10 second preview of 2 minute video – Jaguar F-Type R at Harris Hills Raceway It is 1920×1080 at 30fps captured from a dash cam. The first video I used was a video captured from a car on a racetrack. The little Pi Zero? Well, it did its best and we’re proud of it! Test Media Trackday The Pi 3 B+ isn’t terrible, but wouldn’t be able to encode a realtime stream smoothly. Most webcams that are 30fps would be handled just fine with the Pi 4 (depending on the quality of sensor and what you’re filming). Artist is more of a torture test.īoom! The Raspberry Pi 4 B is right in the butter zone.

This is why you’re here, let’s cut to the chase and do a comparison of the two latest Raspberry Pi’s available, the Pi 4 B, and Pi 3 B+ (we’ll throw in the little Pi Zero Wireless for fun too.) We’ll talk about the two videos used later, but suffice to say, Trackday is easier to encode and closer to what an average Webcam would produce. Would using the hardware encoder help you? The Results First Those streams are generally too large to pump over the Raspberry Pi’s wifi at full fps. However, you may just happen to have an old cheap webcam that only does MJPEG streams. Some webcams do as well, and they are honestly the best choice to use rather than constantly battering the GPU encoder if you don’t need to. You might have already seen a lot of people using the built-in raspberry pi cameras to stream crisp 1080p video, so why is this even a question? Well the catch there is the Pi Camera itself supports native H.264 encoding. But is it fast enough for live stream a 1080p webcam? It can be accessed in FFmpeg with the h264_omx encoder. It is perfect to use for transcoding live streams as well.

The GPU hardware encoder in the Raspberry Pi can greatly speed up encoding for H.264 videos.

Ffmpeg h264 codec testing