RasPi Camera: GStreamer-1.0 w/ Windows 7

As talked about in our previous post, the MJPG-Streamer video rate using the Pi's Camera module was definitely not acceptable for our project. The maximum speed (with dropped frames)of raspistill was far below the video quality needed for our project. After researching multiple different streaming methods we settled on using GStreamer-1.0, an open source visual and audio streaming platform. This method is faster as the software opens up a direct network pipeline between the Raspberry Pi and the OCU (in this case a Windows 7 machine).

This tutorial is Windows 7 specific, but will work on Mac and Linux. The tutorials for Mac and Linux are actually much easier as GStreamer was originally created for those platforms.

1a. First prime the Pi by adding the follow to /etc/apt/sources.list:

2a. Then update the Pi to download dependencies for GStreamer:





3a. Finally download GStreamer-1.0:

4a. The download is complete. To pipe raspivid through GStreamer use the command below.

****Make sure to use this specific code because GStreamer-1.0 for Windows does NOT include gdpdepay or gdppay as plugins.

1b. In Windows, visit http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/pkg/windows/1.2.2/ and download this (make sure you have the correct installer -- Windows 7 comes with a pre downloaded .msi installer, but other versions do not):

 gstreamer-1.0-x86_64-1.2.2.msi

2b. Install!

3b. Using cd and dir navigate to /gstreamer/1.0/64_x86/bin

4b. Now you can use the get-launch-1.0.exe command to read the stream coming from the Pi (make sure to use the ip you found using ipconfig above!).

As you can see the quality of the stream is as good as the Pi Module can give. Unlike the jerky MJPG-Streamer, the GStreamer pipeline has <.3 seconds of delay!! This is perfect for our Pi-based submersible. Unfortunately, there is not yet a Java API built for GStreamer-1.0. We will be defaulting to the older version (GStreamer-.10) in order to use this video streaming software.