Streaming video with a Raspberry PI and a Logitech C270

Hi,

I wanted to setup a live webcam using a Raspberry Pi (model B, first rev. with 256M RAM) so after checking and happily finding out that my camera is suported I went along. First I installed the support packages:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer-tools gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-good v4l-utils

After that I wrote a small script that would start the stream:

#!/bin/bash
# set below your Raspberry PI IP address
myip="192.168.xxx.xxx"
port="5000"

gst-launch -v v4l2src ! "image/jpeg,width=1280,height=720,framerate=30/1" ! multipartmux ! tcpserversink host=$myip port=$port sync=false

Save this to a script and set it to start on boot (if you want).

After the stream is running you could check it with VLC for example:

vlc tcp://192.168.xxx.xxx:5000

Notes:

• I got my inspiration from here (the author also has a simple android app for viewing the stream)
• Yes, I can stream HD with low CPU usage (it starts to hickup after running 7 clients)
• I couldn’t get audio to work. Maybe it has something to do with this camera as CPU usage is very low. The source blog has details on how to enable audio but I couldn’t get it to work
• I tried using ffmpeg (if you want audio support remember to install libasound2-dev before compiling ffmpeg) but audio still didn’t work
• The camera would randomly fail after a few minutes and gstreamer would crash. Because I didn’t want to use a powered USB hub I bridged the polyfuses as described here. If you have the newer rev. 2 (with 512M RAM) that might not be necessary. Do note that this PI has no keyboard, wi-fi dongle or video out and uses a 2A power supply. Now the stream remains stable.