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Video stream with Gstreamer on Raspberry Pi

Xukyo

In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to stream video from a Raspberry Pi using Gstreamer. One of the most widely used streaming tools is FFMPEG. We’ll be testing gstreamer here, as there’s less transmission delay.

Previous streaming tutorial: Video streaming between two machines with FFMPEG

Hardware

Installing Gstreamer on Raspberry Pi

Part of Gstreamer is installed by default on Raspbian. We’ll simply complete the installation with a few additional libraries.

# install a missing dependency
$ sudo apt-get install libx264-dev libjpeg-dev
# install the remaining plugins
$ sudo apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-dev \
     libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev \
     libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev \
     gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly \
     gstreamer1.0-tools \
     gstreamer1.0-gl \
     gstreamer1.0-gtk3
# if you have Qt5 install this plugin
$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-qt5
# install if you want to work with audio
$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio

To test the installation, enter the following command

gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc ! videoconvert ! autovideosink

Find available video and audio devices

gst-device-monitor-1.0

Video streaming with Gstreamer

Once you have the device name, you can start the stream with the command

gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! video/x-raw, width=640, height=480, framerate=30/1 ! videoconvert ! videoscale ! clockoverlay time-format="%D %H:%M:%S" ! autovideosink

We send the video stream using the UDP protocol from a Raspberry Pi

gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 num-buffers=-1 ! video/x-raw, width=640, height=480, framerate=30/1 ! clockoverlay time-format="%D %H:%M:%S" ! videoconvert ! jpegenc ! udpsink host=192.168.1.70 port=5200

We receive the UDP stream from the client (192.168.1.70) using the command

gst-launch-1.0 udpsrc port=5200 ! jpegdec ! videoconvert ! autovideosink

To save the video stream as a file

gst-launch-1.0 -e v4l2src device=/dev/video0 num-buffers=-1 ! 'image/jpeg,framerate=30/1,width=640,height=480' ! queue ! avimux ! filesink location=video.avi

Installing Gstreamer on Windows

To receive the video stream from the Raspberry Pi, we use a Windows computer. You can use any other device (RPi, Android, iOS, macOS).

For your information, Gstreamer is installed on Windows using an msi installer available on the site.

After downloading and installing Gstreamer, you need to add the folder C:\gstreamer\1.0\msvc_x86_64\bin to the Path environment variable.

To test the installation, enter the following command

gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc ! videoconvert ! autovideosink

To stream a video from the camera

gst-launch-1.0 mfvideosrc ! video/x-raw, width=1280, height=720, framerate=30/1 ! videoconvert ! videoscale ! clockoverlay time-format="%D %H:%M:%S" ! video/x-raw, width=640, height=360 ! autovideosink

It is possible to launch a stream using the UDP protocol

gst-launch-1.0 mfvideosrc ! video/x-raw, width=1280, height=720, framerate=30/1 ! videoconvert ! videoscale ! clockoverlay time-format="%D %H:%M:%S" ! video/x-raw, width=640, height=360 ! jpegenc ! udpsink host=192.168.1.92 port=5200

We receive the UDP stream from the client (192.168.1.92) with the command

gst-launch-1.0 udpsrc port=5200 ! jpegdec ! videoconvert ! autovideosink

Installing Gstreamer on Ubuntu or Debian

To get the most out of Gstreamer, we’ll need the v4l2 library

sudo apt install v4l-utils

In a terminal, enter the following commands to install gstreamer.

sudo apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-tools gstreamer1.0-x gstreamer1.0-alsa gstreamer1.0-gl gstreamer1.0-gtk3 gstreamer1.0-qt5 gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio

To test the installation, enter the following command

gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc ! videoconvert ! autovideosink

To launch the video stream from Ubuntu, you can run the following command

gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src name="/dev_video0" ! decodebin ! videoconvert ! videoscale ! clockoverlay time-format="%D %H:%M:%S" ! video/x-raw,format=RGB ! queue ! videoconvert !

N.B.: don’t forget to add decodebin

It is possible to launch a stream using the UDP protocol

gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src name="/dev_video0" num-buffers=-1 ! decodebin ! videoconvert ! videoscale ! clockoverlay time-format="%D %H:%M:%S" ! video/x-raw,format=RGB ! queue ! videoconvert ! jpegenc ! udpsink host=192.168.1.70 port=5200

We receive the UDP stream from the client (192.168.1.70) using the command

gst-launch-1.0 udpsrc port=5200 ! jpegdec ! videoconvert ! autovideosink

Sources

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