Popular industrial and home monitoring systems are based on a central media server that connects cameras with the end users. This architecture is fine for most use cases, however have some drawbacks such as: higher latency, privacy concerns (if you use 3rd party server), and high cost.
In the article we present a peer-to-peer alternative: let's remove a media server and directly access a camera streaming service running on the camera itself.
The project is based on WebRTC for audio and video streaming to a web browser. Access to the server over the Internet is possible thanks to Husarnet VPN Client.
Here are some of the advantages of our solution:
- low latency over the Internet
- simple infrastructure architecture (only your laptop and Internet camera)
- quick setup (everything is dockerized)
Basically all WebRTC infrastructure is hosted on the Internet camera (Single Board Computer + webcam) together with a simple web server.
