Converting raw frames into webm live stream

Question

I have an ASP.NET application with the following set up:

1. A camera that captures raw RGB frames at a resolution 656x492
2. These frames are processed in my C# code (with some simple image processing)
3. The raw image is stored in a byte array (as well as wrapped in a Bitmap container)
4. MISSING MAGIC: Convert raw image buffer to WebM stream
5. On the other end I have a function HttpResponseMessage function that hooks up a WebM stream with a PushStreamContent function (inspired by this blog post). This function pushes chunks of a video file to the website.
6. A Website that plays back the video.

I am struggling to figure out how to implement point 4. Right now I can only stream video files. But I would like to encode my raw buffer into a WebM container and stream that to my website. The central piece of code of point5 looks as follows:

while (length > 0 && bytesRead > 0)
{
    bytesRead = video.Read(buffer, 0, Math.Min(length, buffer.Length));
    await outputStream.WriteAsync(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
    length -= bytesRead;
}

Basically I would like to replace the video.Read function by somehow encoding my raw frames into a WebM format on the fly and storing them in buffer, so they can be pushed to the website as a live stream. Is there a straight forward way to do this? It's fine if some frames get dropped.

If there is an entirely different approach that is better then I am of course also open for suggestions.

Answer 1

Depending on what you can do on the server (outside of deploying a web app), you might consider writing your buffer into a pipe, then use ffmpeg running in the background to create your stream from it with something like -f rawvideo -pixel_format rgb24 -video_size 656x492 as input parameters.