@evroom
Perfect timing. Just sat down think of options to try next. And the first one I was going to try was setting the cache and see what happens. So that is where I will start, and go from there. I’m also going to dig more into the options for Mplayer I can see the command to start mplayer is

mplayer rtsp://admin/camadmin@172.16.0.37:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0 -vf rotate=-1 monitoraspect 0 -noborder -geometry 471:20 -x 990 -y 557 -rtsp-stream-over-tcp -prefer-ipv4 -vo xv,gl,gl_nosw,vdpau, -nosound

Does not appear to be a memory issue. Starts at 74m, 24 hours later 80m. CPU averages from 12-25%, with a short jump to 40% for 1-2 seconds every 10 seconds on the Pi5. Much lower usage from the 4…so I expect there may be more going on with the 4. This 5 I setup from scratch, so no carryover from the 4.
And maybe it is the camera. It got along with the omxplayer, but maybe there is something Omxplayer that it didn’t care about, and now Mplayer does.

Thanks for the thoughts. I’ll continue to update this thread as I come across anything.

@sdetweil
Just an update on this.
I did find my pi 4 with 8gb of memory, after I ordered the pi5 with 8gb. Must have take the old pi 4 w 4Gb memory, out of my mirror, and stuck the old one back in again.
I now have setup a fresh install of MM on the new pi5 and it is amazingly fast compared to the old 4. Installed MMM-Mplayer, and it works great for a few hours. After about six hours, the camera on MM is about 15 seconds behind. When that happens the video becomes choppy, and at times it stops for a few seconds, some video is lost. It never gets caught back up again until it is restarted. Letting it run longer, the issue continues to get worse. To figure this out, I have the video being timestamped from the camera.
So when MM is started up, the clock on the video agrees ( about a second behind) with the clock on MM, which agrees with another computer displaying the stream. After time has passed, everything is still showing the correct/synced time, except for video in MMM-Mplayer.

Processor temp 35-40c

Is it possible to have MailMessage play an audio file/notification when a new message comes in?

@evroom

Here we go. The Pi has only 4gb. I bought 8, but I must have accidentally used it elsewhere. I’ll probably get a Pi 5 with 8gb ordered soon and try that.

Codec details:
Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (h264)
Video resolution: 1920x1080
Buffer dimensions: 1920x1088
Frame rate: 10
Orientation: Top left
Color primaries: ITU-R BT.709
Color transfer function: ITU-R BT.709
Color space: ITU-R BT.709 Range
Chroma location: Left

Frame rate is normally at 30. It’s 10 at the moment from when I last changed settings around.

I added the two lines, no change.

Cameras are Amcrest. I’ve tested with the other ones I have, different ages/resolutions, same issues. I have one that is not Amcrest, but it’s down at the moment, and I can’t get to it unless the weather gets better.

Tested lowest resolution and appeared not to work, 352x240 too blurry. Changed to 640x480 not very clear, but still could see the lights on vehicles passing by, delayed, stuttering. May take 10 seconds for the cars to pass though the camera, and if I’m lucky maybe 8 images appear. Sometimes only one or two or none at all.

Channel/Subchannel let me choose the stream from the camera. Main has the high resolutions, sub has the low. Normally I only use the main, and the sub is disabled.

On the old pi 3b, it ran along side with a stream going to Zoneminder using OMXplayer. Ive gone to removing it from Zoneminder, but it makes no change.

With all the changes I’ve attempted from high resolution to low, different frame rates, frame intervals, bit rates it never appears to make a difference. The encode is h.264. It has options for h.264b &h.265. Changing to those other encoding does make matters worse.

I’d say at this time, if your not running into these problems elsewhere, don’t go too deep on this. I’m probably going to get the Pi5 as it is to have a definite performance boost. I’m also looking at setting up Zoneminder to provide a feed out instead of direct from the camera to see if that makes any difference.
It will just take me some time to get to doing that.

