Emulate webcam streaming by showing a sequence of snapshots

The default video streamer in the OctoPi image is mjpg-streamer. It works by fairly simply stitching the jpeg images from the webcam into a stream that can be displayed by the browser. You may want to avoid this stitching and just have javascript display the jpg images every few hundred milliseconds instead.

A couple of reasons might be:

  1. You want to use a browser that doesn’t support mjpeg streams (IE).

  2. You want to reduce your bandwidth and cpu usage on your host.

You can reduce bandwidth and cpu usage by reducing the frame rate on mjpg-streamer, but perhaps the plugin is even lighter weight, try it out on your hardware and see.

Settings

The plugin has a couple of settings you can change:

  1. Frames per second.

    The plugin uses javascript to update the snapshot so the frames are really limited by the browsers ability/willingness to call a timer interval function. Probably best to stay in the slow, reliable, but choppy end of things: 1, 2 or 4 or something like that.

  2. Fallback mode only.

    The plugin only takes over and uses snapshots when the stream fails to load.