Stream Webcam Via HTTP

Good for baby monitoring, home security, or online chatting. Heres how to turn your system and your webcam into a streaming video web server

To take the images from your webcam and stream it we will use MJPG streamer. You can download the DEB file here or go to sourceforge and get the latest and greatest version.

I ran into problems installing it from sourceforge. The latest version (at the time) had a inproper version in the config file. Which forced me to unpack and redo the deb file. If you have a newer version and cant install because of this error do the following. If you download the one from this site you should be good to go and skip the next set of instructions

dpkg-deb -x mjpg-streamer_r94-1_i386.deb tmpdir
dpkg-deb -e mjpg-streamer_r94-1_i386.deb tmpdir/DEBIAN
nano tmpdir/DEBIAN/control                  #REMOVE THE R FROM THE VERSION NUMBER
dpkg-deb -b tmpdir mjpg-streamer_r94-1_i386.deb

Install the MJPEG DEB Package

dpkg -i mjpg-streamer_r94-1_i386.deb

Start the streaming server. If you have many video devices you may need to replace the following /dev/video0 with whatever your webcam is listed as on your system. The -r specifies the resolution to capture, the -f specifies frame rate, the -p specifies what http port to use.

mjpg_streamer -i "input_uvc.so -r 640x480 -d /dev/video0 -y -f 30" -o "output_http.so -p 8080"

This Works most of the time however I found some cameras required the following to start properly

mjpg_streamer -i "input_uvc.so -r 640x480 -d /dev/video0 -f 30" -o "output_http.so -p 8080"

Sometimes you might run into a permissions problem. You need to either add your user to the video group, or the simple fix is to add permissions to all people:

sudo chmod a+r /dev/video0
sudo chmod a+w /dev/video0

Once you see output that the server has started fire up your web browser and go to:

For video streaming: http://localhost:8080/?action=stream

For single JPEG: http://localhost:8080/?action=snapshot

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Stream Webcam Via HTTP