I have installed ffmpeg and mjpeg-streamer. The latter reads a .jpg file from /tmp/stream and outputs it via http onto a website, so I can stream whatever is in that folder through a web browser.
I wrote a bash script that continuously captures a frame from the webcam and puts it in /tmp/stream:
while true
do
ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -i /dev/v4l/by-id/usb-Microsoft_Microsoft_LifeCam_VX-5000-video-index0 -vframes 1 /tmp/stream/pic.jpg
done
This works great, but is very slow (~1 fps). In the hopes of speeding it up, I want to use a single ffmpeg command which continuously updates the .jpg at, let's say 10 fps. What I tried was the following:
ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -r 10 -i /dev/v4l/by-id/usb-Microsoft_Microsoft_LifeCam_VX-5000-video-index0 /tmp/stream/pic.jpg
However this - understandably - results in the error message:
[image2 @ 0x1f6c0c0] Could not get frame filename number 2 from pattern '/tmp/stream/pic.jpg'
av_interleaved_write_frame(): Input/output error
...because the output pattern is bad for a continuous stream of images.
Is it possible to stream to just one jpg with ffmpeg?
Thanks...
You can use the -update
option:
ffmpeg -y -f v4l2 -i /dev/video0 -update 1 -r 1 output.jpg
From the image2 file muxer documentation:
-update number If number is nonzero, the filename will always be interpreted as just a filename, not a pattern, and this file will be continuously overwritten with new images.