Notes on live streaming from raspberry pi

rapsberry_pi_streaming

Thanks https://johnvoysey.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/raspberry-pi-camera-live-streaming/

libx264
Compiling the libx264 library from source is relatively straightforward. You will need git installed to check out the latest version. Use the following commands to check out, compile & install libx264:

git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
cd x264/
./configure --enable-static --enable-shared
make
make install
ldconfig
FFmpeg
Compiling FFmpeg can take a long time – it took about 5 hours to complete on my Raspberry – and will use a significant amount of memory. While compiling this on a Raspberry Pi Model A (with 256Mb of RAM), the compile eventually failed due to a lack of memory.

To get around this, you can increase the size of the swap file in Raspbian by editing the contents of /etc/dphys-swapfile using vi (or your favourite text editor).

By default, it will look like this:

CONF_SWAPSIZE=100
In my case, increasing the swap size to 1024 solved the problem, but you can increase or decrease this based on your environment. You will need to reboot for this to take effect.

Another change that may help is to decrease the amount of memory the Raspberry allocates to the GPU. By default 128Mb of RAM is allocated to the GPU – for a headless server, this seems a bit excessive.

To change the memory split, start raspi-config from a terminal window:

sudo raspi-config
Then navigate to Advanced Options then Memory Split. Reduce this to 16, hit Ok, then close the tool. You will need to reboot for this to take effect as well.

Once you’ve made these changes, you can check out, compile and install FFmpeg using the following commands:

git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git
cd ffmpeg
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 --enable-nonfree
make
make install
ldconfig
As mentioned earlier, this will take about 5 hours to complete.

nginx
I’m using the nginx web server to host my live streaming. As with FFmpeg, the version of nginx in the Raspbian repositories does not currently have all of the required features, so it needs to be build from source. I’m also using the nginx-rtmp-module plugin for nginx to enable support for the live stream.

The first step is to check out the current version of both nginx and nginx-rtmp-module, then compile and install them. This can be achieved using the following commands:

Need some additional dependencies for nginx (Thanks https://jobinbasani.com/2014/08/23/nginx-based-streaming-server-raspberry-pi/):
apt-get install -y libpcre3-dev libpcre++-dev zlib1g-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev


git clone https://github.com/nginx/nginx.git /usr/src/nginx
git clone https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module.git /usr/src/nginx-rtmp-module
cd /usr/src/nginx
./configure --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx \
--conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf \
--pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid \
--error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log \
--http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log \
--with-http_ssl_module \
--without-http_proxy_module \
--add-module=/usr/src/nginx-rtmp-module
make
make install
Once the installation is complete, you’ll need to setup the nginx configuration file. Open /etc/nginx/nginx.conf in a text editor. My nginx.conf file is as follows:

worker_processes  1;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;

        location / {
            root /var/www;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }

        location /hls {
          types {
            application/vnd.apple.mpegurl m3u8;
            video/mp2t ts;
          }
          root /var/www;
          index index.html;
          add_header Cache-Control no-cache;
        }

        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }
    }
}

rtmp {
    server {
        listen 1935;

        chunk_size 4000;

        application hls {
            live on;
            hls on;
            hls_path /var/www/hls;
        }
    }
}
If it doesn’t already exist, create the /var/www and /var/www/hls directories.

sudo mkdir /var/www
sudo mkdir /var/www/hls
Once this has completed, you should be able to start nginx:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start
The final step here is to create a HTML file to access the video stream. Create a file, e.g. /var/www/index.html and paste the following;

 <html>
  <body>
    <video controls="controls" width="1280" height="720" autoplay="autoplay" >
      <source src="hls/live.m3u8" type="application/x-mpegURL" />
    </video>
  </body>
</html>
Starting the stream
With nginx running, and your Raspberry Pi Camera attached, start the stream by running the following:

cd /var/www
raspivid -w 1280 -h 720 -fps 25 -t 0 -b 1800000 -o - | ffmpeg -y -f h264 -i - -c:v copy -map 0:0 -f flv -rtmp_buffer 100 -rtmp_live live rtmp://localhost:1935/hls/live
By default, this will start a 720p stream.

You can adjust the width (-w), height (-h), fps (-fps) and bitrate (-b) to suit your network speed. You can also add -vf and/or -hf if you need to rotate the image.

Watching the stream
Using Safari (either on OS X or using an iOS device), navigate to http://your.raspberry.pi.address/index.html


---------------

Youtube Directions (some repetitiveness here, will maybe cleanup later. The ffmpeg command in the end is what matters):
Thanks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3zNBGfPFxI

sudo apt-get install libmp3lame-dev; sudo apt-get install autoconf; sudo apt-get install libtool; sudo apt-get install checkinstall; sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

mkdir /home/pi/src
cd /home/pi/src
git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264
cd x264
./configure --host=arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi --enable-static --disable-opencl
make
sudo make install

cd
cd /home/pi/src
sudo git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git
cd ffmpeg
sudo ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-libx264 --enable-libmp3lame
sudo make -j$(nproc) && sudo make install

raspivid -o - -t 0 -vf -hf -fps 30 -b 6000000 | ffmpeg -re -ar 44100 -ac 2 -acodec pcm_s16le -f s16le -ac 2 -i /dev/zero -f h264 -i - -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ab 128k -g 50 -strict experimental -f flv rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/YOURCODEHERE