This is basically an AWS SAM project with the purpose to make snapshots from our web cams that are only available as an RTSP stream.
So far apparently only ffmpeg is enabled to make this possible. After a bit of research and experimenting, it turned out the following ffmpeg (cli) command does the job well:
ffmpeg -y -rtsp_transport tcp -i 'rtsp://the:[email protected]/sub/path' -frames:v 1 rwypic.jpg
Since ffmpeg is an application that required a couple of dependencies, a simple Lambda does not the trick. During research, I stumbled upon a blog post that leveraged a tool called Exodus which greatly simplifies the process of relocating native binaries from one Linux system to another
. Still, that felt too much of an overhead.
With a fresh start a couple of weeks later when I looked at the issue again, I finally found what I thought was exactly the thin I needed: a ready-to-use "Lambda layer" that could be installed right from the SAR: @gojko's ffmpeg-aws-lambda-layer.
So basically the application declared in template.yml
has a Lambda in place that is triggered by about every 10 minutes. This will just invoke the ffmpeg command mentioned above for two of our web cams and save the pictures in an S3 bucket.
The same lambda that does that also makes use of Amazon Rekognitions' detectFaces
functionality and blurs the respective image portions.
After storing the picture, the S3 bucket is accessible with a CloudFront distribution so that these pictures can be served into the web.
To deploy,
$ sam deploy
To test the lambda locally,
$ sam build && sam local invoke SnapshotFileFunction --env-vars local-debug-env-vars.json
Main credits go to @gojko for his repository mentioned above; it also contained examples that enabled me to get started on the whole AWS SAM stuff.
@veelenga's aws-lambda-face-blur repository got me inspired and started to blur the faces that are shot on the web cam stream. Since the webcam images are supposed to be publicy viewable on the internet I thought this was a nice idea to add for some additional privacy.
Another lot of the scaffolding has been done by the sam init
wizards; bear with me (or make a PR) if there's some leftovers I didn't clean up.
- These scripts: MIT
- FFmpeg: http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html