Displaying a local gstreamer stream in a browser

Question

I have a camera feed coming into a linux machine using a V4l2 interface as the source for a gstreamer pipeline. I'm building an interface to control the camera, and I would like to do so in HTML/javascript, communicating to a local server. The problem is getting a feed from the gst pipeline into the browser. The options for doing so seem to be:

• A loopback from gst to a v4l2 device, which is displayed using flash's webcam support
• Outputting a MJPEG stream which is displayed in the browser
• Outputting a RTSP stream which is displayed by flash
• Writing a browser plugin
• Overlaying a native X application over the browser

Has anyone had experience solving this problem before? The most important requirement is that the feed be as close to real time as possible. I would like to avoid flash if possible, though it may not be. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You already thought about multiple solutions. You could also stream in ogg/vorbis/theora or vp8 to an icecast server, see the OLPC GStreamer wiki for examples.

Since you are looking for a python solution as well (according to your tags), have you considered using Flumotion? It's a streaming server written on top of GStreamer with Twisted, and you could integrate it with your own solution. It can stream over HTTP, so you don't need an icecast server.

Depending on the codecs, there are various tweaks to allow low-latency. Typically, with Flumotion, locally, you could get a few seconds latency, and that can be lowered I believe (x264enc can be tweaked to reach less than a second latency, iirc). Typically, you have to reduce the keyframe distance, and also limit the motion-vector estimation to a few nearby frames: that will probably reduce the quality and raise the bitrate though.