How to stream video using AWS Kinesis Video Streaming - Docker on Linux?

This article talks about how you can stream video using AWS Kinesis Video from one machine to AWS. We will use the AWS Kinesis Producer library for this and then view the livestream on AWS.

📚 Prerequisites

This article assumes that you already know

• Basics of AWS, AWS Kinesis, Python and Linux
• Cursory understanding of Docker and Docker Compose

Let's first get some of the basics out of the way.

• AWS Kinesis - essentially a tunnel which lets you send things
• Kinesis Producer - the thingy that creates stuff to send through the tunnel

This means to get video streaming to work we have to first setup our Producer make sure it is sending things to Kinesis, that's what we will be doing here.

Note - Here, the video source mounted at /dev/video0 will be streamed to AWS, this can be updated in the docker-compose.yml file. Before starting with the next steps make sure /dev/video0 is the desired video source and that it's working correctly.

👷🏽‍♂️ Steps

1. Create a Video Stream Using the AWS CLI

1. Install & setup the AWS Command Line Interface

2. Run the following Create-Stream command in the AWS CLI:

aws kinesisvideo create-stream --stream-name "Producer-Stream" --data-retention-in-hours "1"

1. Send Video to the Kinesis Stream

1. Clone my Github Repo git clone https://github.com/CT83/AWS-Kinesis-Video-Streaming.git
2. Create .env with client id, & secret for your IAM user Refer the .example.env - Read More
3. docker-compose up --build

3. View the Video Stream

1. Login to AWS Console
2. Navigate to Kinesis Video Streams, Video Streams and Producer-Stream
3. Check different regions if you can't see anything in your current one. Mine in us-west-2

🐛 Appendix

Now, let's get a little bit of a background on what this repository is actually doing, and it is not doing much.

Dockerfile

First, let's take a look at the Dockerfile, it's simply starting from a base debian image, installing build tools and Gstreamer and building the C++ producer. In the last step we are simply running this producer when the container starts.

FROM debian:buster

# Install Requirements

RUN apt-get update -y && apt-get install git build-essential cmake g++ wget curl -y

RUN apt-get install libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev liblog4cplus-1.1-9 liblog4cplus-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-base-apps gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-tools -y

# Build Producer

RUN git clone https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-producer-sdk-cpp.git

WORKDIR /amazon-kinesis-video-streams-producer-sdk-cpp

RUN git checkout 824de900c2d4b42a403319ace5de9d68ec88b171

WORKDIR /amazon-kinesis-video-streams-producer-sdk-cpp/kinesis-video-native-build

RUN ./min-install-script

CMD ["/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-producer-sdk-cpp/kinesis-video-native-build/kinesis_video_gstreamer_sample_app", "Producer-Stream","/dev/video0"]

References

• https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-producer-sdk-cpp

docker-compose.yml

The docker-compose file simply sets a container name, mounts the /dev/video0 inside the container and sends the environment variables to the container

version: "3.3"

services:

  producer:

    container_name: aws-kvs-producer

    build: .

    devices:

      - /dev/video0:/dev/video0

    env_file:

      - .env

References

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kinesisvideostreams/latest/dg/gs-createstream.html