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Friday 8 February 2013

Raspberry PI, Video & Audio Streaming

Requirements :
Using my PI seemed a logical solution = small.  Attach a PowerGen external pack = Portable.  I'm already making progress!

Streaming has been tougher, 4-5 days of tough.  Seemed to settle immediately on VLC and started by using the Windows GUI to build out the command line options.  I ended up with a network stream that VLC client could open.
vlc --qt-start-minimized dshow:// :dshow-vdev="QuickCam Orbit/Sphere AF" :dshow-adev="Microphone (2- Orbit/Sphere AF)" :dshow-size="640x480" :live-caching="300" --sout="#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=0,scale=0,acodec=mp4a,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:http{mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv},dst=:8888/}"
Figured the next step was to reproduce this on Ubuntu before trying the Wheezy in case there was anything odd about the distro.  Ubuntu build resulted in :
cvlc "v4l2://" --v4l2-width=420 --v4l2-height=320 --input-slave=alsa:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=WMV2,vb=256,acodec=wma2}:standard{access=http,dst=8080/,mux=asf}'
Adding the Mediabuntu repository allowed me to use h264 but the video was awful.

Getting this working involved a great deal of trial and error to find video and audio codecs that worked.

RaspberryPI

Expected to be able to use the same Ubuntu command.  #fail

Again, a lot of trial and error resulted in.
cvlc 'v4l2:///dev/video0:chroma=mjpg' --v4l2-width=420 --v4l2-height=320 --input-slave=alsa://hw:1,0 --alsa-audio-channels=1 --volume=1024 --sout '#standard{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=:8888/stream.ogv}' --sout-http-mime=video/ogg
Big difference here is I stopped transcoding and switched to using the M-JPEG stream from the camera.  as the CPU just wasn't up to transcoding, >90% CPU.

Initially the audio stream volume was very low.  --volume=1024 helped but the actual fix was to use alsamix.

 ./alsamixer
- Change to Cam
- F4 change to capture
- Was set to 0 .. raised to 50

Getting this working in a browser is still a WIP.  The camera outputs:

Video : MJPG
Audio : PCM S16 LE (ARAW)

From what I can tell theres no way to view a MJPG stream in a browser.  Tried various things, including wrapping it all in a HTML5 <video></video> tag with some Apache proxy statements.  Setting mime type (which I left on the working command above).

I have some h264 cameras coming so will see how that works out.

Some useful links that got me this far :
http://www.phillips321.co.uk/2012/11/05/raspberrypi-webcam-mjpg-stream-cctv/
https://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/11/02/pieye-streaming-webcam-piday-raspberrypi-raspberry_pi/
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=74077&start=0
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7917905/how-to-use-vlc-live-streams-with-html5-video

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