What's this?

This is an experiment which aims to capture HTML5 MediaStream coming from a web browser webcam, pass it to Express server through a Socket.IO namespace which will be buffered and stream through Express endpoint in form of HTTP partial/range requests

Environment

• FireFox or Chrome (but not Safari)
• Node & NPM

Install

• npm i from the project directory

Run

• npm start: to start the express server
• Open http://localhost:3000 in Firefox or Chrome, and accept the webcam access dialog.

Stream to Web browser

• Open http://localhost:3000/view from web browser to stream

Passing stream to FFmpeg (chunked)

• npm run ffmpeg -- -i http://localhost:3000/chunked output.webm:
  • http://localhost:3000/chunked will be visible once it was opened in Firefox/Chrome and they'll keep requesting till the end of stream or server down.
  • note, npm run ffmpeg -- ... is a just a shortcut to ffmpeg executable dependency which should be installed at startup in node_modules/@ffmpeg-installer/linux-x64/ffmpeg (which may differ depending on your OS)
  • note, -- is used to pass flags

Passing stream to FFmpeg (range-request)

• npm run ffmpeg -- -i http://localhost:3000/view output.webm: TODO: this doesn't output the full stream to FFmpeg
  • http://localhost:3000/view will be visible once it was opened in Firefox/Chrome and they'll keep requesting till the end of stream or server down.
  • note, npm run ffmpeg -- ... is a just a shortcut to ffmpeg executable dependency which should be installed at startup in node_modules/@ffmpeg-installer/linux-x64/ffmpeg (which may differ depending on your OS)
  • note, -- is used to pass flags