Video capture

[zfountas]

Hi,
Is the script dronevideo.py working? I managed to connect with my FQ777-954 and I receive some packets of various lengths - most of the times len(data) returns 1460 - but I cannot reproduce video using the file that is saved as 'mp4' with VLC or any other player I tried.

Also, what do the variables DATA and DATA1 represent? I am happy to help in any way I can to contribute to this project, as we would like to use this mini drone for a research project.

Thanks

[voorloopnul]

Hey @zfountas , the script is "working" but the FPS information is not being stored. You can watch the video using mplayer -fps 14 video.mp4.

I can't remember exactly what DATA end DATA1 represent, if I recall it is some sort of handshake to start the recording. The original source and some extra explanation can be found in this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HowToHack/comments/4512il/how_to_hack_ip_camera_in_toy_drone/

[zfountas]

Thanks @voorloopnul this helped me a lot! You are right about DATA and DATA1, I found it in the original source.

Do you know by any chance how I could load the images that are coming from the drone in real time (without having to save the incoming bytes to a file)? If I could do this, I would be able to control it using an A.I. algorithm I've been developing directly from python.

One of the reasons I haven't managed to do this is that I haven't found another way of viewing these frames apart from the solution you suggested (mplayer) which, however, recognizes all settings automatically.

If we found a solution to that, I'd be happy to help and update your code in this project.

Thanks again!
Zaf

[voorloopnul]

Not yet, the best I can do so far is streaming to mplayer.

Create a named pipe in linux:
mkfifo STREAM

Change the file path in dronevideo.py to STREAM

Read it from mplayer:
mplayer -fps 15 -demuxer h264es STREAM

[heidtn]

Any progress on this? I've been able to get live data somewhat using py264decode (https://github.com/tzwenn/pyh264decode), but the video stream is really noisy. I don't know enough about video decoding to figure it out. Thoughts? (I have a fork here: https://github.com/heidtn/drone-fq777-954)