Streaming local Webcam in a Linux machine, and acessing it when on vacations - which protocol to choose?

Submitted ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨shadowintheday2@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I want to configure a local webcam to stream (and possibly record) a live feed open to the internet, and acess it half-world away while traveling, using FOSS only acessing it via Android VLC

This guide was quite comprehensive; however the packages for nginx-rtmp are quite abandoned in arch linux. So I thought maybe WebRTC could be an alternative - the communication itself should be encrypted, which WebRTC seems to do; however, I still can’t figure out if VLC will handle this well

Also, it seems that I might need to self-host a VPN to achieve this? What are my options? Has anyone else done this ?

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redcalcium@lemmy.institute ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If you have a Home Assistant instance, adding a webcam and accessing it from outside your network is quite easy: home-assistant.io/…/usb-webcams-and-home-assistan…

Home Assistant is a very useful platform to have around if you have a handful of IoT devices at home.

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- shadowintheday2@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks, I will look into setting up Home Assist
  
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vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I recently set up a personal Owncast instance on my home server, it should do what you’re looking for. I use OBS Studio to stream random stuff to friends, if your webcam can send RTMP streams it should be able to stream to Owncast without OBS in the middle (else you just need to set up OBS to capture from the camera and stream to Owncast over RTMP). I suggest having the camera/OBS and Owncast on the same local network as RTMP is unencrypted and could possibly be intercepted between the source and the Owncast server.

From there, my reverse proxy (apache) serves the owncast instance to the Internet over HTTPS, so it is encrypted between the server and clients. You can watch the stream in a plain web browser, or use another player such as VLC pointing to the correct stream address [1]

Owncast itself offers no authentication mechanism to watch the stream, so if you expose this to the internet directly and don’t want it public, you’d have to implement authentication at the reverse proxy level (HTTP Basic auth), or as you said you may set up a VPN server (I use wireguard) on the same machine as the Owncast instance and only expose the instance to the VPN network range (with the VPN providing the authentication layer)

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- aniki@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I second RTMP. I used to use it to send video all over the internet back in the covid days.
  
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Feliberto@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m using Frigate with a Google Coral connected to Home Assistant, it’d send an image and a short video to a Telegram group with my wife whenever it detects a person.

I’m using OpenIPC firmware flashed on a chinese Goke camera and works great. It connects to Frigate using RTMP.

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abominable_panda@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
MediaMTX can sort a lot of this for you. Then its just a matter of accessing your feed on vlc.

VPN is the safer option of accessing your network

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- TCB13@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  MediaMTX
  
  Going to Mars seems easier and less resource intensive than that thing.
  
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- shadowintheday2@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thank you, I managed to get it working with MediaMTX and DockoVPN I still don’t know how I would manage dynamic IP changes during the days I’m away, that would break the VPN
  
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  - abominable_panda@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Amazing! Congrats :)
    
    For the dynamic ip address that you can get a free domain name from afraid or noip or maybe others and point your vpn to your domain name instead of direct ip address. Following that you can run cron job scripts to ensure the ip address that the domain points to is up to date
    
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  - tapdattl@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I just set up a security camera for my dad’s office: zoneminder running the webcam and tailscale for access anywhere.
    
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- Administrator@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  this is the way. Not sure if you can watch webrtc streams with vlc though. But you can always use rtmp or hls
  
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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters

HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web

HTTPS HTTP over SSL

SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption

VPN Virtual Private Network

[Thread #402 for this sub, first seen 5th Jan 2024, 02:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Setup Tailscale on your machine at home and on your Android device. It’ll provide a virtual encrypted network between your devices.

Not sure what video performance across it will be like, I’m sure there’s a bit of overhead.

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- beeng@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just use wire guard, which is the backbone of tailscale.
  
  Tailscale could rug pull one day or start charging.
  
  Sounds like OP could handle wire guard setup.
  
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equidamoid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’d go for HLS due to its simplicity: just files over http(s). VPN or not - depends on your network. If your machine is accessible from the internet, just putting the files into a webserver subdirectory with a long random path and using https will be secure enough for the usecase. Can be done with an ffmpeg oneliner.

The downside of HLS is the lag. It is in no way realtime. Webrtc does it better (and other things too), but it is also a bigger pain to set up and forward.

Also, just in case, test that the webcam works fine if left active 24/7. I had (a cheapo) one that required a powercycle after a week or so…

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Lordjohn68@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My use case is similar. So i use a Pi 5 running motioneye dev 64bit. 3 cams 2 usb webcams (uvc compliant) 1 esp32 cam wifi. Another Pi a 4 this time runs pihole and wireguard vpn. Static ip so all is good. Homarr is my dashboard and i can view from that or the motioneye interface directly.

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muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Cant u do it with vlc directly?

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- shadowintheday2@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t think VLC alone could handle auth/permissions/encryption
  
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  - muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ur right in that case i suggest just set up a vpn to ur home lan and have it stream to lan
    
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TCB13@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

however the packages for nginx-rtmp are quite abandoned in arch linux.

Maybe you should switch to Debian? I’ve been doing it for a long time that way and playing to VLC without issues.

Are repositories are you using btw? Is it the Nginx official ones? nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html

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Fewer Letters	More Letters
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS	HTTP over SSL
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPN	Virtual Private Network