Project Page: github/ip-ffmpeg-youtube

This article is a followup to ip-camera-stream which used Open Broadcasting Studio for streaming video upload. In the updated version we will be running using FFMPEG directly inside of a Docker container. This allows for an ideal headless server setup.

Sanity Check: FFMPEG performance in Docker

We want to run this in Docker, but first lets do a sanity check to see if FFMPEG has any major performance issues running inside Docker.

Running FFMPEG in Docker

time docker run -v $(pwd):/src -w /src --rm -it jrottenberg/ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -c:v libx264 -f null /dev/null

real  0m24.793s

Running a local, custom-compiled FFMPEG

time ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -c:v libx264 -f null /dev/null

real  0m23.881s

No crazy performance loss there, so we can go ahead.

Step 1: Camera

Need an IP Camera with RTSP support. I used the “JOOAN 703ERC-T”. Make reference to iSpy Devices for information about camera support

Step 2: Configure Camera

This varies by device. For my camera specifically:

Device had a hard coded IP address of 192.168.1.57. I needed to change my network to the 192.168.1.X range to be able to access it.
Installed the Device Management software that came with the camera
Used the device manager to change the camera networking settings to my normal internal network range.

Step 3: Video Stream Test

Make reference again to iSpy Devices for RTMP address to use for your device.

Important note: The RMTP address will need to be changed if it includes a username/password that doesn’t match that of your camera.

The address for my device is rtsp://192.168.56.23/user=admin_password=_channel=1_stream=0.sdp

Open the RTSP address in VLC media player or ffplay and it should stream your camera video

Step 4: Youtube Live

Private must be either Public or Unlisted to allow for the Stream Keepalive periodic download job which comes later.

Be sure to enable DVR mode if you want to be able to go back up to 4 hrs in your YouTube live history.

Step 5: Stream Upload

Your live event Injestion Settings page will provide your (secret) Stream Name, for example: p1tt-db3b-11xv-5a1n

Modify the command below to insert your own IP Camera RTSP Address and YouTube Stream Name:

docker run --restart=always -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime -v ~/recordings:/data -d --name stream-upload idlerun/youtube-live-stream -- rtsp://192.168.56.23/user=admin_password=_channel=1_stream=0.sdp p1tt-db3b-11xv-5a1n

This will stream the IP camera to the YouTube live event AND save a segmented video regularly to the mounted recordings folder.

Step 6: Periodic Download (Optional)

If there are no viewers on a stream, YouTube will eventually stop processing the stream input traffic. This means that joining the stream later and going back in the DVR history will not work correctly.

To avoid this happening we can run a job which periodically streams the video for us.

To keep the load as low as possible, it is streaming at the lowest available resolution and only for 5 seconds to ping YouTube to keep the stream from timing out.

docker run --restart=always -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime -v ~/recordings:/data -d --name stream-download idlerun/youtube-live-download -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOURVIDEOID

Step 7: Recording Cleanup (Optional)

The youtube-live-cleanup container mounts the recordings directory and periodically (removes all but the most recent 48 hours of recordings.

docker run --restart=always -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime -v ~/recordings:/data -d --name stream-cleanup idlerun/youtube-live-cleanup

Notes:

The ~/recordings path could (and probably should) be moved to a directory which is automatically backed up off-site.