webcam-proxy

Introduction

Sometimes you have web camera behind poor or unreliable network connection. In many cases the web camera itself is quite low-performance and might struggle to serve the video feed or image snapshot in a performant manner.

webcam-proxy is to help in these cases. It acts as reverse proxy for the web camera, caching last image. The application is optimized to serve multiple clients. Both mjpeg and jpeg endpoints are provided.

This is particularly useful when the proxy is behind a good connection, but the web camera is behind low-bandwidth connection.

Features

• stale image detection while showing last image capture
• simple authentication, similar to FOSCAM API using pwd and usr query string parameters

Installation

Cargo

• Install the rust toolchain in order to have cargo installed by following this guide.
• run cargo install webcam-proxy

Configuration

The application takes config file as the argument:

cargo run config.toml

where config.toml is something like

[server]
listen = "127.0.0.1:3000"

[server.auth]
admin = "admin"
user2 = "userpass"

[webcam]
# Example of proxying FOSCAM camera feed
# url = "https://MYWEBCAM/cgi-bin/CGIProxy.fcgi?cmd=snapPicture2&usr=MYUSER&pwd=MYPASSWORD"
url = "https://www.portofhelsinki.fi/webcams/image_00001.jpg?1550313659718"

You can then access the mjpeg feed at http://localhost:3000/stream?usr=admin&pwd=admin and the jpeg at http://localhost:3000/snapshot?usr=admin&pwd=admin.

Deployment

See contrib folder for examples.

nginx configuration

The repository contains nginx.conf configuration example to reverse proxy cmd=snapPicture2 and cmd=GetMJStream to this service, while other endpoints are accessing the backing web camera directly.

By pointing your web camera client to this nginx, you can enjoy the benefits of fast mjpeg and cached jpeg responses, while having access to other functions of FOSCAM web camera (e.g. admin interface).

systemd service setup

example.service is shows how to setup

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Releasing

cargo release --skip-publish and let the github CD pipeline do the rest.