Live stream to browser

[akhilphilip]

Is there a way to live stream the h264 video received from getVideoStream() to an html

[johan-olsson]

I achieved this with Broadway

[deadprogram]

@johan-olsson how did you do it with Broadway? The README says The video player first needs to download the entire video before it can start playing. Can you please show a code sample? Thanks!

[johan-olsson]

This is what I did. In this example I'm using Electron but you might as well send the base64 data over a socket or 206 response.

var Drone = require('./Drone');
var Player = require('./Broadway/Player/Player');
var stream = Drone.getVideoStream();

var player = new Player({
  useWorker: true,
  workerFile: './lib/Broadway/Player/Decoder.js'
});

document.body.appendChild(player.canvas);

var toUint8Array = function (parStr) {
  var raw = atob(parStr);
  var array = new Uint8Array(new ArrayBuffer(raw.length));

  Array.prototype.forEach.call(raw, function (data, index) {
    array[index] = raw.charCodeAt(index);
  })

  return array;
};

stream.on('data', function (data) {
  player.decode(toUint8Array(data.toString('base64')));
});

[johan-olsson]

@deadprogram did you get this working? In that case maybe we should close this issue and add a reference to the readme or something similar.

[deadprogram]

I did not have a chance to test yet, but am charging some batteries now to check it out.

[ialexivy]

@johan-olsson I can confirm that the video not working with bebob 2 also other commands like land

[Silvanosky]

http://developer.parrot.com/docs/bebop/#a-name-ardrone3-mediastreaming-videoenable-a I think this is why people on bebop 2 can't get the stream

[deadprogram]

@Silvanosky thanks for the link, sounds like we just need to call https://github.com/hybridgroup/node-bebop#mediastreamingvideoenableenable ala:

var bebop = require("node-bebop"),
      fs = require("fs");

var output = fs.createWriteStream("./video.h264"),
    drone = bebop.createClient(),
    video = drone.getVideoStream();

video.pipe(output);

drone.connect();
drone.MediaStreaming.videoEnable(1); // this line should start video

What do you think?

[Silvanosky]

It would be better to call it in the connect callback to be sure the drone get the packet

[deadprogram]

Good point. So that does seem to be the correct configuration call, we need to update the docs and examples.

[ialexivy]

@deadprogram, @Silvanosky MediaStreaming is null when doing drone.MediaStreaming.videoEnable(1); so this is not working :(

[Chetic]

I'm trying to see the video stream in some reasonable way where I don't need to see the drone to steer it. Is this even possible with node-bebop? The best solution I have so far is just doing "tail -f video.h264 | mplayer -" but we're still talking a second or two of lag and a LOT of decoding artifacts.

I've tried using your example @johan-olsson but I get an error saying "ReferenceError: print is not defined" in some minified code in Decoder.js:63. You can try it yourself at https://github.com/Chetic/beepbop

Anybody have a clue what I'm doing wrong? Is there a complete streaming example for node-bebop anywhere?

[davibe]

i got the same error. Print is not defined (OSX)

[ghost]

not sure if this helps, but since the video is streaming on a different port you can include the stream port number (55004) as part of the discovery connection which will enable getting the video stream from vlc or other media players.

[DA75]

@fleish007 What is the syntax of changing the port number ?