MJPEG stream from your raspberry pi over the internet

With a little bit of Python, NodeJS, ngrok and powerful Node wrapper for ngrok

I saw a lot of attempts to stream a video from a raspberry pi to your web application running on NodeJS. Most of them come up with non-idiomatic ideas eg sending base64 image strings over WebSockets to a web client.

This is a simple example of how you can create mjpg stream, expose it to the web and use it in your web app.

All of the source code is in src dir, assuming you have nodejs installed and camera set up on you rasperry pi.

Example:

Usage:

1. Copy src dir content
2. npm i
3. npm start

Explanation:

1. First we'll create an mjpeg stream. I couldn't find proper nodejs solution for this, so we are using python (src/stream.py).
2. Now all we need to do is to connect our js ngrok to the port at which our python stream runs (src/main.js)

const url = await ngrok.connect(9090);

Thats it, we have ngrok generated url string with our mjpg stream, use it however you want.

PS:

You may want to password protect your video:

const url = await ngrok.connect({
    addr: 9090,
    auth: 'user:pwd',
});

<img src="https://user:pwd@c038f6f8.ngrok.io" />

Refs

• ngrok
• ngrok npm
• picamera web streaming