Streaming Video in Remote Panel

[danbranan]

Desired Functionality:  Our laboratory uses LabVIEW 2011 to make science instrumentation such as digital microscopes, spectrometers, etc., available to college students to do remote laboratory assignments.  We need to be able to choose a live video stream from a number of cameras and display it on a VI front panel that is being served up by the LabVIEW web server.  We also need allow the users to pan/tilt or zoom the camera using the VI.  The purpose of this video stream is to allow remote users of the VI to see what is going on in the laboratory in real time.  The video must have low latency and be reasonably high resolution so there is no lag in viewing what is happening as the users control instruments and equipment in the laboratory.

Current Solution:  We use a DataVideo SE-800 video switcher to take in the feeds from up to 4 Sony EVI-D70 cameras.  The switcher can be controlled through LabVIEW in order to allow selection of one of the video feeds.  The selected video is sent to a MOXA V-Port 461 streaming appliance.  When the VI is loaded in a browser by a user, a piece of code placed in the html file uses JAVA to layer the video stream from the MOXA over top of the front panel.  A cartoon showing this physical connectivity is attached as “Current Connectivity.pdf”  The limitations of this are that JAVA introduces some additional complexity and also is a potential security risk.

Desired Solution:  We would like to display the live video feed directly in the Remote Panel, without having to layer it with an external application.  The use of the video switcher and video streamer are not requirements, although it is nice to pull the video from an IP address and it gives us more control over the quality and frame rate of the video stream using the MOXA.  Also, the Sony camera model we are currently using is not a requirement – any pan/tilt/zoom controllable camera will do just as well, but must be high resolution, as these cameras are.  So, if there was a way to connect 1 to 4 cameras directly to the LabVIEW server and select a video feed from any one of them to display in the front panel of the VI, that would be fine.

[USBarnes]

Hi danbranan,

Have you attempted to write any code in LabVIEW for this yet? I've included a couple of links below that might help. One is a forum thread talking about how to stream video in a remote panel. The second is an overview of Remote Panels. Using Remote Panel may not be fast enough to get the quality that you want due to throughput limitations of Remote Panels.

How to streaming video in remote panel:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/How-to-streaming-video-in-remote-panel/td-p/758512

Remote Panels in LabVIEW:

http://www.ni.com/white-paper/4791/en

Hope this helps!