koudevoeten

koudevoeten is a very small, fast, completely free and open source command-line software implemented in C++ and designed for people who want a simple tool to stream MJPEG videos from any V4L (Video4Linux) compatible device, through a built-in web server.

Supported web browsers and requirements

The software lets users to view MJPEG video streams with a supported web browser. At the moment, it has been tested with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Konqueror, Chromium, and Safari web browsers.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with the Internet Explorer web browser used in the Microsoft Windows operating systems because of some issues. The application requires the libpng12-dev package to work properly.

Getting started with koudevoeten

Being a very small software, koudevoeten is easily installable and convenient to use on any distribution on Linux. To get started, first download the latest version from its official website (see link at the end of the article) or via Softoware by clicking the download button above.

Save the archive somewhere on your computer, extract its contents with an archive manager tool, open a Terminal app and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softoware/koudevoeten-0.6).

In the terminal emulator window, run the ‘make’ command to compile koudevoeten. After a successful compilation, run the ‘sudo make install’ command if you’re a privileged user or the ‘make install’ command as root to install it system wide.

Command-line options

After installation, run the ‘koudevoeten --help’ command to view the available command-line options. These will allow you to specify the device used to read the MJPEG files, the network adapter to listen on, as well as the TCP port to listen on for either of the VNC or HTTP servers.

In addition, you will be able to set the screen width and height, the frame rate, or the JPEG quality, to fork the program in the background, to specify the file to write an image to if the signal SIGUSR1 is caught, print timestamps at a given position, enable workarounds or JPEG mode.

What is new in this release:

• Enabled TCP fast open

What is new in version 0.5:

• Improved raspberry pi native camera support:
• workaround for exposure bug in video4linux driver
• support for receiving jpeg encoded frames from camera encoded by gpu (this dramatically reduces the CPU load)
• Now only sends a new frame/image when streaming MJPEG/MPNG when the source (camera) delivers a new frame (no longer faking frames), this reduces network traffic

Requirements:

• libpng