Media Server
Streaming video from the Pi using raspi-vid -> cvlc is stable and works well with low latency within the LAN.
Drawbacks are:
- VLC media player is required to view the stream (A web browser solution is needed - HTML5?).
- The number of connections to the video steam is limited by your home upload bandwidth (usually lower on ADSL).
- A port must be open on your router that may be a security concern.
One solution is to use a publicly accessible media server to re-stream the video from the hive such as livestream.com.
Streaming video requires bandwidth and it is not practical to publicly stream all the hives all the time. There are times of the year or day when hives will have no interesting activity to view. This problem can be solved by being able to select different video streams from hives in different time zones and different seasons.
Public viewing of hive video.
This is a proposed control structure to turn on and off video streaming from each hive.
- Every 5 minutes, the hives send data. In addition to the data, a frame of video would also be sent.
- The frame of video in jpg or png format would be displayed as a preview.
- An acknowledgement to the XML file that is POSTed to the server, can be used to issue a command to the hive to start streaming video to a certain IP address.
- The video stream from the hive can then be transcoded into different formats and streamed to the public.
