Media source extension video player for live streaming mp4

[kevinGodell]

Is there any advantage of building a video player yourself, instead of using an existing one. I have been experimenting a few weeks ago with video.js in the dashboard. They have quite some plugins already, e.g. for live streaming. And the user interface is quite customizable: I have e.g. been playing with a svg overlay on top of it (e.g. to show leds for recording, and other kind of stuff). Reason why I wanted to go that way, is because I experimented already some time ago to build my own node-red-contrib-ui-camera-viewer. But it is quite some work if you need to build it from scratch.

The main advantage is that it is simple. The popular video players have too many features that are not needed. We already have the playable mp4 chunks, just have to feed them to media source player to get video. No complicated configurations needed or writing files to disk or multi bitrate streams or rewinding. Just (near) live video.

I assume you want to build a UI node so we can use it in the Node-RED dashboard?

yes

If you build a UI node for the Node-RED dashboard, then the whole websocket stuff is already in place for you. And the dashboard offers functions that you can use to intercept and manipulate data to be send.

Are you saying that if i wire a server-side node to a UI node, that the data will be sent without me needing to create my own websocket or http server? If yes, then that is the info I am looking for. I need to get a hold of a hollowed out simplistic template of a UI node that can receive data via the msg.payload.

However I experienced already many times that pushing large amounts of data through the websocket channel will make your UI unresponsive. On the other hand when you - instead of pushing through the websocket channel - let the UI pull the video chunks then it works much smoother...

Without me knowing the finer details about your situation, perhaps it was due to sending 5 jpegs per second or something similar? Sending mp4 chunks should use less bandwidth and will at the fastest rate be sent maybe every 2 seconds, which is usually the smallest chunk duration based on my experiments with rtsp cams.

But - based on your large experience in the area - I assume that you have good experiences with websockets for mp4 chunks in other applications??

My personal cctv system at my house uses socket.io to deliver mp4 and jpeg for 14 cams. Also, a variation of my video player is used on a very popular nodejs based cctv solution.