h264_video_encoder

Overview

This package provides a ROS Node that will encode a stream of images into an H264 video stream.

Keywords: ROS, AWS, Kinesis

License

The source code is released under LGPL 2.1. However, this package uses h264_encoder_core which incorporates several different encoding components which may further restrict the license. By default, x264 is used for software encoding, thereby applying GPL to all of h264_video_encoder.

Author: AWS RoboMaker
Affiliation: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

RoboMaker cloud extensions rely on third-party software licensed under open-source licenses and are provided for demonstration purposes only. Incorporation or use of RoboMaker cloud extensions in connection with your production workloads or commercial product(s) or devices may affect your legal rights or obligations under the applicable open-source licenses. AWS does not provide support for this cloud extension. You are solely responsible for how you configure, deploy, and maintain this cloud extension in your workloads or commercial product(s) or devices.

Supported ROS Distributions

• Kinetic
• Melodic

Installation

Building from Source

To build from source you’ll need to create a new workspace, clone and checkout the latest release branch of this repository, install all the dependencies, and compile. If you need the latest development features you can clone from the master branch instead of the latest release branch. While we guarantee the release branches are stable, the master should be considered to have an unstable build due to ongoing development.

• Install build tool: please refer to colcon installation guide

• Create a ROS workspace and a source directory

    mkdir -p ~/ros-workspace/src
  

• Clone the package into the source directory .

    cd ~/ros-workspace/src
    git clone https://github.com/aws-robotics/kinesisvideo-encoder-ros1.git -b release-latest
  

• Install dependencies

    cd ~/ros-workspace 
    sudo apt-get update && rosdep update
    rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y
  

Note: If building the master branch instead of a release branch you may need to also checkout and build the master branches of the packages this package depends on.

• Build the packages

    cd ~/ros-workspace && colcon build
  

• Configure ROS library Path

    source ~/ros-workspace/install/setup.bash
  

• Build and run the unit tests

    colcon build --packages-select h264_video_encoder --cmake-target tests
    colcon test --packages-select h264_video_encoder h264_encoder_core && colcon test-results --all
  

Building on Cloud9 - Cross Compilation

• In RoboMaker’s Cloud9, start with an empty workspace and in the Cloud9 console:

   # build docker image
   cd /opt/robomaker/cross-compilation-dockerfile/
   sudo bin/build_image.bash  # this step will take a while
  
   # create workspace
   mkdir -p ~/environment/robot_ws/src
   cd ~/environment/robot_ws/src
   git clone https://github.com/aws-robotics/kinesisvideo-encoder-common.git
   git clone https://github.com/aws-robotics/kinesisvideo-encoder-ros1.git
  
   # run docker image
   cd ..
   sudo docker run -v $(pwd):/ws -it ros-cross-compile:armhf
  

• Now you’re inside the cross-compilation docker container

   # build the workspace
   cd ws
   apt update
   rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y  # this step will take a while
   colcon build --build-base armhf_build --install-base armhf_install
   colcon bundle --build-base armhf_build --install-base armhf_install --bundle-base armhf_bundle --apt-sources-list /opt/cross/apt-sources.yaml   # this step will take a while
   exit
  

• Now you’re oustide the cross-compilation docker container

   # for more on copying s3 buckets see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3/cp.html
   aws s3 cp armhf_bundle/output.tar.gz s3://<bucket_name_in_your_robomaker_account>/h264_video_encoder.armhf.tar
  

Launch Files

A launch file called h264_video_encoder.launch is included in this package. The launch file uses the following arguments:

An example launch file called sample_application.launch is included in this project that gives an example of how you can include this node in your project and provide it with arguments.

Usage

Running the node

To launch the H264 encoder node, you can run the following command:

roslaunch h264_video_encoder sample_application.launch

Configuration File and Parameters

An example configuration file called sample_configuration.yaml is provided for running the H264 encoder node on a Raspberry Pi based system. When the parameters are absent in the ROS parameter server, default values are used, thus all parameters are optional. See table below for details.

Node Details

Published Topics

| Topic Name | Message Type | Description | | ———- | ———— | ———– | | Configurable (default=”video/encoded”) | kinesis_video_msgs/KinesisVideoFrame | The node will publish to a topic of a given name. Each message being published contains a chunk of the video stream, usually per video frame. |

Subscribed Topics

| Topic Name | Message Type | Description | | ———- | ———— | ———– | | Configurable (default=”/raspicam_node/image”) | sensor_msgs/Image | The node will subscribe to a topic of a given name. The data is expected to be a stream of images from a source (such as a Raspberry Pi camera). |