All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

I knew VLC was great for playing video files, especially those files I hadn't been able to play using other players... & it's even cross-platform! What I hadn't paid attention to before was it's ability to stream videos.

My friend, Craig Fowler (aka ToreadorVampire), recently ran me through the process rather quickly... I didn't have much time and he didn't have anything really written up... It was a last minute discussion over IM and I thought it could help to at least get people pointed in the right direction.

There is some documentation up at videolan.org (Streaming HowTo/VLM - VideoLAN Wiki) that shows how to set VLC up to do the streaming, talks about the HTTP interface, etc, but isn't an instant answer.

Here's what Craig set up for /etc/init.d/vlc (modified slightly to fit the blog):

#!/bin/sh
STARTUP_COMMAND=/usr/local/bin/cvlc
PID_LOCATION=/var/run/vlc/vlc.pid
LOG_LOCATION=/var/log/vlc.log
CONFIG_LOCATION=/etc/vlc/vlm.conf

case $1 in
    start)
        if [ ! -f $PID_LOCATION  ]; then
            start-stop-daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION \
                --chuid vlc --exec $STARTUP_COMMAND \
                --start -- --vlm-conf $CONFIG_LOCATION \
                --file-logging --logfile $LOG_LOCATION \
                --quiet --daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION
        fi
        ;;
    stop)
        if [ -f $PID_LOCATION ]; then
            start-stop-daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION \
                --stop --signal 15
        fi
        ;;
    restart)
        if [ -f $PID_LOCATION ]; then
            start-stop-daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION \
                --stop
        fi
        start-stop-daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION \
            --chuid vlc --exec $STARTUP_COMMAND \
            --start -- --vlm-conf $CONFIG_LOCATION \
            --file-logging --logfile $LOG_LOCATION \
            --quiet --daemon --pidfile $PID_LOCATION
        ;;
esac

Here's what he set up for /etc/vlc/vlm.conf (also slightly modified for blog):

# VLM Config file, used to configure automated streams




# ====================================================================
# Someone's webcams




# --------------------------------------------------------------------
# Camera 2




# For reference, the original VLC command to stream from this camera
# vlc "http://username:pass@webcam.example.com/nphMotionJpeg?Resolution=320x240&Quality=Standard"
# --sout "#transcode{vcodec=FLV1,acodec=mp3,sameplerate=44100}:std{access=http{mime=video/x-flv},mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv},dst=0.0.0.0:8081/stream.flv}" --noaudio




new camNumber2 broadcast enabled
setup camNumber2 input http://username:pass@webcam.example.com/nphMotionJpeg?Resolution=320x240...
setup camNumber2 output #transcode{vcodec=FLV1}:std{access=http{mime=video/x-flv},mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv},dst=127.0.0.1:8081/directory/camera2.flv}
setup camNumber2 loop
control camNumber2 play
# --------------------------------------------------------------------
# ====================================================================

The URLs /nphMotionJpeg etc are just specific to the HTTP stream I was connecting to (in that instance motion JPEG)

The "setup camNumber2 loop" line tells VLC that if the origin stream goes down or it loses its connection, it should just keep trying to reconnect

The output line is obviously telling it to convert to FLV, and make the result stream available at http://127.0.0.1:8081/directory/camera2.flv

I then used some mod_rewrite magic to proxy http://bsgc.co.uk/webcam-streams/ to http://127.0.0.1:8081/directory/

If this is missing anything I'll try to get more info up later, but for now it should get anybody interested in this a good start.