support for multiclient streaming

[TungstenE2]

Hi,

thx for the great project!

Any chance for having multiclient streaming enabled in your project?

See for reference:
https://github.com/arkhipenko/esp32-cam-mjpeg-multiclient

br

[easytarget]

By co-incidence I was looking at that sketch earlier today and wondering If this sketch could do something similar.
Well.. not co-incidence, I was checking out people who follow this, and saw it listed in your recent activity ;-)

It's an excellent suggestion; but the architecture they use to serve the stream is really different to how this sketch currently works; it's not a copy/paste/modify job to replace the stream handler. And they do not use face detection, further complicating things.

I have a vague idea that the existing stream handler could be made thread-safe and multiple handlers run via RTOS, and we have 2 cores in the ESP to leverage too, the bottleneck should be WiFi not CPU.. Especially if (as I believe) face recognition can be done before the image is copied to be returned to each stream client.

I'm going to tentitively peg this to V5, which is where I intend to strip face recognition anyway, and should make this easier to implement using the code in the repo from @arkhipenko

At present V5 is pure vaporware, I'm not sure if I will ever have time to get there, but I'm very open to PR's from anybody who can get multi-client streaming running on top of the existing code architecture.

[arkhipenko]

I had to move away from espressif's streaming implementation completely because their code uses "chunked" stream which VLC and Blynk video players choke on. I needed something that can play on multiple clients and be compatible with VLC/Blynk.
As for use of cores - yes, and I have done some experimentation in this project:
https://www.hackster.io/anatoli-arkhipenko/minecraft-interactive-do-not-enter-sword-sign-esp32-cam-cd1b07

Also, there are multiple approaches for using RTOS tasks here:
https://github.com/arkhipenko/esp32-mjpeg-multiclient-espcam-drivers

[TungstenE2]

for the moment I solved the issue for me, that I just call for a still picture every 1 sec and show it on my tablet UI. This I can do from several clients at the same time.

[TodWulff]

I had to move away from espressif's streaming implementation completely because their code uses "chunked" stream which VLC and Blynk video players choke on. I needed something that can play on multiple clients and be compatible with VLC/Blynk.
...

As info, just for another data point, I was able to get VLC to receive and display the stream using this build. It would not work on the example webcam sketch. https://i.imgur.com/O9JHfPL.jpeg

As such, I suspect that VLC can transcode this in a multicast construct. Granted, it is not ideal, but could be a viable workaround for those with a system topology that supports doing same.

Also, @easytarget, be advised that there are a couple of typos in the myconfig.sample.h file - seems you dropped the #define on the serial debug #def (Line ~139). And, on line 26, seems to be an extra 'station' word in the structure definition construct (yes, it being a comment is acknowledged. :).'

[easytarget]

Thanks, I didnt do a good job on merging myconfig up to the sample. Sigh... fixed.

I've very much focussed on this playing in a browser window, In keeping with it being an expanded example. The stream code is essentially untouched from the original.
I'm kind of assuming that those who need rtsp streams etc would be looking at the more advanced projects focussing on specific security and home-automation. That said; a more solid streaming part of the code is in the plan; which is why this issue is open and active 😉

[TungstenE2]

push, any news on this topic?

[TungstenE2]

@easytarget are you still working on this project? Please do not let it go down....

[TungstenE2]

fyi, Tasmota added rtsp to the tasmota32-webcam.bin, so this added multiclient streaming to ESP32cam.
May be this helps you as well?

arendst/Tasmota#9293

Also a nice page in Tasmota for the cam, but missing some options:
https://cgomesu.com/blog/Esp32cam-tasmota-webcam-server/