http://www.moreno.marzolla.name/software/camera_control/

Live Streaming with ffmpeg

We now describe how to configure the webcam for streaming. In order to enable streaming with the webcam, you can use ffmpeg and ffserver. Install the ffmpeg package (under Ubuntu, you simply do sudo apt-get install ffmpeg), and create a configuration file ~/ffserver.conf for ffserver. The configuration file defines three streams, which are available from other machines as the following URIs:

http://sacam-wlan:8090/webcam.mjpeg
    (MJPEG format, can be used for live streaming to any browser without the need of an additional plugin on the receiving side);
http://sacam-wlan:8090/webcam.flv
    (Flash video format, good quality, requires a plugin on the receiving side);
http://sacam-wlan:8090/webcam.asf
    (ASF format, can stream both audio and video, good quality, requires a plugin or you can use MPlayer or VideoLAN to display the stream)

Issue these commands to start the streams:
ffserver -f ~/ffserver.conf & ffmpeg -v 2 -r 5 -s 640x480 -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0 http://localhost:8090/webcam.ffm

If you want to stream audio using the Quickcam E3500, you need to install the oss compatibility modules:
sudo modprobe snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm-oss snd-seq-oss

Furthermore, you need to add -f audio_device -i /dev/dsp to the ffmpeg command line; finally you need to tweak the ffserver.conf configuration file to add audio capture (that is, you need to remove the Noaudio directives).

At this point, you can connect from another machine to view the video stream:
mplayer http://sacam-wlan:8090/webcam.asf

The following picture shows the MPlayer window at the receiving side



ffserver -f ~/ffserver.conf & ffmpeg -v 2 -r 5 -s 176x144 -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0 http://localhost:8090/feed1.ffm


ffserver ffmpeg -v 2 -r 5 -s 640x480 -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0 http://localhost:8090/webcam.ffm



ffserver -f /etc/ffserver.conf & ffmpeg -v 2 -r 5 -s 640x480 -f audio_device -i /dev/snd http://localhost:8090/webcam.ffm