Raspberry Pi as chew.tv Streaming Camera

After having moved recently I started to think about having a proper camera setup for my attic studio. I’ve been using a action cam that doubles as webcam, but image quality cannot be altered at all, leading to some issues with white balance mainly. I still have a spare raspberry pi somewhere, that I will be trying to convert into a small streaming box. Normally I use OBS and BUTT on my serato laptop to connect to both chew.tv and our clouwdnine icecast. In OBS I overlay chat and a logo to end up with a nice streaming setup.

I’m hoping that with the Raspberry Pi I can put the box with camera nice and close to the setup and use a cable to connect to the USB sound card next to the decks.

I hope that the raspberry pi camera module provides good enough image quality. I will be using gstreamer and possibly nginx to send audio and video to chew.tv and audio only to our icecast server.

Video encoding through omxh264enc

Some resources I found for streaming:

• http://www.raspberry-projects.com/pi/pi-hardware/raspberry-pi-camera/streaming-video-using-gstreamer
• http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/26675/modern-way-to-stream-h-264-from-the-raspberry-cam

Using omxh264enc for gstreamer:

• https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=59412
• http://rpiquadcopter.blogspot.com.es/2014/06/raspberry-pi-camera-module-video.html

And using nginx for forwarding audio/video to multiple streams:

• http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/174603-how-to-live-stream-to-multiple-services-with-a-rtmp-server/

The basic setup will be capturing audio and video, muxing it into a h264/AAC .mp4 stream which I send to nginx, where it is split into an audio/video stream that is forwarded to chew and an audio stream that is forwarded to clouwdnine. I’ll try to create a control page in nginx that will allow me to control and monitor both streams from my phone or another computer.

A challenge I’m unsure about is the chat overlay. Gstreamer allows text overlay, but I don’t know to what extent I’ll be able to overlay a stream…

If this idea works out, the next cool thing would definitely be using several Pi’s to get a multi-camera setup.