Aircast QGC

The stable Aircast ground station: QGroundControl for ArduPilot and PX4, with Aircast video built in. An Aircast drone announces its cameras and Aircast QGC plays them, and you can add more streams, RTSP or low-latency WebRTC (WHEP), and watch them one at a time or all at once. Everything else is the QGroundControl you know.

Download

Latest stable: v5.5.11. Each button downloads the file directly.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/QGroundControl.app

Which app

• Stable · recommendedAircast QGC →Fly with this. QGroundControl with Aircast video: missions, vehicle setup, and the drone’s cameras picked up by themselves.Windows, macOS, Linux, Android
• BetaAircast Ground Station →The next Aircast apps, with the Device tab where you set the drone up. The app every drone serves in the browser is this one.Windows, macOS, Android, iPhone, browser
• Any MAVLink appMission Planner & others →Already fly with something else? Point it at the drone’s telemetry and RTSP video.Whatever it runs on

Connect to your drone

With Aircast set up on the drone (First flight ends here), two things connect it:

1. Telemetry. Open Application Settings → Comm Links → Add, set the type to UDP, add the server <drone>:14550 and connect. On the drone's own network the drone is <hostname>.local or its IP; from anywhere else, its tailnet name.
2. Video. Once telemetry arrives, the drone announces its camera and Aircast QGC sets up Camera 1 by itself; Application Settings → Video then says it is configured over MAVLink. A drone with a SIYI gimbal bridge running announces nothing, so add its stream by hand as below.

The drone's exact telemetry and camera addresses are under Ground station links in its Device tab: open http://<hostname>.local in a browser, then Settings → Device.

More cameras

In Application Settings → Video, under Cameras, press Add camera stream for each extra camera: a wide-angle and a gimbal, or several drones. Give it a Name, pick the Source and paste the URL:

rtsp://<drone>:8554/<camera name>

http://<drone>:8889/<camera name>/whep

The camera button at the top of the flight view cycles between them live. Turn on Show all cameras at once (picture-in-picture) to tile every stream into the flight view.

Tune for latency

Below the camera list, the Settings section trades latency against resilience:

• Low Latency Mode: shrinks the WebRTC jitter buffer to ~40 ms and renders each frame as it arrives. Best on a direct or low-jitter link. Turn it off on a lossy or relayed link, where the ~200 ms buffer gives packet recovery room to keep the picture clean.
• Video decode priority: leave on Default for hardware decoding. On macOS, “Force software decoder” can be lower latency for H.265, because the hardware decoder buffers extra frames.
• Connection Timeout: how long to wait for the stream before restarting. Keep it at 15 s or more; WebRTC needs a few seconds on a fresh connection.

Fly with your own radio

Plug an EdgeTX radio into the computer or tablet over USB and fly over 4G or Starlink with your own sticks and switches. Radio over USB has the setup.