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Add an audio stream

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This guide will teach you how to add an audio stream to your teleoperation interface.

Step 1: Navigate to device teleoperation settings

  1. In Formant, in the upper-left corner, open the menu and click Settings.
  2. Click Devices, and then click on the device you want to configure.
  3. Click on the Teleoperation tab to open the teleoperation configuration page.

Step 2: Configure audio stream

ROS audio stream

Formant supports the audio_common_msgs/AudioData ROS data type.

  1. In the teleoperation configuration page, scroll down to Audio and click the plus (+) icon.
  2. Click Add ROS topic.
  3. Enter the name of the ROS topic which contains the audio stream you want to play during teleoperation.
  4. Click Done, click Save to confirm your teleoperation settings, and proceed to Step 3.

Camera microphone stream

You can also stream audio directly from an integrated microphone on your camera. If you've already added an image stream as in Add a teleoperation image stream, you'll follow the same process here to add the audio stream from that camera.

  1. In the teleoperation configuration page, scroll down to Audio and click the plus (+) icon.
  2. Click Add from hardware.

USB camera

  1. Configure your audio stream as follows:
PropertyUsage
Hardware typeSet this to usb.
Hardware path to USB cameraEnter the hardware path to your camera. This field should auto-populate with detected USB devices.
Quality of the videoChoose the resolution of the encoded video stream. Higher video quality will use more data.
  1. Click Done, and then click Save to confirm your teleoperation settings.

IP camera

  1. Configure your audio stream as follows:
PropertyUsage
Hardware typeSet this to ip.
RTSP URI of IP cameraEnter the URI of your camera in the following format:
RTSP:
rtsp://<ip>:<port>/H264
RTMP:
rtmp://<ip>:<port>/steam/live
Encoding requiredSet this to YES if your camera outputs a format other than H.264.

Formant requires incoming H.264 video to be encoded with the baseline or baseline constrained profile. If Formant detects a different profile, or a non-supported set of encoding parameters, it will try to re-encode the video. If this fails, you must enable this property.

Proper encoding of your video prior to ingestion by the Formant agent (allowing you to set this property to NO) will save computation resources.
Supports ONVIFSet this to YES if your camera supports the ONVIF protocol. Formant will be able to connect to your camera automatically.

If you specify a fully qualified address in RTSP URI of IP camera, this property will be ignored, as its functionality will already be fulfilled.
UsernameEnter the username to access your camera.
PasswordEnter the password to access your camera.
  1. Click Done, and then click Save to confirm your teleoperation settings.

Step 3: Verify your work in teleoperation mode

  1. In your device view, in the upper-right corner, click the three dots >> Teleop, or enter Shift + T.
  2. Verify that your audio stream is working properly.

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Updated 11 months ago