webcam
webcam Documentation

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Small WebCam server

A program which captures video frames from a V4L2 device (e.g. USB camera), converts them to JPEG with minimal effort, and serves the resulting stream of video data as multipart/x-mixed-replace MIME type:

  • either to a single HTTP client using built-in primitive HTTP server, or
  • via CGI responder interface.

Alternatively, it can save each JPEG image to a separate file, or pass them to stdout.

"Minimal effort" means the following:

  • in case of a camera producing JPEG frames - no effort at all;
  • in case of a camera producing MJPEG frames - adding missing chunk of data with Huffmann table;
  • in case of cheapest cameras giving just YUV 4:2:2 packed frames - converting to JPEG using jpeglib (or libjpeg-turbo).

Program can also be compiled without YUV support, what allows linking without jpeglib.

Examples

Serving video with built-in HTTP server on TCP port 44444, with just 5 FPS, using no more than 16 MB of buffers:

nph-webcam.cgi -v -o http -r 5 -m 16 -p 44444

Video can be seen in a web browser at http://localhost:44444 provided you have a supported webcam plugged in and permissions of its /dev/videoX node include rw for the user running this program.

Video can also be embedded inside a web page like this:

<img id="webcam" src="http://server:44444" alt="Video stream">

CGI output is enabled by default so the program can be directly used as a CGI script (nph-webcam.cgi), for example with lighttpd configured this way:

server.modules += ( "mod_cgi" )
cgi.execute-x-only = "enable"
cgi.assign = ( ".cgi" => "", ".sh" => "" )
server.stream-response-body = 2

Parameters can be passed by a helper script nph-webcam.sh like this:

#!/bin/sh
exec "${0%.sh}.cgi" -w 1280 -h 720

Documentation

See documentation.

Notice

webcam

Copyright
© 2023 Aleksander Mazur

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.