Serving Still images/snapshots

[vlasky]

I would like the ability for VLC to serve JPEG snapshots/still images to a client via HTTP.

e.g. In internet explorer, the user would enter a URL like this:

http://vlc-server:portnum/stream1.jpg

They would then see a single image on the screen.

VLC would either grab and encode the latest frame from the video input source, or provide periodic update every X number of frames.

This is for people with low-bandwidth connections that cannot view motion video. In my application, I have a monitoring camera and this will allow those users to view what is currently in front of the camera and refresh the image when they have to.

I do not imagine this to be difficult to implement - it would just be a hack to the existing MJPEG code - in fact, I am abusing the MJPEG codec and raw multiplexer to achieve this feature, but it's not reliable and consumes excessive CPU time because it constantly re-encodes the image.