Chicken Cam

All chickens, most of the time!

What are this?

Chicken Cam is, under its shell, a system for broadcasting a live video stream from a source behind a firewall. It uses a lightweight daemon to push a VP8 encoded WebM video stream from a computer (or Raspberry Pi!) on your local network using a customizable GStreamer pipeline, to a broadcast server connected to the Internet. Viewers visit the broadcast server, which streams any video data it receives from the source down to each user over a WebSocket connection.

Eventually, once I figure out the proper stream encoding settings for the Media Source Extensions API, the video data received via WebSocket on a user's browser will be pushed into a buffer and fed to a standard, HTML5 <video> tag. It's a work in progress, and I haven't gotten there just yet.

Why chickens?

Aside from giving me a chance to learn more about full-stack live video streaming, this project's real-life application is to enable my wife to keep an eye on her beloved flock of back yard chickens while she's away from home.

Setup

Package Dependencies

You will need to install the GStreamer 1.0 development headers and default plugins on the machine you plan to use as the video source. The package names vary by distro, but on Ubuntu it's libgstreamer1.0-dev. You may also need to install additional audio/video encoding packages in order to get a WebM stream from a Video4Linux camera feed.

The broadcast server doesn't need these packages, so you can install chicken-cam using the --no-optional flag on that machine to avoid build failures.

Installation

# Run this on both the video source and the broadcast server:
git clone https://github.com/mikedamage/chicken-cam.git
cd chicken-cam
npm install

# on the video source machine
node ./bin/video-feed.js

# on the broadcast server
node ./bin/broadcast-server.js