As you all know, much of what one wants to do on the public Internet involves encrypted communications... https. Our local ARES group is pretty new to practical deployments of AREDN. We got around this issue for having some access to the Internet from the field using the mesh network by putting a raspberry Pi at the network edge and using VNC to remote control the RPI's web browser. We were a bit surprised by the RPI running short on horsepower to access a particular website we were interested in (which tracked some participants on a map), but other than that, it worked fine. The same RPI was running our PBX, so we may have been expecting a bit much of it
But my question here is the next step we might want to take... being able to stream video over the mesh network... and to the public Internet... live. Is there a practical way to accomplish that while still keeping encrypted traffic off of the mesh network? Short pre-recorded video clips might be accomplished in much the same way I described above, but doing live streaming would seem to require a different approach. I've never been very good at figuring out that "Swiss army knife of video"... ffmpeg... but maybe there would be a way to use it as the "middle man" on an edge computer?
Dave
But my question here is the next step we might want to take... being able to stream video over the mesh network... and to the public Internet... live. Is there a practical way to accomplish that while still keeping encrypted traffic off of the mesh network? Short pre-recorded video clips might be accomplished in much the same way I described above, but doing live streaming would seem to require a different approach. I've never been very good at figuring out that "Swiss army knife of video"... ffmpeg... but maybe there would be a way to use it as the "middle man" on an edge computer?
Dave
He used one PC (not sure if it was a desktop, pi, etc) to download the RTSP stream from a video camera and resend it to YouTube.
You can easily accomplish all this without putting https on the mesh by that streaming PC being on a node with a WAN port active. I’m a big fan of follow all the regulations especially when it’s so easy to do.
A node that has a WAN port (with mesh GW disabled) will allow content from its LAN port to be routed to the internet but not allow anyone else on the mesh internet access.
With a deployment like this follow ANY howto that discusses streaming a networked IP can to YouTube and you should be fine.
To decrease load on the PC most cameras let you choose the feed settings so you could set it to stream to you in a format Youtube accepts natively so it doesn’t need transcoding.
More recently we streamed two cameras along a Red Cross charity bike race out onto our mesh network. I took them and retransmitted them to YouTube per the article. For that effort I used a Linux workstation (an older Dell desktop running Fedora Linux)
Prerequisites:
You need one YouTube channel for each stream that's going to be active. I had two simultaneous streams, so set up two YouTube channels and streamed them to YouTube. At the Red Cross Chapter house they displayed the streams alternatively to a big screen TV. They reported it worked well.
(As an aside, watching a street waiting for bicyclists to come along is pretty boring. Recommend you orient your camera to include something to look at :-) )
Hope this helps.
Dave