Video streams allow you to quickly and easily see what your robot is seeing and greatly aid in teleoperation. Formant supports USB and IP video streams via Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) and Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP).

This guide will teach you how to configure a USB or IP video stream on your device.

Step 1: Create a video stream

In Formant, in the upper-left corner, open the menu and click Settings.
Click Devices, and then click on the device you want to configure.
Click the Telemetry tab, and then click Add Stream.
Click Hardware Video. This will open the New Hardware Video Stream configuration window:

Property	Usage
Telemetry stream name	Give the stream a name.
On demand	If ON, this stream will store data locally on your device, and only upload data to Formant when you click Retrieve on-demand data. `Rate limit` controls the rate at which datapoints are added to the on-device buffer. For more information, see On demand streams. If OFF, this stream will ingest periodically. `Rate limit` controls the rate of data ingestion.
Quality of the video	Select your video quality. Higher video quality requires more bandwidth.

The next few options depend on whether you are configuring a USB camera, or an IP camera over RSTP or RTMP.

Step 2: Configure a camera

USB

For USB devices, you can simply enter the path to the device file:

Property	Usage
Video Hardware path	Enter the path to the Linux device file. This dropdown will auto-populate with devices detected by Formant.

Once configured, the Formant agent will automatically read the image stream from the selected USB camera, encode it to H.264, and ingest it as a video stream.

IP camera

Formant supports IP cameras via RTSP and RTMP, as well as the ONVIF protocol.

Property	Usage
Video RTSP URI	Enter the URI of your camera in the following format: RTSP: `rtsp://<ip>:<port>/H264` RTMP: `rtmp://<ip>:<port>/steam/live`
Encoding required	Set this to YES if the video has any encoding other than H264.
Supports ONVIF (RTSP only)	Set this to YES if your camera supports the ONVIF protocol.
Username	Enter the username to access your camera.
Password	Enter the password to access your camera.

Step 3 (optional): Configure audio

You can add an audio source to your video stream:

Property	Usage
Audio Hardware name	Enter the name of the audio device you want to associate with this video stream.

Step 4 (optional): Tag your data

Add tags to your video stream using the following options:

Property	Usage
Add tags (e.g. `key: value`) (optional)	Add tags to each datapoint of this stream. For more information on tags, see Configure access levels.

When you're finished configuring your stream, click Done, and then Save.

Step 5: Add stream to a view

Once you've added a stream to your device, your next step is to add it to a view in Formant.

Add the streams you want to visualize, and then move on to Viewing data in Formant.

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