WebVideoStreamer (commonly stylized as videostreamer) is an open-source, lightweight Go daemon hosted on GitHub by developer horgh that allows users to stream live video feeds—such as RTSP camera feeds—directly to standard web browsers via HTTP.
By acting as an intermediary proxy, it solves a major problem for people trying to view IP security cameras or live feeds over the web: it translates data from formats that web browsers natively reject into standard HTML5 video elements. Core Functions & Architecture
Format Remuxing: It takes a raw video input stream (like an H.264 video over an RTSP network) and remuxes it into a fragmented MP4 container. This allows browsers to play the stream inside a basic tag without requiring resource-heavy plugins or video transcoding.
Connection Throttling: If you hook a network camera directly to the web, multiple people viewing it will instantly crash the camera’s limited connection pool. WebVideoStreamer opens exactly one connection to the camera feed, regardless of how many client browsers are actively watching.
Zero Transcoding Overhead: Because it repackages the stream container without changing the underlying video compression data, it requires minimal CPU processing. Build and System Requirements
To deploy and compile the software, your environment must include: Go Compiler: Compatible with any Go 1 version.
FFmpeg Libraries: Requires libavcodec, libavformat, libavdevice, libavutil, and libswresample (version 3.2.x or later).
C11 Compiler: A standard C compiler to bundle the underlying FFmpeg hooks. Setting It Up (Quick Overview)
Dependencies: On Debian or Ubuntu systems, dependencies can be fetched using:
sudo apt-get install git-core pkg-config libavutil-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavdevice-dev Use code with caution. Build: Pull down and compile the binary with Go: go get github.com/horgh/videostreamer Use code with caution.
Frontend: Point your local web server to the provided index.html file and map your camera source URL to the daemon’s input target.
Note: If you were actually searching for a consumer application rather than a developer tool, you might be looking for Web Video Caster, which is a popular mobile app used to stream browser videos directly to smart TVs and Chromecasts.
Are you looking to use this project to stream an IP/security camera feed to a website, or are you trying to troubleshoot a specific error while setting it up? Web Video Caster
Leave a Reply