I love doing things the hard way, and I wanted a solution for streaming my PoE RTMP Reolink cameras remotely which I have set up as a security solution. It had to be self-contained and low power, and require minimal configuration.

The Hardware

For my Hardware I chose a Banana Pi R2 with 1GB RAM and SATA + PCIe slots, running OpenWRT. I chose this over a more standard Linux box because of the following reasons:

1. It is low power (I intend to run the setup on solar)
2. It can accept an LTE modem for remote access
3. I can plug in an SSD or HDD for recording video to
4. It has a built-in ethernet switch and WiFi capability

For my cameras I am using the Reolink (TBD) as these are low-cost and don’t require any kind of cloud subscription nonsense.

The Software

I chose OpenWRT over Linux as it provides a great networking / firewalling solution, which means I can easily wall off the cameras from the internet so they can’t communicate out and join the Internet of Shit.

With the Banana Pi, it is able to run docker and handle quite a bit of throughput.

To configure everything I am using Ansible, as it provides me with a repeatable script to set everything up again if I was to lose my hardware, and it serves as valuable documentation as to what I even did on the device. I won’t be covering the Ansible script here, but I can highly recommend it despite the high learning curve!

To actually stream the video, I’m using a little-known plugin to Nginx (nginx-rtmp) that adds native RTMP support and translates it to HLS/MPEG-TS (the same tech used for Twitch and other real-time streaming platforms!)

Unfortunately this plugin has to be compiled from source, which is where Docker comes into play - Docker provides a repeatable and self-contained environment for building things from scratch.

Architecture

TODO.

Cameras -> PoE Switch -> Banana Pi -> Internal LAN -> Docker -> NGINX-RTMP

NGINX-RTMP -> Docker -> WAN -> My Phone

Compiling Nginx-RTMP

  - name: Copy docker script
    become: yes
    copy:
      src: docker/nginx-rtmp.dockerfile
      dest: ~/nginx-rtmp/Dockerfile
      mode: 'u=rw,g=rw,o=r'
    when: not result.images

  - name: Build docker image
    become: yes
    docker_image:
      name: nginx-rtmp
      source: build
      build:
        path: ~/nginx-rtmp
        dockerfile: Dockerfile
        #dockerfile: nginx-rtmp.dockerfile
        args:
          ENABLED_MODULES: 'rtmp'
      state: present