Live streaming video and sound with raspberry pi

Question

I am all new to raspberry pi, but think I could use it for a small project that I just can across.

The thing is that I have to put up a nest box with a built-in camera, but unfortunately it is a rather old school setup—with RCA and scart cables and all that. So, instead of having it connected directly to the TV, I would like to make it wireless and be able to stream from the web (E.g. YouTube).

In the picture below, you can see the wireless receiver that gets the video and audio signal from the nest box, and the provided cables (RCA and scart).

So my question is, if anybody can point me in the right directing for this project. What hardware do I need, and what are some common pitfalls, that I should know of? Basically, any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I think what you're looking for is something like an EasyCap USB adapter.

The RCA inputs accept standard analogue signals (white/red for L/R audio, yellow for video), and the device should register as a standard webcam when plugged into the Pi.

There are many devices which do the same job (analogue to digital USB video converters) and I suspect they won't all use the same chipset. You may have to experiment a little to get everything working as it should. There are reports from several years ago of issues getting certain chipsets to work properly with the Pi, but Google hits on the topic seem to have dried up a little in the last year or two. You can read over some of the issues you might face in this post on raspberry-at-home.com.

Having gotten the video signal from your nest box into the Pi, all you need to do is stream it. We have literally hundreds of questions on video streaming already. It's a fairly large topic, but I would recommend starting with some of the suggestions against the question 'How can I stream H.264 video from the Raspberry Pi camera module via a web server?'. You'll need to modify some of the commands to work with a USB camera device rather than the Pi camera module.