Ready-made camera software for the i.MX 8M Mini: capture, hardware encode, RTSP streaming and a standards-compliant ONVIF interface, with overlays and analytics.
The silicon
NXP's compact applications processor: four Arm Cortex-A53 cores, a hardware video encoder, a 2D graphics engine and a MIPI CSI camera input, on a long-life industrial part.
On this silicon
The i.MX 8M Mini has a vendor GStreamer stack with elements for camera capture, the hardware H.264 encoder and the G2D graphics engine. That makes it a GStreamer port: the CameraStack plugin describes how those elements connect, and the portable core builds and runs the pipelines in-process. RTSP delivery, the ONVIF services, authentication, events, tracking and configuration are the same portable core used on every other platform.
One capture graph feeds every branch: the main and secondary encoders, the JPEG snapshot branch and a small analysis image for motion, darkness and object detection. Streams can be served through GStreamer’s own RTSP server or through the core’s delivery engine, and both serve the same profiles and ONVIF services.
The factory video configuration has two hardware H.264 encoders:
| Encoder | Resolution | Frame rate |
|---|---|---|
| Main | 1920x1080 or 1280x720 | 5 to 30 fps |
| Secondary | 640x360 | 5 to 15 fps |
Each profile has its own frame rate and bitrate, and bitrate changes apply to the running encoder. Encoding is demand-driven: an encoder with no viewers stops while the other profile keeps streaming, and wakes when a client asks for its stream again. Armed motion rules keep capture and analysis running while both encoders are idle, so events and metadata stay available without a video viewer.
JPEG snapshots are taken on demand from the live capture at the main profile’s resolution. The OSD has four slots for plain text, date and time, with background fills, composed on the G2D engine.
The Analytics service runs up to four ONVIF MotionRegionDetector polygons over a small analysis image, evaluated by the same shared detector used on other platforms. The same image supplies mean luminance for the ONVIF ImageTooDark tampering event.
Object detection runs on the CPU at one inference per second. PicoDet-S, YOLOX-Nano and PP-YOLOE-S are supported. Detected objects are tracked with stable IDs and published as ONVIF scene metadata.
The port builds against NXP’s i.MX Linux BSP and its GStreamer plugins: V4L2 capture, the VPU H.264 encoder and G2D image processing. CameraStack installs as a systemd service and keeps configuration and keys across updates. Everything above the platform plugin is the same portable core used on every other platform.
Field note
The i.MX 8M Mini's GStreamer stack let CameraStack bring up a complete ONVIF camera with 111 lines of platform code and no new shared code, then grow it into a full camera with analytics, portrait rotation and demand-driven encoding.
Read the port storyBuild on it
The port work is already done, at the level of the NXP BSP and GStreamer stack your board already has. Use CameraStack Server as your complete camera stack, or as a drop-in ONVIF interface for a pipeline you already have. Evaluation builds are available to teams building real products.
Talk to us about the i.MX 8M Mini