Many people have asked how I got the lowrance HDS to stream live sonar/structure scan video to mission planner and also a PC - so here is the info.
I’ve confirmed this worked with both newest HDS models and also the oldest lowrance HDS models.
Basically you need some kind of network connection between the PC and the HDS unit. A wifi bridge is the simpliest, 4G/5G works but can be slightly more complicated.
I found the lowrance HDS uses the protocol RTSP very similarly to an IP camera. However there was no documentation on how to access the lowrance RTSP stream. Using some creative methods I was able to crack the correct URL.
First get the IP address of the HDS unit using the screen itself, then I used this URL
rtsp://x.x.x.x:554/screenmirror
Example if the HDS IP address is 192.168.1.10 then the network URL is
rtsp://192.168.1.10:554/screenmirror
I know the video viewer app VLC allows connection to network streams, so I used that first to test. Once that worked, I worked on mission planner to get the sonar video to appear in the HUD window.
Here is the mission planner video settings that worked for me
rtspsrc location=rtspu://192.168.1.10:554/screenmirror latency=50 ! decodebin3 ! videoconvert ! video/x-raw,format=BGRA ! appsink name=outsink
