Onvif-IP-Camera-Mock

A lightweight IP camera simulator written in Rust, capable of generating a real-time RTSP stream and designed to emulate ONVIF-compatible cameras for development, testing, and validation environments.

The project dynamically generates video frames (DVD-style bouncing animation with timestamp overlay) and publishes them to an external RTSP server (such as MediaMTX) using FFmpeg.

⚠️ This project is not an RTSP server.
It acts as an RTSP publisher and requires an external RTSP server.

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🎯 Project Goals

• Simulate an RTSP IP camera
• Provide a foundation for ONVIF (PTZ, Presets, Status) simulation
• Enable testing of:
  • VMS systems
  • NVRs
  • Video ingestion pipelines
  • Computer vision and analytics services
• Designed to run seamlessly on Docker, Docker Compose, and Kubernetes (AKS)

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🚀 Running with Docker Compose (Recommended)

The repository includes a ready-to-use docker-compose.yml that starts both the RTSP server and the camera simulator.

version: "3.9"

services:
  mediamtx:
    image: bluenviron/mediamtx:latest
    container_name: mediamtx
    ports:
      - "8554:8554"
      - "8888:8888"

  onvif-ip-camera-mock:
    image: ezequielmr94/onvif-ip-camera-mock
    depends_on:
      - mediamtx
    environment:
      RTSP_URL: rtsp://mediamtx:8554/cam1
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
      - "80:80"
    restart: always

And then just run:

docker compose up

To watch the stream run the following:

# using tcp stream can take a while to load
ffplay -rtsp_transport tcp rtsp://localhost:8554/cam1

Of course you can use your favorite player to watch it, like VLC or whatever...

Environment variables

| RTSP_URL | Description | | RTSP endpoint where the stream will be published | ab |

Local Build (Optional)

Change those lines of docker-compose.yml file to:

onvif-ip-camera-mock:
  build: .
  container_name: onvif-ip-camera-mock
  # image: ezequielmr94/onvif-ip-camera-mock

Or use

docker build -t onvif-ip-camera-mock .
docker run onvif-ip-camera-mock

👩‍💻 For Developers

This section is intended for developers who want to build, run, or extend the project locally, without Docker.

The application itself is fully cross-platform and can be built and executed natively using Rust and Cargo.

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🦀 Installing Rust

The recommended way to install Rust is via rustup.

macOS / Linux

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

After installation, restart your terminal and verify:

rustc --version
cargo --version

This project uses Rust edition 2024, so make sure your Rust version is 1.85+ (or newer).

Project Dependencies

The project depends on:

• Rust (edition 2024)
• FFmpeg (runtime dependency)
• An external RTSP server (e.g. MediaMTX)

Running Project

You can use the following command to build or run the project:

cargo run

When running you should see log output similar to:

Streaming to rtsp://127.0.0.1:8554/cam1

Building Binary

To build a release binary:

cargo build --release

The executable will be located at:

target/release/onvif-ip-camera-mock

You can run it directly:

RTSP_URL=rtsp://127.0.0.1:8554/cam1 ./target/release/onvif-ip-camera-mock

Next steps

• support other video CODECs (HVEC, AV1, etc)
• support RTMP
• generate an mock for ONVIF showing some response to the stream screen
• configure fake detections of vehicle plates
• configure fake detections of people's face