This document is a WIP reference of my video streaming experiments with GStreamer, raspberry pi w, logitech c920, random raspberry camera and my macbook pro
I wrote a brief summary of how I set up my raspbian lite.
Current raspbian ships with GStreamer 1.10.2 but the last GStreamer release as of today is 1.14.2 so I decided to build and install the latest version. Note: the stock GStreamer 1.10.2 has a few problems and most of the examples here would not work.
The c920 is a camera that's capable of producing hardware encoded h264 streams. It also has a microphone. Both things make it perfect for the pi zero w which is lacking both cpu power and mic.
I was able to stream hardware encoded h264 using rtsp to a rtsp relay running on my mac. The stream played fine with very low latency.
I even successfully streamed it to disk as HLS. The pipeline generated some critical error in the console but the stream worked fine.
I also tried to encode the video stream using omxh264enc instead of the hardware encoder of the camera. The pi w was able to handle up to 720x480 (85% cpu).
Pure software encoding with x264 software encoder worked as well but its very heavy and the pi could only handle very low resolutions around 320x240.
Streaming hardware-encoded h264 from the c920 works but the stream seems to have some artifacts from time to time. It looks like B-frames are lost.
I have tried to get rid of them. After reading this and this I have tried
sudo rpi-update
and prepended to /boot/cmdline.txt
dwc_otg.fiq_enable=1 dwc_otg.fiq_fsm_enable=1 dwc_otg.fiq_fsm_mask=0x7
I still see the artifacts from time to time. I am not sure if these ones are introduced by the camera itself or it's the network. Need more testing.
The camera shipped with wrong cable. I am waiting for re-shipment before i can test it :)