You know, I’ve been messing around with this idea of creating a super simple “I can watch you” type of thing, and I gotta say, it turned out to be way easier than I thought. It’s more of a fun little experiment than anything serious, but it’s pretty cool to see how it all comes together.
Get webcam working
First things first, I needed to get my hands on a webcam stream. For that purpose, I used a simple HTML and a little Javascript code, to get my webcam working.
The Server-Side Magic
Okay, so the frontend is showing the video, but how do we get that video to someone else? That’s where the server comes in.I chose Python, with Flask,It’s simple, and I just like it better.
I start by using a while loop to capture images from the webcam.
Then convert the captured images into a format suitable for sending over the network. The byte stream is a common and efficient way to handle binary data like images.
And then I set up a route that would serve up these images as a stream. It’s like creating a never-ending movie, one frame at a time.
Putting It All Together
So, I’ve got the frontend grabbing the video, and the backend serving it up. The last step was just making sure they talked to each other.I set the source of an image tag on my webpage to the URL of my Flask stream. And boom, there it was. My webcam feed, live on a webpage.
Final thought
It’s a basic setup, sure. There’s no fancy stuff, no security, and it definitely wouldn’t work for anything serious. But as a proof of concept? It’s awesome. It shows you how surprisingly easy it is to stream video with just a bit of code. I mean, I built this whole thing in like, an afternoon. Gives you a whole new perspective on how all those video streaming services work, you know?
