Streaming live video from a webcam over RTMP using a Raspberry Pi and Nginx

Live stream for foosball in action, much inception!

Imagine you're in a shared office with a foosball table and many people in the office like to play foosball. Then sometimes when you want to play you'll make a trip down the stairs just to find out it's in use and you'll have to go up the stairs again. That's pretty sad, useless and a waste of time. That time should be spent in awesome projects like these.

The fix is obvious: Hackaton! Get a Raspberry Pi, a webcam and stream the foosball table so you'll always know if it's free! There are also some additional bennefits, such as secretly analysing competitor tactics

Because we ran into quite a few difficulties we decided to write a little how-to. Sharing is caring ;)

If you find anything is missing, please create an issue here!

Hardware

This is the hardware we used. You will probably have some other stuff... which should work as well.

RaspberryPi B+ with Raspbian installed
8 GB SD card
Logitech C310 webcam
2A power adapter
All these things connected appropriately

Installing the necessary software

Everything here should be done on the Raspberry Pi (as opposed to on your computes) unless stated otherwise.

Basics

Some basic dependencies:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg supervisor

Build Nginx with RTMP module

To stream our video to the web we use Nginx with an RTMP module. This module has to be compiled into Nginx, so let's do it:

cd /tmp
wget https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module/archive/master.zip
wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.7.9.tar.gz
tar -zxvf nginx-1.7.9.tar.gz
unzip master.zip

cd nginx-1.7.9
./configure --add-module=/tmp/nginx-rtmp-module-master
make # <- This takes a few minutes on a Raspberry Pi
sudo make install

Get the files!

You can fork the entire repo, or clone to your computer:

git clone https://github.com/Tomtomgo/raspberry_livestream.git

Edit `stream.sh` for your environment

Replace <STREAM_NAME> and <RASPBERRY_IP> in stream.sh with suitable values for you.

Copy files to Raspberry Pi

From this folder on your machine:

scp -r ./ pi@<RASPBERRY_IP>:/home/pi

Copy config files

cd ~
sudo cp nginx.conf /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
cp stream.supervisor.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/stream.supervisor.conf

Run the systems!

This will (re)start Nginx and the stream itself.

sudo service supervisor stop
sudo service supervisor start

Verify the stream

You can check that it's actually streaming by opening this URI in VLC on your computes:

rtmp://<RASPBERRY_IP/live/<STREAM_NAME>

Showing the stream on a web page

We used HDW Player for showing the RTMP-stream, but there are probably many more.

Download it and put the player folder in a project folder somewhere.

Then to show the video you can do something like this (replace <THESE_THINGS>):

<html>
  <head>
    <script src="<PROJECT_FOLDER>/player/hdwplayer.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="player"></div>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      hdwplayer({ 
        id        : 'player',
        swf       : '<PROJECT_FOLDER>/player/player.swf',
        width     : '640',
        height    : '334',
        type      : 'rtmp',
        streamer  : 'rtmp://<RASPBERRY_IP/live',
        video     : '<STREAM_NAME>',
        autoStart : 'true',
        controlBar: 'false'
        });
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

That should do it! Go fot it!

Adventures

As mentioned, we ran into a little bit of trouble before it worked. Hereby a short summary what we tried and why it did not work;

Stream to bambuser.com

We never got the stream connected at Bamuser. The RMTP-addresses were unclear and did not accepted the connections.
Stream to twitch.tv

This did not worked as we got banned several times, because we were not streaming gaming content. Wierd! Foosball is the best sport ever.
Stream to youtube.com

This attempt almost worked, we had a few cases were the stram was received. But in the end YouTube did not accepted the low bitrate coming from the RasberryPi.

Credits

Built at Rockstart by Sjoerd Huisman from Congressus and Tom Aizenberg from Achieved.

Tomtomgo/raspberry_livestream