uv4l WebRTC vs rpi-webrtc-streamer

I have spent the past two days working with the uv4l driver to get WebRTC working. I eventually got everything to work with three major issues

  1. I could not get the transmitted quality to anything close to what I needed
  2. I could not get rid of the the watermark which was put over the video
  3. The complete CPU utilization for 640×480 was above 90% and caused issues.

Another slightly annoying issue was that I had to re-install Jessie after I found out that uv4l is currently not available for Raspbian stretch lite. I could only find the full version for Jessie, which requires at least a 8GB microSD card. And off I went to replace my 4GB microSD card.

On the positive side I installed rpi-webrtc-streamer from github and was able to look at the results in realtime right away.

Unlike uv4l, which is based off OpenWebRTC from Ericson, rpi-webrtc-streamer is based off the Native Code from www.WebRTC.org which seems to be a bit more responsive than uv4l.

Here are the steps I had to do to get things to work.

bash>  # First create a home for the code
bash>  mkdir utils && cd utils
bash>  git clone https://github.com/kclyu/rpi-webrtc-streamer.git

You can find the Android App under rpi-webrtc-streamer/misc/AppRTCMobile.apk
But first lets avoid the work and go straight to installing the software.

Go to https://github.com/kclyu/rpi-webrtc-streamer-deb and download the appropriate deb-package.

bash>  dpkg -i rws_xxx_armhf.deb
bash>  sudo systemctl start rws

Then simply point your browser at http://<IP Address>:8889/native-peerconnection/

Raspberry PI camera
Raspberry PI camera

I will be going through the setup and usage of the Android App which is part of rpi-webrtc-sstreamer in one of my next blog entries.

3 thoughts on “uv4l WebRTC vs rpi-webrtc-streamer”

  1. Hi i am interrested in webrtc on Raspberry Pi… i also try rpi-webrtc-streamer but i can’t make streaming audio and video in full duplex… have you try to do it and do you have a description ? Thx. Vincent.

  2. I followed your tutorial, but on the webpage it only shows 415, instead of camera videostream why is that?

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