As written in the changelog: Live streams formerly worked around a
Firefox pixel aspect ratio bug by forcing all videos to 16:9, which
dramatically distorted 9:16 camera views. Playback didn't, so anamorphic
videos looked correct on Chrome but slightly stretched on Firefox. Now
both live streams and playback are fully correct on all browsers.
* API change: in update signals, allow setting a start time relative
to now. This is an accuracy improvement in the case where the client
has been retrying an initial request for a while. Kind of an obscure
corner case but easy enough to address. And use a more convenient
enum representation.
* in update signals, choose `now` before acquiring the database lock.
If lock acquisition takes a long time, this more accurately reflects
the time the caller intended.
* in general, make Time and Duration (de)serializable and use them
in json types. This makes the types more self-describing, with
better debug printing on both the server side and on the client
library (in moonfire-playground). To make this work, base has to
import serde which initially seemed like poor layering to me, but
serde seems to be imported in some pretty foundational Rust crates
for this reason. I'll go with it.
To improve reliability of live streams (#59) on Safari.
Safari was dropping the cookie from websocket update requests.
(But it worked sometimes. I don't get why.) I saw folks on the Internet
thinking this related to HttpOnly:
* https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/104488
* https://stackoverflow.com/q/47742807/23584
but I still see this behavior without HttpOnly. SameSite=Strict vs
SameSite=Lax appears to make a difference. Try that instead.
SameSite=Strict is pointless for us anyway as noted in a new comment.
Turning off HttpOnly would be more unfortunate security-wise.
Chrome appears to time out at 60 seconds of inactivity otherwise.
I think it's better to keep the stream open, even if the camera is
broken.
The implementation looks awkward, but that might be the state of Rust
async right now.
I also enforced some invariants in the signals code, fixing a couple
bugs. The signals code is more complex than I'd like, but hopefully
is working now.
This should reduce live stream latency by two seconds when my cameras
are at their default setting (I frame interval = 2 * frame rate)!
I was under the impression that every HTML5 Media Source Extensions
media segment had to start with a Random Access Point. This used to
be true, but apparently changed quite a while ago:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=229412
Support generating segments that don't start with a key frame, and
plumb this through the mp4 media segment generation logic. Add some
extra error checking in mp4 slice handling, as my first attempts had a
mismatch between expected and actual lengths that silently returned
corrupted .m4s files.
Also pull everything from the most recent key frame on along with the
first live segment to reduce startup latency. Live view is quite a bit
more pleasant now.
This splits the schema and playback path. The recording path still
adjusts the frame durations and always says the wall and media durations
are the same. I expect to change that in a following commit. I wouldn't
be surprised if that shakes out some bugs in this portion.
This is a quick fix to a problem that gives a confusing/poor initial
experience, as in this thread:
https://groups.google.com/g/moonfire-nvr-users/c/WB-TIW3bBZI/m/Gqh-L6I9BgAJ
I don't think it's a permanent solution. In particular, when we
implement an event stream (#40), I don't want to have a separate event
for every frame, so having the days map change that often won't work.
The client side will likely manipulate the days map then to include a
special entry for a growing recording, representing "from this time to
now".
Benefits:
* Blake3 is faster. This is most noticeable for the hashing of the
sample file data.
* we no longer need OpenSSL, which helps with shrinking the binary size
(#70). sha1 basically forced OpenSSL usage; ring deliberately doesn't
support this old algorithm, and the pure-Rust sha1 crate is painfully
slow. OpenSSL might still be a better choice than ring/rustls for TLS
but it's nice to have the option.
For the video sample entries, I decided we don't need to hash at all. I
think the id number is sufficiently stable, and it's okay---perhaps even
desirable---if an existing init segment changes for fixes like e5b83c2.
I want to start returning the pixel aspect ratio of each video sample
entry. It's silly to duplicate it for each returned recording, so
let's instead return a videoSampleEntryId and then put all the
information about each VSE once.
This change doesn't actually handle pixel aspect ratio server-side yet.
Most likely I'll require a new schema version for that, to store it as a
new column in the database. Codec-specific logic in the database layer
is awkward and I'd like to avoid it. I did a similar schema change to
add the rfc6381_codec.
I also adjusted ui-src/lib/models/Recording.js in a few ways:
* fixed a couple mismatches between its field name and the key defined
in the API. Consistency aids understanding.
* dropped all the getters in favor of just setting the fields (with
type annotations) as described here:
https://google.github.io/styleguide/jsguide.html#features-classes-fields
* where the wire format used undefined (to save space), translate it to
a more natural null or false.
The multipart stream / hanging GET approach worked in a prototype for a
single stream, but Chrome has a per-host limit of six connections. If I
try streaming all my cameras at once, I hit that limit. I can't open all
the streams, much less additional connections to load init segments and
such. Websockets apparently has a much higher limit of 256.
My dad's "GW-GW4089IP" cameras use separate ports for the main and sub
streams:
rtsp://192.168.1.110:5050/H264?channel=0&subtype=0&unicast=true&proto=Onvif
rtsp://192.168.1.110:5049/H264?channel=0&subtype=1&unicast=true&proto=Onvif
Previously I could get one of the streams to work by including :5050 or
:5049 in the host field of the camera. But not both. Now make the
camera's host field reflect the ONVIF port (which is also non-standard
on these cameras, :85). It's not directly used yet but probably will be
sooner or later. Make each stream know its full URL.
