Stream raspberry pi camera over multicast and cope with raspivid exiting

RPI Streaming notes

This requires a couple of windows (or a screen/tmux session)

First create a fifo to use
 mkfifo video.h264

In the first window start raspivid in the following way
while true; do raspivid -n -vf -hf -w 460 -h 270 -b 512000 -t 36000000 -o video.h264 -v; done

In the second window start vlc like:
cvlc video.h264  --sout "#duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=239.255.1.2:1234}}" :demux=h264 --ttl 4 -I http --sout-keep -v --loop

With this setup raspivid will run for the time specified by -t (10 hours in this case) if that timeout arrives or it fails for some other reason it will get restarted. The h264 stream is then sent to the fifo named video.h264 (this could be called anything but will need the .h264 extension)

VLC then reads in from the fifo and sends the video over a multicast stream to other clients.

On a client (on the same local network unless your network is multicast enabled you can run vlc and request the network stream udp://@239.255.1.2:1234

It's also possible to use ffmpeg to stream the data over multicast using a command like
ffmpeg -re -f h264 -i video.h264  -metadata title="PiTV" -f sap  -vcodec copy -acodec null rtp://239.255.1.1:1234

With this the stream will appear as PiTV in the "Network Streams (SAP)" section of vlc's playlist


This is similar to the setup that uses a pipe (raspivid -o - | cvlc stream:///dev/stdin) but uses a named fifo to transfer the data allowing you to detect either application failing.


To recieve the multicast stream and send to BATC this seems to work
ffmpeg -re -f sap -i PiTV -f flv -vcodec copy -acodec null rtmp://fms.batc.tv/live/q4de2m6n/q4de2m6n
(Failed on a VM but worked on the same pi doing the streaming.)