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Comment by beryilma | Hacker News Reader

With my limited knowledge of network technologies, I still found it relatively easy to setup a Pi Zero + Raspberry Pi Camera Module system to stream video over RTSP to VLC software on my desktop or phone. The stream quality is pretty crappy, but I am hoping that, at least, this would not send my video to some Chinese servers. Anybody else experimented with such setup?

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I've been playing for a while with various *Pi like boards (mostly Orange Pis) and the ustreamer software which is very light and well suited for small boards like those.

https://github.com/pikvm/ustreamer

Yes, most of our early product prototyping was Pi-based. I've experimented with cameras, parallel stream processing, opencv, even voice assistants. It's a great platform. Happy to answer any questions. Also, lots of tutorials (on Medium and YT) for your exact setup.

I looked at some tutorials and videos, but I can't seem to be able to create a smooth stream no matter what I try: different frame rates, different resolutions, etc. RTSP streaming works reliably for me, but the stream is always choppy. Have you had a better experience?

You mentioned VLC playback is choppy on your desktop or phone. Have you tried local playback (VLC on your Raspberry Pi that's doing the capturing), is it smooth there? Also, what does CPU and memory usage look like when you a) play locally, b) stream RTSP over the network to your desktop/phone. These should steps should help narrow this down.

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