I've been using a Raspberry Pi 3 to view the camera feeds thru a web browser. I has been working great. What I'm wondering is, has anyone done the same, but using a Raspberry Pi Zero W instead? Is the Zero W powerful enough?
Hmm. Well the pi zero is a lot weaker. Basically it is a single 1 GHz core versus four 1.2 GHz cores on the Pi 3. And the pi 3 is already pretty weak for video streaming unless you use the hardware-accelerated omxplayer app which is a pain in the ass.
That said, web pages are (mostly) single-threaded so the difference in performance won't be 4x. But I'm sure it will be significant. UI3 does decode H.264 on a separate thread but I doubt you can get a decent video resolution out of a pi anyway, not without falling way behind in the decoding. You would probably need to use jpeg streaming and live with the low frame rate.
but I doubt you can get a decent video resolution out of a pi anyway, not without falling way behind in the decoding. You would probably need to use jpeg streaming and live with the low frame rate.
Are you saying that even a Raspberry Pi 3 is bad for this? If that's what you meant, I dont have any issues using the 3. If I can get down to the nearest Microcenter, maybe I'll just try it anyway, it's only $5. So, I'll try it and report back.