Kinesis video streams is one of the easiest way to stream your videos to internet. We will try it today using a raspberry pi.

I am using the below hardware for streaming video.

Hardware that I will use:

Raspberry pi - https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/

Camera module - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L82XBNM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Steps:

1. On raspberry pi

Enable camera by running below and selecting appropriate options

raspi-config

Install dependencies

sudo apt-get install byacc flex
sudo apt-get install cmake
git clone https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-producer-sdk-cpp --recursive

Note: Do not miss –recursive flag. If you miss it it will result in compilation errors later due to missing submodules.

optional

git checkout 5080cba # checking out to this commit will ensure that the steps below will work (Can't guarantee submodules though).

cd amazon-kinesis-video-streams-producer-sdk-cpp/ && mkdir build && cd build

time cmake .. -DBUILD_GSTREAMER_PLUGIN=ON

It took 17 minutes to run on my raspberry pi 4b

time make

This took another 1 minute 33 seconds

This will produce some binaries in your build folder like:

1. kinesis_video_gstreamer_audio_video_sample_app
2. kinesis_video_gstreamer_sample_app
3. kinesis_video_gstreamer_sample_multistream_app

You can use the above ninaries to push video streams to a kinesis video stream on AWS.

Let’s set the credentials in environment variables first

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<Access Key ID> 
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<Secret Access Key> 

Now let’s stream

kinesis_video_gstreamer_sample_app <name of your kinesis video stream>

2. On your laptop

Get the stream viewer:

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-media-viewer

open the index.html file in browser. Pass the

1. AWS credentials
2. stream name

Click “Start Playback”. You are done.