RPi Video Streaming: MJPG-Streamer

MJPG-Streamer was the last pre-built video streaming software we tested. It was something that we had looked into earlier in the summer, but had never followed through with. It is comparatively "lighter" than both Ffmpeg and Motion. It was fairly easy to download and compile although you do have to jump through a few loopholes.

 1. Use your laptop to download and unzip the MJPG-Streamer software.

 2. Forward the folder from your desktop using a secure shell connection (scp forwarding).

3. Login to your Raspberry Pi and download the following dependencies.

--------> Update the Raspbian Operating System

       

--------> Install dependencies (libv4l-dev, subversion, libjpeg8-dev, imagemagick)

4. Copy the following file to a different name (MJPG-Streamer will show a make error otherwise). Try this a few times as it may not work correctly the first time.

5. Then, just for good housekeeping, Clean All and then run the Makefile.

7. Now you're ready to stream using MJPG-Streamer. Enter the following command. It will hopefully inform you that the stream is up and running. Our stream is running at 20 frames per second, at a resolution of 1280x960 pixels on the port 8092.

To customize the settings (fps, resolution, and device) you can change the values that follow these letters:

8. To view your stream open up Firefox (or Chrome) and type in the ip of the Pi followed by the port # (i.e. http://10.0.1.201:8082). You should see the following:

9. Obviously you will not always want to view your stream over this page. To view this same stream directly open VLC and type in the following:

The direct stream should look like this:

After long nights testing different camera's and there capabilities we finally found one worth the effort. MJPG-Streamer is the best universal USB video streaming software we've used. We would recommend this over Motion and Ffmpeg because of its fluidity and response time. 

To see how we have integrated MJPG-Streamer into a friendly Java GUI check out this post.