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GStreamer for video streaming

GStreamer is the lowest latency alternative for streaming video from the drone to your laptop.

Installing GStreamer

To run the streaming pipeline in the next section you will need a runtime installation of GStreamer. The instructions below show the basic steps for installing GStreamer on the most common operating systems. You can find more in depth instruction for your specific operating system in the GStreamer docs.

Windows

On Windows the basic installation steps are:

  1. Download the relevant installer for your computer from https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download . Using the latest stable relase should be fine, at the time of writing that is 1.16.1 runtime installer
  2. Run the installer. When asked to choose a setup type choose to do a complete installation. This is because some plugins that are needed for the basic pipeline later are not included if you choose to install the typical setup
  3. To run GStreamer commands form the terminal, GStreamer must be added to the PATH environment variable. This can be done from the advanced system settings. Add %GSTREAMER_1_0_ROOT_X86_64%\bin to path. Alternatively you can choose to run gst-launch-1.0.exe from the folder it is installed in, typically C:\gstreamer\1.0\x86_64\bin
Mac OS

On Mac OS GStreamer and its plugins can be installed using brew 

brew install gstreamer gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-ugly gst-libav

Linux

On Ubuntu and Debian GStreamer and its plugins can be installed using apt. 

apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-0 gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-doc \
gstreamer1.0-tools gstreamer1.0-x gstreamer1.0-alsa

You can test the installation by trying the basic pipeline from the next section when connected to a drone. Or with

gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc ! autovideosink

Basic streaming pipeline

After installing you can run this pipeline in your terminal:

Windows 
gst-launch-1.0 rtspsrc location=rtsp://192.168.1.101:8554/test latency=0 ! rtph264depay ! avdec_h264 ! videoconvert ! fpsdisplaysink sync=false
Linux and macOS 
gst-launch-1.0 rtspsrc location=rtsp://192.168.1.101:8554/test latency=0 \
    ! rtph264depay \
    ! avdec_h264 \
    ! videoconvert \
    ! fpsdisplaysink sync=false

Running the pipeline will open a window with the camera stream and information about packet loss and camera frame rate.

External camera streaming pipeline

If you have a X3 drone with an external camera connected you can use the following pipeline:

Windows 
gst-launch-1.0 rtspsrc location=rtsp://192.168.1.101:8555/guestport_cam latency=0 ! rtph264depay ! avdec_h264 ! videoconvert ! autovideosink sync=false
Linux and macOS 
gst-launch-1.0 rtspsrc location=rtsp://192.168.1.101:8555/guestport_cam latency=0 \
    ! rtph264depay \
    ! avdec_h264 \
    ! videoconvert \
    ! autovideosink sync=false

Running the pipeline will open a window with the external camera stream.