(I also considered the names "capabilities" and "scopes", but I think
"permissions" is the most widely understood.)
This is increasingly necessary as the web API becomes more capable.
Among other things, it allows:
* non-administrator users who can view but not access camera passwords
or change any state
* workers that update signal state based on cameras' built-in motion
detection or a security system's events but don't need to view videos
* control over what can be done without authenticating
Currently session permissions are just copied from user permissions, but
you can also imagine admin sessions vs not, as a checkbox when signing
in. This would match the standard Unix workflow of using a
non-administrative session most of the time.
Relevant to my current signals work (#28) and to the addition of an
administrative API (#35, including #66).
This is a definite work in progress. In particular,
* there's no src/web.rs support yet so it can't be used,
* the code is surprisingly complex, and there's almost no tests so far.
I want to at least get complete branch coverage.
* I may still go back to time_sec rather than time_90k to save RAM and
flash.
I simplified the approach a bit from the earlier goal in design/api.md.
In particular, there's no longer the separate concept of "observation"
vs "prediction". Now the predictions are just observations that extend a
bit beyond now. They may be flushed prematurely and I'll try living with
that to avoid making things even more complex.
This is mostly untested and useless by itself, but it's a starting
point. In particular:
* there's no way to set up signals or add/remove/update events yet
except by manual changes to the database.
* if you associate a signal with a camera then remove the camera,
hitting /api/ will error out.
This is so far completely untested, for use by a new UI prototype.
It creates a new URL endpoint which sends one video/mp4 media segment
per key frame, with the dependent frames included. This means there will
be about one key frame interval of latency (typically about a second).
This seems hard to avoid, as mentioned in issue #59.
Some caveats:
* it doesn't record the peer IP yet, which makes it harder to verify
sessions are valid. This is a little annoying to do in hyper now
(see hyperium/hyper#1410). The direct peer might not be what we want
right now anyway because there's no TLS support yet (see #27). In
the meantime, the sane way to expose Moonfire NVR to the Internet is
via a proxy server, and recording the proxy's IP is not useful.
Maybe better to interpret a RFC 7239 Forwarded header (and/or
the older X-Forwarded-{For,Proto} headers).
* it doesn't ever use Secure (https-only) cookies, for a similar reason.
It's not safe to use even with a tls proxy until this is fixed.
* there's no "moonfire-nvr config" support for inspecting/invalidating
sessions yet.
* in debug builds, logging in is crazy slow. See libpasta/libpasta#9.
Some notes:
* I removed the Javascript "no-use-before-defined" lint, as some of
the functions form a cycle.
* Fixed#20 along the way. I needed to add support for properly
returning non-OK HTTP statuses to signal unauthorized and such.
* I removed the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header support, which was
at odds with the "SameSite=lax" in the cookie header. The "yarn
start" method for running a local proxy server accomplishes the same
thing as the Access-Control-Allow-Origin support in a more secure
manner.
There may be considerable lag between being fully written and being committed
when using the flush_if_sec feature. Additionally, this is a step toward
listing and viewing recordings before they're fully written. That's a
considerable delay: 60 to 120 seconds for the first recording of a run,
0 to 60 seconds for subsequent recordings.
These recordings aren't yet included in the information returned by
/api/?days=true. They probably should be, but small steps.
This allows each camera to have a main and a sub stream. Previously there was
a field in the schema for the sub stream's url, but it didn't do anything. Now
you can configure individual retention for main and sub streams. They show up
grouped in the UI.
No support for upgrading from schema version 1 yet.
The Javascript is pretty amateurish I'm sure but at least it's something to
iterate from. It's already much more pleasant for browsing through videos in
several ways:
* more responsive to load only a day at a time rather than 90+ days
* much easier to see the same time segment on several cameras
* more pleasant to have the videos load as a popup rather than a link
that blows away your position in an enormous list
* exposes the fancier .mp4 generation options: splitting at lengths
other than the default, trimming to an arbitrary start and end time,
including a subtitle track with timestamps.
There's a slight regression in functionality: I didn't match the former
top-level page which showed how much camera used of its disk allocation and
the total duration of video. This is exposed in the JSON API, so it shouldn't
be too hard to add back.
This is intended to support HTML5 Media Source Extensions, which I expect to
be the most practical way to make a good web UI with a proper scrub bar and
such.
This feature has had very limited testing on Chrome and Firefox, and that was
not entirely successful. More work is needed before it's usable, but this
seems like a helpful progress checkpoint.
The advantages of the new schema are:
* overlapping recordings can be unambiguously described and viewed.
This is a significant problem right now; the clock on my cameras appears to
run faster than the (NTP-synchronized) clock on my NVR. Thus, if an
RTSP session drops and is quickly reconnected, there's likely to be
overlap.
* less I/O is required to view mp4s when there are multiple cameras.
This is a pretty dramatic difference in the number of database read
syscalls with pragma page_size = 1024 (605 -> 39 in one test),
although I'm not sure how much of that maps to actual I/O wait time.
That's probably as dramatic as it is due to overflow page chaining.
But even with larger page sizes, there's an improvement. It helps to
stop interleaving the video_index fields from different cameras.
There are changes to the JSON API to take advantage of this, described
in design/api.md.
There's an upgrade procedure, described in guide/schema.md.
Now it's possible to quickly determine what calendar days have data and then
query recordings for just the day(s) of interest with their returned
{start,end}_time_usec.
Scott Lamb
clydebarrow