I need to set up live streaming from a number of web-cameras to the internet (in browsers), and the streams should be visible only to particular users. I.e. user A logs in to my system with his or her login/password, goes to the video stream page, and sees the stream from a particular cam, and other users cannot see that video, even if they know the url to that stream.
I've looked at a number of solutions so far, but some of them are obsolete, most of them are for image processing, recognition and the like, and some are just a bit too cumbersome, like Red5, for example.
Is there a relatively simple solution for that, that would just allow me to get a videostream from a particular cam connected to my computer?
Thanks in advance.
If you are using Linux I have had success with V4L4J (Video 4 Linux 4 Java) which is small and really quite cool. You would need to do quite a bit of work to get streaming working for a low bandwidth connection but if it is over LAN playing back an MJPEG stream over a TCP socket is easy beans :-)
http://code.google.com/p/v4l4j/
Good luck.
Have a look at Java Media Framework to communicate with your cam.
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I want to get some advice. I have to implement java server which will stream video from user to other clients. On client side will be using WebRTC. Can you give me some ideas how to implement this? Thank you)
You should use a media server that has WebRTC capabilities to do that. Don't try to write one on your own.
Here are a few open source alternatives: Janus, Jitsi, Kurento, mediasoup
If you plan on using an open source one, then I suggest you also understand the realities of these options - some got acquired, which changed a bit how they operate and how solid a solution they may be for you: https://bloggeek.me/twilio-acquires-kurento/
Janus video room demo is doing that. Although Janus is not written in Java, and I would say it is less than rock solid, it works quite well for this purpose.
We could not make Kurento working (last year). It seemed having odd requirements of a specific Linux distribution and version, and even once it was working fine, it just stopped working for no reason a month after.
Kurento does offer a lot more than Janus, OTOH you don't need those features. Using simple WebRTC and Janus makes this use case possible.
There is no need to write any Java server. Clients can send the video stream right from a HTML5 webpage, and viewers can view it right in HTML5. Janus examples show the actual code.
I am trying to create a low latency method to use an android device as a secondary display for a PC. So far all I have found has been either wireless streaming, or a slow usb connection (i.e. using iDisplay).
However, I found a DSLR camera contoller app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dslr.dashboard/) that is able to stream a live feed of the camera to an android display via USB. Would it be possible to edit the source code of this application so it can read the video output of PC via USB? If so, how would you go about this? Do you think that this would be a low latency alternative?
Thank you!
Lots of fantasy in your question. Have you ever seen a PC outputting data from one of its USB ports to another device? How are you supposed to do that? With a plain male-to-male USB cable, in case you find one? Sorry but things don't go that way. To transfer data (files, or a network) via USB between two computers you'd need some propietary/specific software. Of course, once you have acomplished that is technically possible to transfer files with the screen content. Buy you'd need to develop a software that would capture the computer screen, compress it in real time, and send it through USB with enough low latency to be usable. That's going to be resource intensive.
A better, easier approach would be, maybe, using some sort of remote desktop or VNC on the Android machine, with the computer acting as a server. At least far more feasible than trying to implement a similar protocol by yourself.
Sorry but what you are trying to achieve is flawed from the beginning.
I want to read in a live video stream, like RTSP, run some basic processing on it, and display it on a website. What are some good ways to do this? I have used OpenCV for Python before but found it to be a hassle. I am also familiar with Java and C++ if there are better libraries available. I haven't done a lot of web development before either.
What kind of live video source that you mean? If you don't intend to do this code-wise, you can use the free VLC Player to act as a streaming service in between any kind of media stream source (file, network, capture device, disc) and your web video client.
But, if you intend to do this code-wise, you can you VLCJ library. Other options can be Xuggler or FMJ.
I installed Red5 1.0 on EC2 running linux. My goal is to record webcam video from my website -- connect to a user's webcam and save the video to S3.
I tried out the video recorder application in the pre-installed demo apps. It works, but when I play back the recorded flv video, the quality is terrible.
