moonfire-nvr/design/api.md
Scott Lamb eee887b9a6 schema version 1
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.
2016-12-20 22:08:18 -08:00

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# Moonfire NVR API
Status: **unstable**. This is an early draft; the API may change without
warning.
## Objective
Allow a JavaScript-based web interface to list cameras and view recordings.
In the future, this is likely to be expanded:
* configuration support
* commandline tool over a UNIX-domain socket
(at least for bootstrapping web authentication)
* mobile interface
## Detailed design
All requests for JSON data should be sent with the header `Accept:
application/json` (exactly). Without this header, replies will generally be in
HTML rather than JSON.
TODO(slamb): authentication.
### `/cameras/`
A `GET` request on this URL returns basic information about all cameras. The
`application/json` response will have a top-level `cameras` with a list of
attributes about each camera:
* `uuid`: in text format
* `short_name`: a short name (typically one or two words)
* `description`: a longer description (typically a phrase or paragraph)
* `retain_bytes`: the configured total number of bytes of completed
recordings to retain.
* `min_start_time_90k`: the start time of the earliest recording for this
camera, in 90kHz units since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
* `max_end_time_90k`: the end time of the latest recording for this
camera, in 90kHz units since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
* `total_duration_90k`: the total duration recorded, in 90 kHz units.
This is no greater than `max_end_time_90k - max_start_time_90k`; it
will be lesser if there are gaps in the recorded data.
* `total_sample_file_bytes`: the total number of bytes of sample data (the
`mdat` portion of a `.mp4` file).
Example response:
```json
{
"cameras": [
{
"uuid": "fd20f7a2-9d69-4cb3-94ed-d51a20c3edfe",
"short_name": "driveway",
"description": "Hikvision DS-2CD2032 overlooking the driveway from east",
"retain_bytes": 536870912000,
"min_start_time_90k": 130888729442361,
"max_end_time_90k": 130985466591817,
"total_duration_90k": 96736169725,
"total_sample_file_bytes": 446774393937,
},
...
],
}
```
### `/cameras/<uuid>/`
A GET returns information for the camera with the given URL. The information
returned is a superset of that returned by the camera list. It also includes a
list of calendar days (in the server's time zone) with data in the server's
time zone. The `days` entry is a object mapping `YYYY-mm-dd` to a day object
with the following attributes:
* `total_duration_90k` is the total duration recorded during that day.
If a recording spans a day boundary, some portion of it is accounted to
each day.
* `start_time_90k` is the start of that calendar day in the server's time
zone.
* `end_time_90k` is the end of that calendar day in the server's time zone.
It is usually 24 hours after the start time. It might be 23 hours or 25
hours during spring forward or fall back, respectively.
A calendar day will be present in the `days` object iff there is a non-zero
total duration of recordings for that day.
Example response:
```json
{
"days": {
"2016-05-01": {
"end_time_90k": 131595516000000,
"start_time_90k": 131587740000000,
"total_duration_90k": 52617609
},
"2016-05-02": {
"end_time_90k": 131603292000000,
"start_time_90k": 131595516000000,
"total_duration_90k": 20946022
}
},
"description":"",
"max_end_time_90k": 131598273666690,
"min_start_time_90k": 131590386129355,
"retain_bytes": 104857600,
"short_name": "driveway",
"total_duration_90k": 73563631,
"total_sample_file_bytes": 98901406,
}
```
### `/camera/<uuid>/recordings`
A GET returns information about recordings, in descending order.
Valid request parameters:
* `start_time_90k` and and `end_time_90k` limit the data returned to only
recordings which overlap with the given half-open interval. Either or both
may be absent; they default to the beginning and end of time, respectively.
* TODO(slamb): `continue` to support paging. (If data is too large, the
server should return a `continue` key which is expected to be returned on
following requests.)
TODO(slamb): once we support annotations, should they be included in the same
URI or as a separate `/annotations`?
In the property `recordings`, returns a list of recordings in arbitrary order.
Each recording object has the following properties:
* `start_id`. The id of this recording, which can be used with `/view.mp4`
to retrieve its content.
* `end_id` (optional). If absent, this object describes a single recording.
If present, this indicates that recordings `start_id-end_id` (inclusive)
together are as described. Adjacent recordings from the same RTSP session
may be coalesced in this fashion to reduce the amount of redundant data
transferred.
* `start_time_90k`: the start time of the given recording. Note this may be
less than the requested `start_time_90k` if this recording was ongoing
at the requested time.
* `end_time_90k`: the end time of the given recording. Note this may be
greater than the requested `end_time_90k` if this recording was ongoing at
the requested time.
* `sample_file_bytes`
* `video_sample_entry_sha1`
* `video_sample_entry_width`
* `video_sample_entry_height`
* `video_samples`: the number of samples (aka frames) of video in this
recording.
Example request URI (with added whitespace between parameters):
```
/camera/fd20f7a2-9d69-4cb3-94ed-d51a20c3edfe/recordings
?start_time_90k=130888729442361
&end_time_90k=130985466591817
```
Example response:
```json
{
"recordings": [
{
"start_id": 1,
"start_time_90k": 130985461191810,
"end_time_90k": 130985466591817,
"sample_file_bytes": 8405564,
"video_sample_entry_sha1": "81710c9c51a02cc95439caa8dd3bc12b77ffe767",
"video_sample_entry_width": 1280,
"video_sample_entry_height": 720,
},
{
"end_time_90k": 130985461191810,
...
},
...
],
"continue": "<opaque blob>",
}
```
### `/camera/<uuid>/view.mp4`
A GET returns a `.mp4` file, with an etag and support for range requests.
Expected query parameters:
* `s` (one or more): a string of the form
`START_ID[-END_ID][.[REL_START_TIME]-[REL_END_TIME]]`. This specifies
recording segments to include. The produced `.mp4` file will be a
concatenation of the segments indicated by all `s` parameters. The ids to
retrieve are as returned by the `/recordings` URL. The optional start and
end times are in 90k units and relative to the start of the first specified
id. These can be used to clip the returned segments. Note they can be used
to skip over some ids entirely; this is allowed so that the caller doesn't
need to know the start time of each interior id.
* `ts` (optional): should be set to `true` to request a subtitle track be
added with human-readable recording timestamps.
Example request URI to retrieve all of recording id 1 from the given camera:
```
/camera/fd20f7a2-9d69-4cb3-94ed-d51a20c3edfe/view.mp4?s=1
```
Example request URI to retrieve all of recording ids 15 from the given camera,
with timestamp subtitles:
```
/camera/fd20f7a2-9d69-4cb3-94ed-d51a20c3edfe/view.mp4?s=1-5&ts=true
```
Example request URI to retrieve recording id 1, skipping its first 26
90,000ths of a second:
```
/camera/fd20f7a2-9d69-4cb3-94ed-d51a20c3edfe/view.mp4?s=1.26
```