How to connect CCTV camera live streaming in thingworx mashup

Question

1. I'm using Thingworx 9.0, I want to show a dash or CCTV  camera on the thingworx mashup how can I do that, suggest any architecture diagram to show a dash or CCTV camera on the mashup.
 
2. I have sensor data in hex format which is in the attachment, I want to convert it in the readable format in thingworx how can I do that. I did with the below program but it will give me different outputs.
 
 var hex1 = HextData.toString();
	var str = '';
	for (var n = 0; n < hex1.length; n += 3) {
		str += String.fromCharCode(parseInt(hex1.substr(n, 6), 16));
	}
	var result = str;

please suggest the way, thanks in advance

VladimirRosu_116627 · Answer

Hi @Suraj2692 ,

Before jumping to answer your very specific question and not knowing the specifics of your question, I think there some questions you would need to ask yourself first before jumping in writing code:

-how is your device sending data (many cameras simply output a stream you must access at the camera's IP endpoint, others maybe send the data already to a system)

-what exactly do you want to display in the Mashup (while generally people speak about "video", there is a huge difference if you just intend to playback realtime data or want to be able to go back in the video stream in the past)

-what specific browser version do you plan to use to playback the video data? Browsers specifically support different streaming formats, the most notable protocols being HLS (created by Apple originally) and DASH (newer standard), or even the older RTMP. If your customer is trying for example to use an old Internet Explorer version, you should definitely be aware, as you must check what protocol will it support for streaming.

Also, have you thought what widget do you plan to use? In ThingWorx there's no built-in video widget OOTB (maybe Navigate has one, if I remember, but I'm not sure). You would need to build one for sure.

Also, converting a stream using a ThingWorx service will simply not work, since you're wanting to convert a stream, which is a continuous data content (ie: the TCP/UDP socket never closes), while the servlets execute a action and then they close the socket . There's no way to stream data via ThingWorx services. Definitely possible, but not via this approach - see below.

If I'm thinking about some past projects in this area, typically I had cameras that offer a stream in a format, that we would need to convert to a format that the Video HTML tag would support. The conversion was done by the ffmpeg toolsuite, you can find many examples on internet about this.

But, even more important, typically ThingWorx itself should not process video data, since those tasks are highly computational expensive, and typically we would aim to use other systems that can ingest video data, store it somewhere, then let ThingWorx retrieve it for display. For example, think how many users and cameras you could support with a single ThingWorx instance to just stream - you certainly don't want to reach the situation when you add the third camera to have your server experience high CPU usage.

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