At best, the video is extremely pixelated and blurs with motion
At worst, the video doesn't even play -- it just stays stuck on one frame
Most often, the video and audio are totally out of sync and choppy. I found that I could affect this be increasing the buffer allowance on the server using one of the config files, but increasing the buffer seems to cause the video to get choppy.
I've tried connecting with multiple computers and even a fast corporate internet connection. Interestingly, the quality issues persist even when connecting to localhost, so it doesn't seem to be a network problem.
When I use the red5-recorder.com flash app to record to the demo server app, the quality is even worse.
Ultimately, I just want to get a high quality video recording from a visitor's webcam, but don't want to drop the money for FMS or Wowza.
Any ideas on how to get Red5 to record high quality? Is it always this bad?
Thanks for your help!!
The quality of recorded video is not related with RED5 settings but your flash app settings. Just try to set Camera.setQuality() to something more suitable to your needs. For example if you use setQuality(0, 100) you'll get the best possible video quality but bandwidth use also increase.
We experience the same problem with 0.91 version. I read somewhere that 0.8 was fine. You might try that one..
Try using Red5 RC1 it will surely give you much better recording but i am also trying to find something even better and i have not come up with something till now..if you solved your problem i would be glad to hear a better approach..
All Red5 versions (up to and including 1.0.2 ) have been plagued by serious video recording issues. See this answer for a list of all versions and their issues.
Red5 1.0.3 is the 1st version of Red5 with the video recording process fixed because it's the 1st to contain this awesome patch.
Quick explanation of the 2 part cause
Flash Player buffering (only) video packets
Flash Player is known to buffer video packets and send only audio packets when the network conditions do not allow it to send both.
This works very well for live video scenarios where you want to keep at least the audio going but NOT for video recording scenarios where the locally buffered video packets end up arriving too late at the media server (the corresponding .flv section might have already been written to disk).
That's why AMS and Wowza have implemented delayed write mechanism where they wait for the video packets to arrive before writing the data to disk.
Red5's bug
Red5 also had such a mechanism but, due to a serious bug, it was dropping the video packets instead waiting for them.
The bug fas fixed with the patch mentioned above.
How much Red5 will wait for buffered video packets is controlled by fileconsumer.queue.size in conf/red5.properties. it defaults to 120 which should be enough for a buffer of 2 minutes of HD video.
Further reading
delayed.write and queue.size mechanism flawed? on the Red5 mailing list
Recording high quality (HD) video over slow connections with Red5 is now possible
Let me first state that I do not know Java. I'm a .NET developer with solid C# skills, but I'm actually attempting to learn Java and the Android SDK at the same time (I know it's probably not ideal, but oh well, I'm adventurous :))
That said, my end goal is to write a streaming media player for Android that can accept Windows Media streams. I'm okay with restricting myself to Android 2.0 and greater if I need to. My current device is a Motorola Droid running Android 2.0.1. There is one online radio service I listen to religiously on my PC that only offers Windows Media streaming, and I'd like to transcode the stream so my Android device can play it.
Is such a thing possible? If so, would it be feasible (i.e., would it be too CPU intensive and kill the battery)? Should I be looking into doing this with the NDK in native code instead of Java? I'm not opposed to writing some sort of service in between that runs on a desktop computer (even in C#), but ideally I'd like to explore purely device-based options first. Where should I start?
Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide!
Having a proxy on your PC that captures windows audio output, encodes it, and sends it to your phone is perfectly possible. I had something like that 8 years ago on a linux-based PDA (sharp zaurus). The trick is that you're not trying to decode or access the XM radio stream directly, you're simply capturing what is being sent to the speakers on your desktop and re-sending it. There will be a minor hit in audio quality due to the re-encode, but shouldn't be too bad.
I've done cloud-to-phone transcoding using an alpha version of Android Cloud Services. The transcoding is transparently done on a server and the resulting stream is streamed on the phone. Might worth having a look. http://positivelydisruptive.blogspot.com/2010/08/streaming-m4a-files-using-android-cloud.html