A Video Broadcast Control System using Raspberry Pi IP Cameras

Abstract

The Internet of Things is predicted to be more and more popular in the digital society, and it is estimated that there will be over 50 billion embedded devices used to improve the lifestyle of people. Meanwhile, many people had studied the Raspberry Pi in P2P and used it in the SensibleThings platform. This project presents a live video broadcast control system that enables people to watch the live video without accessing the Raspberry Pi. It is verified that the proposed streaming system can provide a 480p live video in the multi-camera scenario (~20 FPS) under the 300Mbps network. For the implementation, the Raspberry Pi streams a 640 × 480 pixel and H.264 video at 30 frames per second and 2.5 Mbps between the server and Raspberry Pi in the same network. Additionally, it is found that a performance drop occurred in the multi-streaming using 5 cameras and more than 17 browsers, and the results show the FPS could keep stable and be around 19 and the video freeze occurred when 18 users were watching the live video.

Moreover, the comparative evaluation is conducted to identify the technologies used in the live streaming. Facebook and YouTube use the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) to achieve the live streaming. FaceTime and WhatsApp implement the Voice over IP (VoIP) by the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) and RTP Control Protocol (RTCP). However, they do not support multi-streaming and camera control after publishing the video.

Further improvement focus on the compatibility of the other types of camera and scalability of the system. The system will support the smartphones by the GStreamer and the multi-server with the reverse proxy and load balancer.