After nearly 8 months of development, a significant release of the OpenIPC 2.2 project has been published, which develops a Linux distribution for installation in surveillance cameras instead of stock firmware. Firmware images have been prepared for IP cameras based on Hisilicon Hi35xx, SigmaStar SSC335/SSC337, XiongmaiTech XM510/XM530/XM550, Goke GK7205 chips. The oldest supported chip is the 3516CV100, which was discontinued by the manufacturer back in 2015. The project's developments are distributed under the MIT license.
The proposed firmware offers features such as support for hardware motion detectors, using the RTSP protocol to stream video from one camera to over 10 clients simultaneously, hardware acceleration for h264/h265 codecs, sound support with a sampling rate of up to 96KHz, the ability to transcode JPEG images on the fly for progressive loading, and support for the Adobe DNG RAW format, which helps solve computational photography tasks.
Key changes compared to the previous version:
- In addition to HiSilicon, SigmaStar, and XiongMai processors, chips from Novatek and Goke have been added (the latter acquired HiSilicon's IPC business in response to U.S. sanctions against Huawei).
- For cameras from some manufacturers, the ability to install the firmware via OpenIPC over the air without disassembling it and connecting to a UART adapter has been introduced (using the original firmware's update system).
- The project has a web interface entirely written in shell (using Haserl and Ash).
- Opus is now used as the base audio codec, but dynamic switching to AAC is performed based on client capabilities.
- The built-in player, written in WebAssembly, supports playback of video in the H.265 codec and works on modern browsers with SIMD instructions support about twice as fast as the old version.
- Support for low-latency video transmission mode has been added, allowing for a latency of around 80 ms in Glass-To-Glass tests on budget cameras.
- There is now the possibility of unconventional use of cameras as alert systems or IP radios.
Source: opennet.ru
