Subscriber Discussion

Rebroadcasting A Video Stream From An IP Camera

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Scott Sheldrake
Mar 04, 2014

Quite often a customer wants a live video stream embedded on a webpage - we always end up compromising and just doing a live still image that refreshes every X seconds. (The IP camera does an FTP upload every X seconds to a webserver, then the burden of viewing is taken off the camera and passed to the web server).

What we'd like to do is rebroadcast the actual stream from the camera - Has anyone done this successfully before or know of a service, paid or free that allows this? The biggest issue is being prepared for potentially hundreds of simultaneous viewers. The Axis cameras we use can handle 10-12 simultaneous viewers, but the limiting factor would be the Internet upstream where the camera is located (probably 2-3 viewers max). I had one person suggest the website Justin.TV for rebroadcasting but when I contacted them they said not a chance.

Anyone with experience or a good solution for this?

LM
Luke Maslen
Mar 04, 2014
IPVMU Certified

If the camera has a video output, especially HD-SDI or HDMI, you could use an inexpensive capture device and an online service such as Ustream. There was a previous thread in this forum about broadcasting church services which covered the technicalities.

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Scott Sheldrake
Mar 04, 2014

The Click2Stream service for $25/mo that lets you embed a live video feed and stream to 1000 simultaneous users looks like the most promising option so far. Thanks for the recommendation. This would be an awesome topic for IPVM to do a feature on.

I'm curious if anyone has done their own hand-coded solution. Would it be possible to have a web server that grabs a single MJPEG stream from a camera, somehow buffers it and then rebroadcasts it out as HTML5 video? I'm wondering how difficult it would be to set something up like this and avoid paying a monthly cost for someone else like Click2Stream to rebroadcast.

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Vincent Tong
Mar 04, 2014

Alex's suggestion is the most economic way of doing it. to do it yourself you would need to be able to manage the traffic of all the potential users. While for a low monthly cost, they would transcode the rtsp stream and host the traffic for you.

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