Stream live video

You can view live video from the in-cabin and the road-facing cameras. This can be done remotely from your computer, phone, or tablet while the vehicle is online. The video is streamed from the vehicle device.

By default Surfsight devices stream for thirty seconds, and prompt you with the option to continue live streaming. Users can change the amount of streaming time using the PATCH /organizations/{orgId} call.

Becoming familiar with this workflow

Currently, the Surfsight API does not have a single API specifically for live streaming. Instead, you can integrate live stream functionality by implementing a combination of our API and javascript functions.

We have built a sample application to help you become more familiar with our recommendations for implementation. Click here to download the sample application source code.

The following sections tell you more about the sample application, explain how to implement this from your platform, and show you how to use the Surfsight API to livestream video directly from remote devices as follows:

• About the sample application
• Running the sample application
• Implementing live streaming in your application
• How it works

About the sample application

In the sample application provided to you, you can get up and running quickly with the existing script.js file rather than working from scratch.

The sample application includes the following files:

Running the sample application

This process describes how to run the sample application as-is; for this, you only need to work with the static.js and index.html files.

1. Download the sample application and copy the entire zip file to a directory on a web server.

2. In the static.js file, modify the following parameters with your user credentials.: 'imei', 'email', and 'password'. For the purpose of this exercise, modify 'cameraType' to 1 for the road-facing camera, 2 for the in-cabin camera, and 51-54 for each successive auxiliary camera.

The following table explains these parameters in detail and provides examples of the changed parameters for illustrative purposes only:

3. Browse to the path where your live view application is on the web server directory.
4. From your application's web server, click Play Video to view the live stream. Select either webrtc or HLS streaming (two options that Surfsight offers) from the Select Video Type dropdown.

Implementing live streaming in your application

Use this process to help you integrate your platform with Surfsight for live video streaming.

1. Download the sample application source code and copy the entire zip file to a directory on the web server where your application is hosted.

2. Use the script.js file to help you understand the functions called in order to trigger live video streaming, stop streaming, and so on. The script.js clearly outlines the purpose of each of the different functions. Refer to this script from your application code, or alternatively, insert the functions in your application code in their relevant positions.
3. Program your application in order to accept and insert relevant values from your users for the following parameters: 'imei', 'email', and 'password'. For example, you can build a screen including fields in which users can enter the relevant values for these paramters.

The following table explains these parameters in detail:

How it works

When called by your application, if you use our sample application script.js, the following flow is triggered:

1. document.ready function is called after page load.
2. login function is called to login to the Surfsight system and to retrieve the user token.
3. Following successful login, connectMedia function is called to get the media token, requesting permission for live video access. This also returns the address of the media server to which the device is connected.

4. The camera returns the media server address to which it's connected using initVideo function call. videoSourceUrl is returned as a string.

   The complete video URL path follows this structure:

   var source = 'https://' + videoSourceUrl + '/webrtc/' + PEERID + '/' + imei + '/' + CameraType + '/' + mediaToken

   See the following table below (bottom of this section) for descriptions for each of the parts of this structure.

5. The broadcast type is selected by a user via the video player dropdown menu.

6. The user clicks Play Video, calling the function according to the selected broadcast type.

   Note

   In some cases the initial connection might time-out and the request will return 404 - Not Found error. Implement a retry mechanism during this step if the error is caught.

Following is a description of the different parts of the complete video URL path: