Android: Stream Camera Data and Write it to Server

Question

I stream webcam data to my client. I can see the data is arriving by listening on('data'). However, when I create it I am not able to view it and it's probably garbage data or missing some headers. VLC cannot play it. My next step is to make it real-time streamable to browser. What am I doing wrong? ``` net = require('net'); fs = require('fs'); // Start a TCP Server net.createServer(function (socket) { console.log("client connected"); var file = fs.createWriteStream("temp.mp4"); socket.pipe(file, {end: false}); socket.on('end', function(){ console.log("ended"); }); }).listen(5000); ``` I tested to see if did it really capture video output: ``` $ mediainfo temp.mp4 General Complete name : temp.mp4 Format : H.263 Format version : H.263 File size : 126 KiB Video Format : H.263 Width : pixel0 Height : pixel0 Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Compression mode : Lossy ``` And this is the following Android code for setting `mediaRecorder` (Assume socket is conne…

Accepted Answer

There are a few open source projects that solve this problem, such as Spydroid (browser/VLC streaming) and Android IP Camera (browser streaming). Your implementation seems similar to Spydroid, so maybe you can adapt some of its code.

The central problem is that `MediaRecorder` is writing raw video frames into the socket. It needs to wait until the video is finished to write the headers, but they need to appear at the beginning of the file. Since the socket is not seekable, the headers can't be written at the correct location. The projects linked above deal with this problem by packetizing the stream into RTSP (Spydroid) or "streaming" a series of still images to the browser (Android IP Camera).

Android: Stream Camera Data and Write it to Server

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