How are people viewing camera snapshots on their MM?

[slaeyer99]

Some time ago, I’d cobbled together a hacky script that would download my camera snapshots every 30 seconds from my 3 outdoor cameras to an image directory on my Pi, overwriting the previous images. I then had am image viewing plugin show those images on a 10 second carousel on the center of my MM screen. While this worked, the constant writing to SD killed my card and I recently had to rebuild my MM. I did not save that script so I’ll have to rebuild that again. I thought about mounting that directory to a 24mb ram disk to avoid the constant writing issues but that feels like a hack on top of a hack. Since I have to redo everything from scratch anyways, I figured I’d check here first.

What are people using to view their camera snapshots today? MMM-RTSPViewer is horribly outdated and doesn’t seem to work anymore due to OMXPlayer being abandoned and VLC takes too much of my Pi 3’s memory to view 3 cameras - it slows to an absolute crawl after loading cameras then freezes the display. Additionally , I can’t seem to get the snapshot capability of MMM-RTSPViewer working standalone. I really DON’T want to view live feeds of my cameras and setting up WebRTC viewers seems overly cumbersome for my needs.

Any suggestions?

[sdetweil]

@slaeyer99 i have a computer acting as a file server where my pics are stored and shared to my MagicMirror systems. and linked to the proper location for my background image viewer

[slaeyer99]

I just finished rebuilding my script and in combination with the MMM-ImagesPhotos module, it’s working ok.

The script is relatively simple using a set of wget commands and is called via a crontab entry @reboot to keep it running at all times. It has a 30 second wait time before downloading again.

I mounted the uploads directory to a 24MB tmpfs mount which is actually more than I needed but I wanted to ensure it didn’t run out of space. It works but it’s not as elegant as I would prefer.

MMM-ImagesPhotos still seems to lag a bit when showing images despite having set the getInterval to 5000 ms. I’ll keep researching another solution and may try to refine my script and my config some in the future. As of right now, it refreshes the images every few minutes which is not what i was after but it’s better than nothing I suppose.

For now, I’ve got everything (mostly) as I wanted it again and am happy enough to move on for the time being. I’ve also made sure to backup my script and config. If anybody would like the script or to pick my brain a bit on my final-ish solution, feel free to ask.

[sdetweil]

@slaeyer99 cool. my mount is directly to the smb server so the images are loaded from the server directly.

my MMM-ImagesPhotos fork supports recursive folder search
too

[BKeyport]

@slaeyer99 I personally use MMM-EmbedURL - and just directly grab either the stream (via MotionOS) or individual frames.

[slaeyer99]

@sdetweil Do you have a link to your github repo?

[sdetweil]

@slaeyer99 https://github.com/sdetweil/MMM-ImagesPhotos