PiCamWeb is a Python based web interface for Raspberry Pi Camera (both v1 and v2 can be used). It uses websockets for data transport and jsmpg to render the video feed in the browser.
Tornado is used for the webserver and websockets, picamera for camera recording and ffmpeg to encode the raw video data to MPEG1.
The project is inspired by the pistreaming project.
If you need authentication for the video stream you can check my alfred project.
After making sure your camera module works (you can test it using raspistill
) install dependencies:
sudo apt-get install libav-tools git python3-pip nginx
sudo pip3 install tornado picamera
Copy source files, edit relevant settings in the settings.py
module if needed and configure services:
cd /var/www
sudo git clone https://github.com/iticus/picamweb
sudo chown -R pi:pi picamweb
cd picamweb
nano settings.py
sudo cp scripts/picamweb.service /etc/systemd/system/picamweb.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable picamweb && sudo systemctl start picamweb
sudo cp scripts/nginx.default /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
sudo systemctl restart nginx
Your camera feed should now be available under:
http://RPI_ADDRESS/
Useful debug command (to view application log):
sudo journalctl -u picamweb.service
- jsmpg and ffmpeg were chosen in order to minimize network traffic when viewing the camera feed
- ffmpeg is running in the background all the time (even when the web interface is not being accessed) which can be quite CPU intensive especially on older single-core Raspberry Pi models; that being said, it works on a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ with a system load of ~ 1.2 - 1.3
- an option to load ffpmeg on demand might be introduced in the future