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cp2004 / OctoPrint-CameraStreamer-Control

Embed WebRTC (& more) streams provided by camera-streamer in OctoPrint
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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OctoPrint Camera Streamer Control Plugin

⚠️ Slow maintenance ⚠️

I have very little time to work on this & my other plugins at the moment.

If you have an issue, please report it. If you think that you can debug & fix an issue, please submit a PR and I will be happy to merge it. I wanted to get this plugin out so people could enjoy the smooth streaming but my lack of time held it up. It's maintenance will need help from the community.

Using OctoPi's new camera stack? Add this plugin to watch your prints in shiny, fast, low bandwidth H264 glory!

The new camera stack is not fully stable yet, and neither is this plugin. Please report issues you find!

There may be cases where the new stack does not work for you. Please make a backup of your OctoPi instance & be prepared to revert!

How do I use it?

First, you need to be using the recent updates to the streaming stack in OctoPi, based on camera-streamer that Gina published a short while ago. For info on that, see the blog post here.

You can install this image through the Raspberry Pi Imager. Follow the steps on https://octoprint.org/download, but select the 'new camera stack' image:

Image highlighting the correct image in the Pi imager

Once that is set up and running, you'll be able to install this plugin. It can be installed by finding it from the plugin manager or manually using this URL:

https://github.com/cp2004/OctoPrint-CameraStreamer-Control/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

Once installed, you should see your webcam stream still in the control tab, but with a new option to switch to 'Camera Streamer':

Image showing the new option in the control tab

Enabling WebRTC streaming

camera-streamer provides a h264 encoded stream alongside the classic mjpg stream. This plugin lets you use that to view your webcam as well! You can switch stream formats in the plugin settings:

Image showing the new option in the settings tab

⚠️ A note on WebRTC support

This is still an 'experimental' feature and issues will continue to be worked out. If your stream fails to connect, the plugin will automatically fall back to the old mjpg stream, so you shouldn't see any interruption.

It is also important to note that camera-streamer uses the Pi's hardware encoders to do the heavy lifting here. On low-powered Pi's such as the Pi Zero, you will struggle to use high resolutions and frame rates. A Pi 4 should be capable of 1080p 30FPS streaming, but this is not guaranteed. If you find stuttering in the stream, lower the resolution and framerate in the streaming stack configuration.