Issue details

• Video is not being sent to Formant.
• My RTSP camera is not showing video in Formant, but I can connect to it.

Troubleshooting steps

First, gather Formant agent logs:

• Install the Formant agent: Retrieve agent logs
• Install the Formant agent via Docker: Retrieve agent logs

Review the agent log for the following error messages:

Unsupported image encoding

If a ROS image topic is publishing but no frames appear in Formant, check the encoding field on the sensor_msgs/Image message.

For ROS 1, run:

rostopic echo /your/image/topic/encoding

For ROS 2, run:

ros2 topic echo /your/image/topic --field encoding

If the agent logs show an error like:

Unsupported image encoding: mono8

check whether Video encoding is enabled for the stream. mono8 is supported when Video encoding is enabled. If Video encoding is disabled, raw image ingestion supports only rgb8, bgr8, and 8UC3.

To resolve this issue, either:

1. Enable Video encoding on the ROS topic stream.
2. Republish the image topic using rgb8, bgr8, or 8UC3.

"media encoder exited with code -1: core dumped"

This may be caused by an underlying error in media encoding packages. To verify:

1. Run the following command:

apt policy libproxy1v5

If you see the following output:

libproxy1v5:  
  Installed: 0.4.17-2  
  Candidate: 0.4.17-2

There is a known issue with libproxy1v5_0.4.17-2 which is resolved by upgrading to libproxy1v5_0.4.17-3:

sudo apt install ./libproxy1v5_0.4.17-3_amd64.deb

gst_parse_error: could not set property “speed-preset” in element “x264enc0" to “fastest” (4)

Set the FORMANT_ENCODE_SPEED_PRESET environment variable to a supported value: Environment variables for the agent: Media environment variables.

The agent defaults to ultrafast. There is a tradeoff between video quality and lag. We typically see that, depending on the cpu between veryfast and medium, lag starts accumulating.

To optimize video quality and speed, experiment to find the slowest setting that doesn't accumulate lag.

See also

• Add a video stream