Streaming live video from a webcam over RTMP using a Raspberry Pi, Nginx and Basic auth

Disclaimer

This fork uses the base repo as an inspiration. Maybe fundamental things will be changed here.

Hardware

This is the hardware I used. You will probably have some other stuff... which should work as well.

RaspberryPi B with Raspbian installed
16 GB SD card
Waveshare Kamera (C), 5 MP Fixfokus
2A power adapter
All these things connected appropriately

Installing the necessary software

see https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module/wiki/Getting-started-with-nginx-rtmp for more detailed information

Everything here should be done on the Raspberry Pi (as opposed to on your computes) unless stated otherwise.

Basics

Some basic dependencies:

sudo apt-get install certbot apache2-utils ffmpeg curl avconv perl make build-essential libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libssl-dev git zlib1g-dev

Basic Auth

Since I wanted at least a minimal level of security, I added Basic auth check on stream play. To generate users, you can simply use createUsers.sh like this:

./createUsers.sh user1 user2 user3 ...

HTTPS

The nginx.conf contains a virtual server for delivering content via HTTPS. Currently, this is not customizable, so if you want to remove it, you need to adapt the scripts.

Build Nginx with RTMP module

To stream our video to the web we use Nginx (to be honest: it's OpenResty) with an HTTP-FLV module. This module has to be compiled into Nginx, which can be done by running:

./build.sh

Install this repo's content

Do it by simply running:

./install.sh -d <<YOUR_DOMAIN>>

Run the systems!

This will (re)start Nginx and the stream itself:

./start.sh

# for the first run your need to call
./start.sh -d <<YOUR_DOMAIN>> -m <<YOUR_MAIL_ADDRESS>>

Since for my usecase I wanted to stop the nginx server easily, its runtime is bound to the start.sh script. Means: nginx gets stop when quitting the start.sh script.

Verify the stream

You can check that it's actually streaming by opening this URI in VLC on your computes:

rtmp://localhost/live/pi-stream?basic_auth=<<BASIC_HASH>>

https://localhost/live?app=live&stream=pi-stream&basic_auth=<<BASIC_HASH>>

Showing the stream on a web page

I put some little HTML and CSS in the frontend/ folder, which is used at the root endpoint. It uses flv.js to play the livestream. Have a look at index.html concerning the library's usage.

Credits

Originally built at Rockstart by Sjoerd Huisman from Congressus and Tom Aizenberg from Achieved.

alxgrk / raspberry_livestream