Databases, Systems & Networks

Source: Xmodulo

Have you ever wanted to live stream a video feed from your webcam for someone else? You could use any existing video chat software such as Skype, Google+ Hangouts. However, if you do not want to rely on any third-party streaming infrastructure, you can set up your own webcam streaming server in house.

In this tutorial, I will describe how to live stream video from webcam by using VLC. VLC is an open-source, cross platform media player which can handle virtually all video and audio formats. VLC can also run as a streaming server supporting various streaming protocol such as RTP, HTTP, RTSP, etc.

Before attempting to set up webcam streaming on your own, you need to understand the huge potential security risk of streaming a webcam over the Internet. Anyone can tap into your streaming feed unless you properly access control the streaming server, and encrypt the streaming traffic. I’ll briefly mention several security protections against threats towards the end of the tutorial.

Install VLC on Linux

Before setting up a streaming server with VLC, install VLC first.

To install VLC on Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint:

To install VLC on Fedora, first enable RPM Fusion’s free repository, and then run:

To install VLC on CentOS or RHEL 6, first set up EPEL repository, and then use the following commands:

Verify Webcam Device on VLC

Next, verify whether a webcam device is successfully detected on your Linux system and VLC.

To do so, first find out the device name of your webcam with the following command. In this example, the device name of the webcam is /dev/video0.

/dev/video0

Now use the following command to test video from your webcam. Replace “video0” with your own device name.

If your webcam is successfully detected by VLC, you should see a video stream of yourself.

Configure Webcam Streaming on VLC

Assuming that your webcam is successfully recognized by VLC, I am going to show how to configure webcam streaming. In this setup, webcam is streamed over HTTP in WMV format.

To configure VLC for webcam streaming, first launch VLC.

Choose “Streaming” from VLC menu.

On the screen, choose webcam/audio device name (e.g., /dev/video0 for webcam, and hw:0,0 for audio). Click on the checkbox of “Show more options”. Make a note of value strings in “MRL” and “Edit Options” fields. We will use these strings later in the tutorial. Click on “Stream” button at the bottom.

Lire la suite…

The good news is it’s very easy. The bad news is you’ll need a PowerPC Mac.A big thank you to Bluemint for pointing out an Universal Binaries version of the Real Codec is actually available, making the conversion possible on both PowerPC and Intel Mac. The instructions below are herewith updated.

What you’ll need:

1. ffmpegX – It’s a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools
2. mpeg2enc – Download to your Downloads folder.
3. mencoder & mplayer – Download and decompress the zip file.

Setup:

The first time you launch ffmpegX it’ll ask you to locate three components (items 2 & 3 above). Click on the respective “Locate” buttons to tell ffmpegX where they are. After that, enter your Mac OS X login password (ffmpegX won’t work if your login password is empty) and click the “Install” button.

Download and Install the Real Codec (Universal Binaries)

1. Download the “Mac OS X x86″ binary codec package from one of these links on this page.
2. Unzip the downloaded zip file and install the codec package.
3. Select “Go to folder …” from Finder’s “Go” menu.
4. Type “/usr/local/lib/” in the input text field and click “Go”
5. You should see a “codecs” folder in the new window.
6. Drag the “codecs” folder to your Desktop, and rename it to “reallib”.
7. Move the “reallib” folder to “/Library/Applications Support/ffmpegx/”.

Performing the conversion to .avi

UB Rockz on any valid unicode Path/Filename.

Drag and drop your rmvb file into the “From” well and just click the “Encode” button to start encoding. Unless you’re an expert user, do not be tempted to change any settings when converting a .rmvb file.

In other words, for a successful run, just drag, drop, and click Encode. What more can you ask for?

Footnotes:

• Re-launch ffmpegX if you messed up the default settings.
• You can close ffmpegX’s main window after clicking Encode; a new stand-alone Progress window shows you the progress.
• Repeat the process to convert more files.
• The “Play” button plays the .rmvb.
• The “Preview” button plays the (partially) converted .avi file.
• Press the Return key to stop playback.
• You can download and install MPlayer to play your .rmvb files. However, it has a bug whereby it only plays video and totally ignores embedded links and other wonderful added features Real is famous for.

Try the following connection options in iSpy to connect to your Hikvision IP camera. If VLC or FFMPEG options are available we recommend you try those first as they will often be faster and include audio support. If you don’t have VLC installed (or are experiencing problems with the VLC plugin) you may be able to use the same URL under the FFMPEG source type (VLC is based on FFMPEG).

The settings for Hikvision cameras are built into our open source project ispy – click “Add” then “IP camera with wizard” to automatically setup your Hikvision cameras. If the camera is not listed in iSpy then click “Get Latest List” when on the add camera wizard. If you need to modify the URL then add or edit the Hikvision camera in iSpy and you can modify the connection type and URL in the video source dialog (button is top of the first tab). Lire la suite…