MultiStream: A Simple and Fast Multiple Cameras Visual Monitor and Directly Streaming

TL;DR

MultiStream is a lightweight, fast toolkit for real-time monitoring and streaming of multiple cameras, automatically managing display layouts and protocol selection, suitable for various streaming configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, efficient streaming toolkit that integrates FFmpeg, Tkinter, OpenCV, and PIL for multi-camera monitoring and streaming with automatic layout and protocol analysis.

Findings

Achieves real-time multi-camera streaming with automatic layout arrangement.

Supports multiple communication protocols for streaming.

Allows saving and loading configuration settings via JSON files.

Abstract

Monitoring and streaming is one of the most important applications for the real time cameras. The research of this has provided a novel design idea that uses the FFmpeg and Tkinter, combining with the libraries: OpenCV and PIL to develop a simple but fast streaming toolkit MultiSteam that can achieve the function of visible monitoring streaming for multiple simultaneously. MultiStream is able to automatically arrange the layout of the displays of multiple camera windows and intelligently analyze the input streaming URL to select the correct corresponding streaming communication protocol. Multiple cameras can be streamed with different communication protocols or the same protocol. Besides, the paper has tested the different streaming speeds for different protocols in camera streaming. MultiStream is able to gain the information of media equipment on the computer. The configuration information for media-id selection and multiple cameras streaming can be saved as json files.