Here is what I have at the moment. If interested, I can show a side by side video from the camera, and what is showing on MM.

Config:

{
  module: 'MMM-MPlayer',
  disabled: false,
  position: "top_center",
  header: "Driveway",
  config: {
    layout: '',
    streamInterval: 30000,
    monitorAspect: '0',
    noAspect: false,
    noBorder: true,
    rotate: -1,
    windowPosition: '',
    windowSize: '',
    windowWidth: '',
    windowWidthNoNewAspect: false,
    windowHeightNoNewAspect: false,
    rtspStreamOverTcp: true,
    rtspStreamOverHttp: true,
    preferIpv4: true,
    ipv4onlyProxy: false,
    videoOutputDriver: 'xv,gl,gl_nosw,vdpau,',
    noSound: true,
    mplayerOption: '',  
    windows: [
      {
        windowSize: { width: 990, height: 557 },
        windowPosition: { x: 471, y: 20 },
        streams: [
           'rtsp://admin:Camadmin@172.16.0.37:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0'
          //'http://admin:Camadmin@172.16.0.37/cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi?1' 
                 ]
      }
    ]
  }
},

Data:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ grep version ~/MagicMirror/package.json
        "version": "2.30.0",
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /proc/device-tree/model; echo
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.5
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)
Release:        12
Codename:       bookworm
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 6.12.47+rpt-rpi-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.47-1+rpt1~bookworm (2025-09-16) aarch64 GNU/Linux
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ free -h -t
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3.7Gi       931Mi       1.9Gi       122Mi       1.1Gi       2.8Gi
Swap:          199Mi          0B       199Mi
Total:         3.9Gi       931Mi       2.1Gi

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ ps -eaf | grep mplayer | grep -v grep
pi          5635    5458 27 19:37 ?        00:01:03 mplayer rtsp://admin:Camadmin@172.16.0.37:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0 -vf rotate=-1 -monitoraspect 0 -noborder -geometry 471:20 -x 990 -y 557 -rtsp-stream-over-tcp -prefer-ipv4 -vo xv,gl,gl_nosw,vdpau, -nosound
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ pm2 flush
[PM2] Flushing /home/pi/.pm2/pm2.log
[PM2] Flushing:
[PM2] /home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-out.log
[PM2] /home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-error.log
[PM2] Logs flushed
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ pm2 restart MagicMirror
Use --update-env to update environment variables
[PM2] Applying action restartProcessId on app [MagicMirror](ids: [ 0 ])
[PM2] [MagicMirror](0) ✓
┌────┬────────────────┬─────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬──────────┬────────┬──────┬───────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┐
│ id │ name           │ namespace   │ version │ mode    │ pid      │ uptime │ ↺    │ status    │ cpu      │ mem      │ user     │ watching │
├────┼────────────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼──────────┼────────┼──────┼───────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┤
│ 0  │ MagicMirror    │ default     │ 2.30.0  │ fork    │ 5704     │ 0s     │ 13   │ online    │ 0%       │ 2.9mb    │ pi       │ enabled  │
└────┴────────────────┴─────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴──────────┴────────┴──────┴───────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┘
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sleep 20
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ grep 'MMM-MPlayer' ~/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-*.log

/home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-out.log:[2025-10-28 19:41:36.725] [LOG]   Module helper loaded: MMM-MPlayer
/home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-out.log:[2025-10-28 19:41:37.509] [LOG]   Connecting socket for: MMM-MPlayer
/home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-out.log:[2025-10-28 19:41:37.510] [LOG]   Starting MMM-MPlayer module ...
/home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-out.log:[2025-10-28 19:41:40.746] [INFO]  [MMM-MPlayer] (launchMPlayer) - Launch mplayer process for window-0 ...
/home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-out.log:[2025-10-28 19:41:40.762] [INFO]  [MMM-MPlayer] Launched mplayer process for window-0 with PID 5921
/home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-out.log:[2025-10-28 19:41:40.762] [INFO]  [MMM-MPlayer] DISPLAY=:0 mplayer rtsp://admin:Camadmin@172.16.0.37:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0 -vf rotate=-1 -monitoraspect 0 -noborder -geometry 471:20 -x 990 -y 557 -rtsp-stream-over-tcp -prefer-ipv4 -vo xv,gl,gl_nosw,vdpau, -nosound
/home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-out.log:[2025-10-28 19:41:43.181] [INFO]  [MMM-MPlayer] [window-0] stdout: [lavf] stream 0: video (h264), -vid 0
pi@raspberrypi:~ $

