Pre-requisites
OS: Raspbian >= 8
Do sudo raspi-config and enable PiCamera, in ‘Memory Split’, give GPU more than 128M of memory. Connect PiCamera, reboot.
Test PiCamera works by raspistill -o photo.jpg.
Load v4l2 module:
sudo modprobe bcm2835-v412
Optionally add bcm2835-v412 to /etc/modules file.
v4l2 should already present in the OS, if not:
sudo apt-get install v4l-utils
There’re multiple ways to stream PiCamera to remote clients. Here I present 4.
Method 1: vlc
Make sure vlc is installed:
sudo apt-get install vlc
shell script:
raspivid -o - -n -fps 15 -w 1280 -h 720 -t 0 \
|cvlc -vvv stream:///dev/stdin \
--sout '#rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8554/}' \
:demux=h264 :h264-fps=15
When you run the script, it will stream, the stream can be viewed from rtsp://raspberrypi_ip:8554/ from VLC on a remote computer.
Method 2: v4l2rtspserver
Details are in v4l2rtspserver github. But basically:
sudo apt-get install cmake liblog4cpp5-dev libv4l-dev
wget www.live555.com/liveMedia/public/live555-latest.tar.gz
tar xfz live555-latest.tar.gz
cd live/
./genMakefiles linux
make CPPFLAGS=-DALLOW_RTSP_SERVER_PORT_REUSE=1
sudo make install
cd
git clone https://github.com/mpromonet/v4l2rtspserver.git
cd v4l2rtspserver/
cmake .
make
sudo make install
Then you can run:
v4l2rtspserver -F15 -H 720 -W1280 -P 8555 /dev/video0
The stream can now be viewed from rtsp://raspberrypi_ip:8555/unicast from VLC on another computer.
Method 3: ffmpeg/avconv
Install avconv by sudo apt-get install libav-tools.
Don’t bother trying to get ffmpeg from third-part apt source, it mostly likely would not work. Also don’t bother compile (it takes a long time) or cross-compile (hassle) ffmpeg. avconv works for our purpose.
shell script:
avconv -f video4linux2 -framerate 15 -video_size 960x540 \
-i /dev/video0 -an -f flv -y \
rtmp://yourstreamserver/live/pi
Run it and view the stream on another computer with vlc: rtmp://yourstreamserver/live/pi.
yourstreamserver is the name or IP of your RTMP stream server, it can be set up with Nginx-rtmp, Wowza, or srs etc.
Using this method, the stream has longest delay, cpu load is pretty high. I will try to reduce it when I get time.
Method 4: gstreamer
Install gstreamer 1.0:
sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-tools
Test we can stream with a MP4 video file:
gst-launch-1.0 -v filesrc location="video.mp4" \
! qtdemux ! video/x-h264 ! h264parse \
! flvmux ! rtmpsink \
location="rtmp://yourstreamserver/live/pi"
After this works, we try to make it work with camera. Unfortunately I couldn’t get v4l2src to work with gstreamer to stream RTMP.
I turned to gst-rpicamsrc.
Install dependencies:
sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libraspberrypi-dev
Build gst-rpicamsrc:
git clone https://github.com/thaytan/gst-rpicamsrc.git
cd gst-rpicamsrc/
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/
make
sudo make install
sudo reboot
After reboot, create a script:
gst-launch-1.0 -v rpicamsrc \
!'video/x-h264,width=1280,height=720,framerate=15/1' \
! h264parse ! flvmux \
! rtmpsink location="rtmp://yourstreamserver/live/pi"
The stream from this method has much lower delay compared with method 3. It’s still much slower than method 1 and 2. This is because it send stream to a RTMP server, you request stream from the server, In method 1/2, the stream is sent directly to you from RPi. The streams from method 3/4 can be viewed in a browser (using for example JWPlayer), while the streams from method 1/2 can’t.