Ask HN: Advice on a live video processing project
3 by pedrolins | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN, I'd love some advice on live video processing for a hobby project I'm working on. I'm currently working on placing a live camera on a beach. My current setup leaves a lot to be desired, but my main problem has been with video-processing-related stuff which I have had no contact with as a developer until now. It consists of a camera-equipped microcontroller connected to WiFi that is constantly sending JPEGs to a server through HTTP POST requests. On the server side, these JPEGs get saved as files in a folder which in turn are converted to an RTMP live video feed - using ffmpeg - which gets sent to a streaming platform (Twitch or Youtube). There are problems with my current approach mainly that ffmpeg "finishes" converting my JPEGs mid "transmission" (I use quotes here because all that means is that my microcontroller is still sending JPEGs to the server). I searched extensively but I've had trouble formulating the queries given how specific my use-case seems to be, and have had little success in this regard. That leads me into believing that I'm commiting mistakes in my approach to this project - which is of no surprise, given my lack of experience in video, specially streaming. So I'd like some pointers or suggestions from you - it could be pointed at any part of the process I'm currently doing, though what made me write this in the first place was the video streaming problems I'm facing. It could be general resources into encoders, decoders, transcoders, video in general... Or even just comment what you'd change to make streaming work. Perhaps as a way of being more direct: how does can "generic" - as in normal practice - livestreaming be achieved without the help of something like OBS? Thank you.