Ever had the desire to see if someone was on your computer? Wished you could get on there and just see through your webcam? Me neither, but one day I got curious and wanted to see if/how it could be done. It's kind of a beast of a command, but I just put it in a script which makes it very easy to use.
What you need:
ffmpeg
vlc (or mplayer)
Here's the script.( I actually got it from here. Then just changed it to use vlc because it seems to work better for me.
#! /bin/bash
B="100K"
F="ogg"
ssh <remote_host> ffmpeg -b $B -an -f video4linux2 \
-s 320x240 -r 10 -i /dev/video0 -b $B -f $F - \
| vlc -
I would break it down for you but I haven't gotten familiar enough with the ffmpeg command. So all I really do is copy and paste, and I only have a general idea of what it is doing. It worked when I copied it so I didn't need to figure it out to change it. If it isn't working, the first thing I would check is the device name in case it's not /dev/video0
vlc -
just tells vlc to read from stdin.(the pipe)
In my script I substituted <remote_host> for $1 so from the command line I can just run
$./script_name <remote_host>
since I wanted to be able to use it on different computers/webcams instead of just one (if I get more than one webcam on one computer then I may also have /dev/video0 passed as a parameter.
You can change the size with the -s flag I changed mine from 320x240 to 640x480 and it streamed fine.
It may take a few seconds for the picture to actually come through and be received, (I know it does for me) so once you run it then give it a little minute to get that data through to vlc.
So there it is. Just for fun.
