jsvideostream

Live videostream in any browser using a Javascript client from an FFMpeg command (ffmpeg). The advantage of using websockets like this, and decoding H264/MPEG-TS in Javascript, is raw access to the videostream at the client-side, and minimizing lag/latency as there is barely any protocol overhead and the chunks never contain more than one frame at a time.

This is just an example of how it could be done, but you could easily customize this setup:

• You could use any webserver to substitute NodeJS (node), which is used to forward regular sockets to websockets.
• You could easily pipe NetCat (nc) through OpenSSL to encrypt the backend connection.
• You could use wss:// instead of ws:// to encrypt the frontend connection with TLS.
• You might need to replace ffmpeg to avconv if the former is not installed on your system.
• You could transform server/run.sh to a batch file (server/run.bat), to support Microsoft Windows as your backend.
• You could use Prism instead of Broadway, e.g. using var pr = prism.create(); pr.decodeNal(uint8arr.buffer); /* use pr.SL, pr.SCb, pr.SCr */.
• You could feed an MP4 file directly to NetCat instead of using FFMpeg, e.g. replacing the ffmpeg command with cat file.mp4.

Install

git clone https://github.com/jetibest/jsvideostream.git
cd jsvideostream

Usage

# backend
server/run.sh

# frontend (only tested on firefox, but any modern browser should work)
firefox client/index.html 2>/dev/null

Libraries

This project uses Broadway for displaying H264 frames and JSMpeg for MPEG-TS demuxing.

The back-end currently depends on NodeJS, NetCat, NodeJS, FFMpeg (with H264), and Firefox. But these components may easily be modified to use alternatives.