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Armbian supported board for video streaming


AntonioPisano

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Hello everyone!

 

I am here to ask for knowledgeable suggestion: I am looking for a possibly armbian supported board capable of hardware transcoding a single 1920x1080 hdmi source at 15 fps. Source is coming from a usb UVC video grabber in raw yuv422 format.

Hard requirements is to produce a rtsp stream at original resolution/framerate of the source.

Soft requirements is to have also an HTML5 embeddable stream to use in a web application without needing a plugin. Tipically, this would be a MP4 (h.264 codec) and a webm (V8 codec) streams (possibly both to ensure best browser compatibility). This would be used for monitoring purposes by the user, so 5fps (maybe less) and 640x480 could suffice. Of course the more, the better.

 

If possible, I would go for an industrial grade solution, as e.g. Olimex can provide.

 

I fiddled a bit with A20 Olimex boards, but they don't seem suitable for my needs. I guess, due to poor software support for hardware h.264 encoder they provide. I have tried cedrus264 ffmpeg versions around, but beside its other limitations, seem like they will support only up to 720p and honestyl I would prefer to not introduce such a fragile dependency in my solution (meaning forked, unmaintained ffmpeg version). webm hardware support is a total no go on A20 as far as I could see. http://linux-sunxi.org/A20

 

I might give it a try with new Olimex A64 board, as should give me h.264 and V8 encoding support http://linux-sunxi.org/A64, but I fear software support is somewhat the same as A20 right now, right?

 

As far as I understand, https://www.armbian.com/cubox-i/ could be suitable: h.264 hardware and software support. No V8 encoding, or industrial grade though...

 

Any tip? Is something like this even worth trying on the kind of board you support?

 

Thanks in advance

Antonio

Edited by AntonioPisano
Clarified requirements, made clearer that I have gone already through some google before :-)
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No idea of your use case or if this is a commercial project or not so this may be overkill ...

 

I would suggest an Odroid XU4. Slightly more expensive than the usual AllWinner boards but far more powerful and with support for the MFC hardware.  I was using it with an 18MP USB3 camera which gives you some idea of its potential. I believe (but have not recently checked) that the distros are generally running a much up to date kernel. There are some decent usage examples about: https://github.com/GT-Robotics/odroid_vlink/tree/master/v4l2-mfc-encoder for example.

 

Best wishes

 

Jerry.

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Many thanks for your answer g40.

 

The project for which we are evaluating this hardware is a lecturecasting solution for a university. Currently the user interface is implemented with technology we don't master and we would like to replace it with native HTML interface. In order to achieve so we must be able to provide a stream of the devices (camera and screen from the lecturer) that can be put in a webpage. To my knowledge there are only 3 alternatives:

  • rtsp stream + VLC plugin (currently deprecated)
  • HLS or other HTML5 format (webm format, might introduce big latency)
  • webrtc (usually implying some additional streamer/transcoder component)

Best solution would be for the devices grabbing the signal to give us already both rtsp low latency and HLS web embeddable sources. This way we avoid some difficult and costly transcoding and there would be no need for additional hardware whatsoever. In case this is not possible we would resolve for some transcoding device, that could be centralized or on the field (and in this case I would still find some board based approacs interesting).

 

Thanks for the pointer regarding odroid xu4. Seems like a powerful device. That you know, transcoding is possible through C only or there exist some support in mainstream software as ffmpeg and vlc? No need to say that this would make implementation of the eventual transcoder much easier.

 

All the best

 

Antonio

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