Just changed from MMM-RTSPStream to MMM-Mplayer because of issues. That solved the issue with the processor being continuously maxed out. However, video from my ip cam is still delayed and stutters losing a lot of frames. I can play it outside of MagicMirror on another computer using the cameras web interface or with VLC using the same url as MM and both show in real time. Tried a bunch of settings, no luck.

Curious for those that have this working properly, real time, what kind of camera are you using. What is your connection type. . . rtsp, http, resolutions, etc …

A bit of history first. I had a Pi3B 32 bit that ran MM and MMM_RTSPStream using omxplayer that worked well. However, it was a bit outdated and upgraded to a Pi4 8Gb, and changed to 64bit. Found out omxplayer was supported under 64bit. Tried to get it to work but was very unstable with ffmpeg & vlc. Go I gave up. Now I have some time to get back to it again.
Installed latest ffmpeg, vlc, MM, & MMM-RTSPStream. Vlc multiple issues, ffmpeg I got to somewhat work, and seems reliable - not crashing or locking up. However the video is very choppy, and lags 12-15 seconds. So at this point, digging around a bit, I found some issues that may help point to where the problem is.
First item here is the string being passed to ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://admin:Campassword@172.16.0.37:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0&unicast=true -pix_fmt yuv420p -f mpegts -codec:v mpeg1video -codec:a mp2 -r 30 -rtsp_transport tcp -

I have not researched this yes, just looking for someone that may be able to say that looks good, or something is wrong.

The second item, which should probably be the first.
As soon as ffmpeg loads, all four cores on the processor sit in the +90% usage constantly. Now this is the same camera that ran on the old Pi without issue. I have changed resolution down to 648x480, bit rates to 512 variable and constant, frame intervals will only go down to 30, and still when started the processor maxes out.

So maybe I’m going down a rabbit hole looking at he issue being ffmpeg. If anyone has any thoughts, they are appreciated.

I had run my MM for a long time with no issues on a old Pi3b. Upgraded everything to a new Pi 4current, and have issues with showing video from the security camera outside. Found OMX player is no longer supported and switched to VLC. Video shows up, plays, all is good. However, it will only display on the top left side of the screen, and I want it back at top_center. No matter what I try to do, it always comes up top left. I can modify all the module and stream height/width settings but they have no effect. I’m guessing I am missing something here in the config, or there is an error that I just don’t see. Any thoughts/suggestions on what is wrong here:

{
module: “MMM-RTSPStream”,
disabled: false,
position: “top_center”,
config: {
debug: false,
autoStart: true,
rotateStreams: ‘false’,
rotateStreamTimeout: 10,
moduleWidth: 100,
moduleHeight: 100,
localPlayer: ‘vlc’,
remotePlayer: ‘none’,
showSnapWhenPaused: false,
remoteSnaps: false,
shutdownDelay: 1,
stream1: {
name: ‘Driveway’,
url: ‘rtsp://mmm:password@172.16.0.37:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0’,
frameRate: ‘20’,
protocol: ‘tcp’,
width: 100,
height: 100,
ffmpegPort: 9999,
},
},
},

Will a touch screen work with MMM-CalendarExt2? For example have the current month displayed, and then be able to scroll to the next month, or months ahead like a phone calendar.