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Web Cam - HLS stream

HLS is extremely easy to set up and works over plain HTTP protocol, thus it can be very easily proxied and accessed by other clients.

Warning

DO NOT use VLC to test streams, there are unfortunately problems with it. Please use ffplay from ffmpeg package.

You should be able to test the stream locally with ffplay command.

For example, if your camera is reachable over address 192.168.0.20 and port 8888 under endpoint /stream then below command should show the stream:

ffplay http://192.168.0.20:8888/stream/index.m3u8

If that works, then configuration should be pretty straightforward:

  • copy ffmpeg-mediamtx-hls.dist as .env
  • in copied file .env replace token-change-me with the value of the token you copied
  • in copied file .env replace fingerprint-change-me with some random value, which is alphanumeric and has at least 16 chars (and max of 40 chars), for example set it to fingerprint-myprinter4-camera-4
  • in copied file .env replace your RTSP device address raspberry-pi, port and stream id in CAMERA_COMMAND_EXTRA_PARAMS if needed
  • save edited file .env

Next, test config.

Real world example

My another Rpi Zero W named hormex has a camera:

  • CSI

and I'm running mediamtx server to convert those to various streams, one of them is HLS. More about mediamtx is here.

So I can have config:

.stream-hls-csi over HLS:

PRINTER_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1
PRUSA_CONNECT_CAMERA_TOKEN=redacted
PRUSA_CONNECT_CAMERA_FINGERPRINT=62e8ab72-9766-4ad5-b8b1-174d389fc0d3
CAMERA_DEVICE=/dev/null
CAMERA_COMMAND=ffmpeg
CAMERA_COMMAND_EXTRA_PARAMS="-loglevel error -y -i "http://hormex:8888/cam/index.m3u8" -f image2 -vframes 1 -pix_fmt yuvj420p "