Pi-Camera-in-a-box

Current Version: 1.00 (Changelog)

Pi-Camera-in-a-box will take a vanilla Raspberry Pi with a Camera Module, and stream the footage directly to your web browser. The stream resolution, FPS and Bitrate are fully configurable. Pi-Camera-in-a-box is capable of streaming 1080P, 25FPS video from a Raspberry Pi Zero.

Pi-Camera-in-a-box uses raspivid to capture the video, FFmpeg to encode, and nginx compiled with the nginx-rtmp module to deliver a HLS steam. This is displayed on a custom Web UI that uses video.js to display in the browser.

Pi-Camera-in-a-box is fully Dockerized, removing the complexity of configuring all of these components manually.

Note: Pi-Camera-in-a-box compiles FFMpeg, and Nginx with the RTMP module from source. This can take a long time on a Pi (8+ hours). Consequently I have built these images and pushed them to Docker Hub, this will save you significant time. If you would rather build the containers yourself, replace the docker-compose pull below with docker-compose build.

Pre-Requisites

1. Vanilla Raspberry Pi running Raspian Stretch Light. Needs to be connected to the network, with SSH access enabled. To configure a headless Pi with SSH access enabled and Wi-Fi configured, see this post
2. Raspberry Pi Camera Module connected and enabled through raspi-config

Recommendations

1. Make sure you have performed basic security hardening on your Pi (default password, SSH keys, etc)
2. This project does not currently implement HTTPS. If you are accessing externally, perform either over VPN or a Reverse Proxy with SSL enabled

Installation Instructions - Quickest Way

## Upgrade System
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y

## Install Git, Python, Python-PIP
apt-get install git python-pip -y

## Install Docker
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh

## Install docker-compose
pip install docker-compose

## Clone this Repository
git clone https://github.com/benjamin-maynard/Pi-Camera-in-a-box.git

## Change into Repository
cd Pi-Camera-in-a-box

## Edit config file with desired configuration settings (see below for explanation).
nano config

## Pull Pre-Compiled Images - This will also take a long time.
docker-compose pull

## Start Containers
docker-compose up -d

Wait around 60 seconds, and then visit http://YOUR-CAMERA-IP/ui. You will be prompted for the credentials that you earlier defined. You should now be able to see the live feed from your camera.

IMPORTANT: Please make sure you append the /ui to the web address. Otherwise you will be presented with a 401 error. I will implement a redirect at some point in the near future.

Configuration Settings

Setting	Purpose
CAMERA_NAME	This setting configures the camera name. It will be displayed in the Web UI to help you identify the camera.
AUTHORISED_USERS	The Web UI is protected with HTTP Authentication. This value configures the usernames and passwords allowed to access the stream. The format is <USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>, for example benjaminmaynard:securepassword. Multiple users can be configured by separating the username and password combinations with an exclamation mark. For example, benjaminmaynard:securepassword!bensfriend:securepassword
FRAMES_PER_SECOND	This configures how many Frames Per Second the stream should be. Pi-Camera-in-a-box has been tested up to 25FPS with a 1920x1080 resolution on a Pi Zero. You can probably go higher.
STREAM_WIDTH	The stream width in pixels, default 1920 (1080p). Depending on where your camera is placed experiment with higher and lower resolutions. I've found lower resolutions are better for a bigger field of view in the house.
STREAM_HEIGHT	The stream hight in pixels, default 1080 (1080p). Depending on where your camera is placed experiment with higher and lower resolutions. I've found lower resolutions are better for a bigger field of view in the house
STREAM_BITRATE	The stream bitrate in bytes
FLIP_HORIZONTALLY	(yes/no) Should the video be flipped horizontally (mirror view). This is useful depending on the orientation of your camera
FLIP_VERTICALLY	(yes/no) Should the video be flipped vertically? This is useful if your camera is mounted upside down

Screenshot

Thanks...

• Peer 5 Article: For the head start on the nginx HLS config