QGC Guide (master)

Video ​

Configure video streaming and recording settings.

Video Source ​

  • Source — Video Stream Disabled / RTSP Video Stream / UDP h.264 / UDP h.265 / TCP-MPEG2 / MPEG-TS / Integrated Camera
  • USB Camera Format (USB cameras only) — the resolution, frame rate and pixel format the camera runs in, from the ones it offers, best first. Auto lets Qt choose: the highest resolution at 30 fps or more, often an MJPEG format, which costs CPU time to decode. YUYV and NV12 formats need no decoding but more USB bandwidth.
  • USB Camera Rotation and Mirror USB Camera (USB cameras only) — turn the picture clockwise, for a camera mounted on its side or upside down, and mirror it left to right after that. Photos follow; recordings keep the camera's own picture.
  • USB Camera White Balance (USB cameras that can set it) — Auto, or set for the light: Sunlight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Flash or Sunset.
  • USB Camera Zoom (USB cameras that zoom) — from 1x up to the most the camera offers. On Linux Qt scales every camera's zoom range to 1x to 2x.
  • USB Camera Exposure Compensation and USB Camera Focus (USB cameras that can set them, not on Linux) — brighten or darken the automatic exposure, in EV, and focus automatically, at the hyperfocal distance or at infinity. Qt's Linux camera support can't set these.

The camera takes these settings each time it starts.

When a MAVLink camera advertises its video stream, QGC plays that stream (and any thermal stream it advertises) instead of the configured source. Your source and connection settings are left unchanged and apply again once no camera advertises a stream.

Connection ​

Connection settings vary by source type:

  • RTSP URL — full RTSP stream address. An rtsp:// stream arrives over UDP, or over TCP when no UDP data arrives; enter rtspt:// instead to receive it over TCP from the start, as through a firewall that blocks UDP.
  • TCP URL — TCP stream address
  • UDP URL — UDP stream address and port (default: 0.0.0.0:5600)

Settings ​

  • Video backend — plays network streams with GStreamer (default) or Qt Multimedia's player (FFmpeg). Qt Multimedia plays RTSP, MPEG-TS over UDP or TCP, and H.264 or H.265 RTP over UDP with payload type 96. It records a stream by encoding the video on display anew, as it does a USB camera, so only while the video is shown; it doesn't measure a stream's bitrate or packet loss, and the decoder, CPU video path and RTP jitter latency settings don't apply to it, so they are hidden. Changing it restarts the video stream. Builds without GStreamer always use Qt Multimedia and don't show the setting.
  • Aspect Ratio — aspect ratio for scaling video in the display widget (default: 16:9; set to 0.0 to disable scaling)
  • Disable Video Stream When Disarmed — stop the video stream, and any recording, when the vehicle disarms. The stream starts again when the vehicle arms, when this setting is turned off, when the active vehicle changes, or when video is started again.
  • Low Latency Mode — minimize video decode latency at the cost of some smoothness
  • RTP jitter latency — how long RTSP and UDP h.264/h.265 streams hold packets before showing them (default: 80 ms). A lower value shortens the video delay; a higher one leaves more time to reorder packets and to recover lost ones by retransmission, which values below about 40 ms prevent. Not used, and hidden, in Low Latency Mode.
  • Auto-reconnect on stream loss — reconnect a stream that times out or fails, waiting 1 s before the first attempt and up to 30 s between later ones (default: on). When off, the stream stops after the first failure.
  • Force CPU video path — disable hardware-accelerated rendering (use if video displays incorrectly). Changing it restarts the video stream.
  • Force video decoder priority — override the automatic decoder selection: Default / Software / Hardware / NVIDIA / VA-API / Direct3D / VideoToolbox / Intel / Vulkan. Only the families of the installed decoders are listed, and Vulkan only in builds with the Vulkan GPU path (QGC_GST_ENABLE_VULKAN). Changing it restarts the video stream.

Local Video Storage ​

  • Record File Format — mp4 / mov / mkv
  • USB Camera Recording Codec (USB cameras only) — the codec a USB camera recording tries first, from the ones Qt can encode on this computer. Auto records with the first of H.264, H.265, AV1, VP9, MPEG-4 Part 2 and MPEG-2 that encodes, which also follow a chosen codec the encoder turns down. A codec the recording format's container can't hold goes into another container.
  • Auto-Delete Saved Recordings — automatically delete old recordings when storage limit is reached
  • Max Storage Usage — maximum disk space for saved recordings (default: 10240 MB)