendor and model, the paths to the primary and sub streams vary a lot. As my setup runs with IP cameras from Dahua, the stream addresses is the same for all models (IPC-HFW4300S, IPC-HFW1320S, IPC-HFW1420S and IPC-HDBW1320E):

Primary stream: rtsp://user:password@ip.address.of.camera:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0
Sub (secondary) stream: rtsp://user:password@ip.address.of.camera:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1

Note the subtype value.

For other cameras the ZoneMinder Wiki is highly recommended. It has a very nice overview of the different video stream addresses for all kinds of camera models.

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