Streaming video to web app

[dexter0380]

I'm looking at building a custom web app to stream multiple cameras to. I don't want to simply 'display' the camera video in the webpage via iFrame or something similar, I actually want to display the actual stream through my app. Along with the video feed, I will also need to have a connection for 2-way voice communication with the app and the camera.

In my initial research, it seems that I'll need to utilize the RTSP stream of the camera and connect to it via the WebRTC protocol.

Has anyone done anything similar and have any details/advice that you're willing to share?

Thanks!

 

[bp2008]

That is an enormous technical challenge. Web browsers don't expose low-level TCP sockets, so they can't use the RTSP protocol. Web sockets and WebRTC are the only two-way data streaming protocols available in a web browser, and cameras can't use either of those protocols, at least not in a standardized way.

So it is necessary to run software on a different computer to translate between the web browser and the camera. There exist numerous open source projects which tunnel RTSP through a web socket to play the video in a browser. They work best with H.264 video of course, because H.265 is not supported in most browsers. These projects require a server program to be running (typically on linux) which pulls the RTSP stream and serves the video via websocket. These are not user-friendly programs.

I'm not aware of any project to achieve 2-way audio to a camera through a web browser. I'm not sure there even is a standard for 2-way audio implementations in cameras.

 

[dexter0380]

Thank you @bp2008 !

It seems that the camera I'm testing with (Amcrest IP2M-841B-V3) allows for 2 way audio communication to also go through the RTSP API. In theory, I'm thinking I could also use a middle-man software running on a Pi or some other type of linux device to convert the audio side of things as well and deliver it to my webapp via WebRTC or Web socket. If you have any information around if this seems plausible or not, that would be awesome!

 

[bp2008]

Plausible, sure, but I don't know of any finished product that does it.

 

[TonyR]

@dexter0380,

Maybe this from @David in July 2020 is worth reading to you ? ==>> Simplest way to stream RTSP IP Cameras to your website via WebRTC, without transcoding

 

[justSomeRandomDude]

I am streaming the RTSP video from my cameras to the browser using WebRTC but I'm not doing anything with two way audio. User bp2008 is correct that you need a server to sit between the cameras and the web page. I am using Wowza Streaming Engine on Centos linux. I believe you can download and run a dev version of the Wowza software for free however there are some limitations to the number of concurrent connections you can have with the dev/free version.