In my application we will present the video stream from a traffic camera to a client viewer. (And eventually several client viewers.) The client should have the ability to watch the live video or rewind the video and watch earlier footage including video that occurred prior to connecting with the video stream. We intend to use wxWidgets to view the video and within that we will probably use the wxMediaCtrl.
Now, from the above statements some of you might be thinking "Hey, he doesn't know what he's talking about." And you would be correct! I'm new to these concepts and I confused by the surplus of information. Are the statements above reasonable? Can anyone recommend a basic server/client architecture for this? We will definitely be using C++ wxWidgets for the GUI, but perhaps wxMediaCtrl is not what I want... should I be directly using something like the ffmpeg libraries?
Our current method seems less than optimal. The server extracts a bitmap from each video frame and then waits for the single client to send a "next frame" message, at which point the server sends the bitmap. Effectively we've recreated our own awkward, non-standard, inefficient, and low-functionality video streaming protocol and viewer. There has to be something better!